MobyLast week, The Kinks lashed back at Moby for calling their 1970 hit Lola “gross and transphobic” when it was actually a tongue-in-cheek piece about a romantic encounter in a London club with a transgender woman.
In the history of rock, hundreds of songs have been misunderstood or fell prey to conspiracy theories.
The three best known examples are Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA being seen as a patriotic song, The Police’s Every Breath You Take is not about love hearts but actually about stalking, and The Beatles’ Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is not a sly reference to LSD but a painting by his young son Julian.
Here are 12 more of rock’s misread songs.
Night Prowler – AC/DC (1979)
AC/DC stopped playing Night Prowler from 1979’s Highway To Hell album in shows because it was accused of glorifying ‘80s Los Angeles mass murderer and rapist Richard Ramirez, aka “The Night Prowler”.
Ramirez was an AC/DC fan, liked the song, and left AC/DC hats at the scenes of his murders.
However Angus Young protested, “That was taken right out of context. It was about a guy who used to sneak around stealing underwear left out on laundry lines, which appealed to (lyricist) Bon Scott’s humour.”
Malcolm Young’s take was “It was about us as teenagers sneaking into our girlfriends’ bedrooms when their parents were asleep.”
Angel – Sarah McLachlan (1997)
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The chorus of Canadian singer songwriter Sarah McLachlan’s Angel – “In the arms of the angel/Fly away from here” – is used at weddings, or seen as an ode to loving animals.
The reason for the latter is a North American animal rights group asked if they could use her name and song in an awareness-raising TV ad.
Angel made $30 million for the group in a year.
However, McLachlan wrote the song about musicians who turned to heroin, because she felt an affinity for the pressures and loneliness they felt. Angel was specifically about Smashing Pumpkins’ keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin who died of an overdose in 1996.
Holy Grail – Hunters & Collectors (1993)
For some Australians, Hunters & Collectors’ Holy Grail was written as a sports anthem. That came from its high-profile use on Channel 10’s Australian Football League telecasts, by the Queensland Bulls cricket team and in the rugby league movie Footy Legends.
But Holy Grail came out of a frustrating time when H&C’s American record producer wanted them to whip up a US radio hit, and the pressure almost broke the band up in the studio.
Around this time, Mark Seymour was reading a 1987 novel The Passion by British writer Jeanette Winterson about Napoleon’s chef who joined the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, but was beaten back by the winter, and defects.
Seymour said the song was about staying true to the quest despite changing circumstances.
Closing Time – Semisonic (1998)
Closing Time seemed to denote coming to the end of something. It was written by Semisonic leader Dan Wilson for a fist-pumper to finish their live shows with.
He also hoped it’d become an anthem for bartenders everywhere, while they cleared their venues of customers for the night. The accompanying video featured a woman closing her café for the night, before she heads off to meet the band in a club.
However Wilson later admitted to American Songwriter that he and his girlfriend were expecting their first child and the song was about that.
"Part way into the writing of the song, I realized it was also about being born. It is about "being sent forth from the womb as if by a bouncer clearing out a bar."
On March 17, 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt used some of the lyrics to illustrate the Trump administration’s throwing undocumented migrants out of the US.
Semisonic lashed back: “The song is about joy and possibilities and hope, and they have missed the point entirely.”
Streets Of Your Town – The Go-Betweens (1988)
Streets Of Your Town continues to be regarded as an ultimate song about The Go-Betweens’ hometown of Brisbane. In 2018 it topped The Guardian Australia’s Songs of Brisbane. It was the theme song for Prime Television in 2001–2002, and for TV ads for The Courier Mail.
But it’s actually a Sydney song. Grant McLennan and multi-instrumentalist Amanda Brown, in a relationship at the time, were sharing a flat in Bondi Junction. Brisbane was McLennan’s town, Sydney was Brown’s. She made the point in a group interview with The Guardian that Grant called it your town, not my or our town.
Lindy Morrison (also in The Guardian): “I always thought it was about Brisbane, because of the buildings being torn down; the nostalgia expressed for a town that once was.
“The most important thing I want to say is that Brisbane took it on as their own, so the Brisbane community grabbed it and ran with it, and because of that, for me, the song is about Brisbane. It’s owned by the Brisbane community.”
Brown: “It’s a widely misunderstood song, in the same vein as something like [Springsteen’s] Born In The USA – people think it’s that kind of patriotic, parochial sentiment.
“It’s actually very dark, with the lyrics about butcher’s knives and battered wives. There’s a lot more awareness of domestic violence now, so it’s a very relevant song.”
Let’s Go Crazy – Prince & The Revolution (1984)
Big at discos and sports events, Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy was nevertheless not a call to debauchery or having good old fun. To the deeply religious artist (first a Seventh Day Adventist, then a door-knocking Jehovah Witness) it was about escaping Satan.
About the “de-elevator” line in the chorus, Prince explained in a 1997 interview: “The elevator was Satan. The problem was that religion as a subject is taboo in pop music, so I had to change the words up because you couldn’t say God on the radio.
“And Let’s Go Crazy was God to me. It was: Stay happy, stay focused, and you can beat the elevator. ‘Are we gonna let the elevator bring us down? ‘Oh no let’s go!’”
Short People – Randy Newman (1977)
Randy Newman was the nephew of multi-Oscar winning Hollywood composers Alfred, Lionel and Emil Newman. He injected his sense of social justice by creating unpleasant characters in songs as Rednecks and Dave The Fat Boy.
He said: “These people in my songs don’t know they’re bad. They think they’re fine.” His mostly underground following took his songs for what they were: satire, irony, and anti prejudice.
As a diatribe against bigotry against the vertically challenged, the song went “Short people got no reason. Short people got no reason. Short people got no reason. To live. They got little hands. And little eyes. And they walk around…”
At its release, Record World called it "one of the funniest singles of any year."
Too bad for Newman, Short People became his one and only big hit under his name. It reached #12 in Australia, #2 in the US, and #1 in Canada.
As a result, the song came into the radar of folks who took it seriously. There were well-meaning campaigns to have it banned on radio, and he got death threats.
They missed the lines:
Short people are just the same
As you and I
(A fool such as I)
All men are brothers
Until the day they die
(It’s a wonderful world)
Newman said in 2017: “I was surprised by the reaction. Because it was a hit, the song reached people who aren’t looking for irony. For them, the words mean exactly what they say.
“I can imagine being a short kid in junior high school. I thought about it before I let the record get out. But I thought, ‘What the hell?’ I know what I meant. The guy in that song is crazy. He was not to be believed.”
Who Let The Dogs Out – Baha Men (2000)
Its fast paced calypso rhythm and call-and-answer response made Who Let The Dogs Out a party anthem in clubs, radio and sports events.
In Australia it reached #1 on the ARIA chart and adopted by teams as Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs in Sydney. It gained global popularity after appearing in Rugrats In Paris: The Movie.
But its writer, Anslem Douglas, who released the original version two years before under the name Doggy, emphasised it was not about men and women having a good time.
It was a feminist diatribe, about men ruining fun for women with shouts of “woof! Woof! Woof!” and harassment usage of “skanks” and “ho’s”.
He explained: “When I said the word 'party' I was being metaphorical. It really means things were going great.
"The men started the name-calling and then the girls respond to the call. And then a woman shouts out, 'Who let the dogs out?' And we start calling men dogs. It was really a man-bashing song."
Total Eclipse Of The Heart – Bonnie Tyler (1983)
Bombastic Welsh power balladeer Bonnie Tyler always thought her six million seller – a Number One worldwide hit including Australia where it was certified 4x Platinum for close to 300,000 sales – was about "someone who wants to love so badly she's lying there in complete darkness."
But the song’s writer and producer Jim Steinman said it came from a different place altogether – from his 1997 $12 million flop musical Dance Of The Vampires, which he wrote the song for.
He recounted, “With Total Eclipse Of The Heart, I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song.
“Its original title was Vampires In Love because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in the dark.”
Mr. Jones – Counting Crows (1993)
Adam Duritz wrote this about how he and bassist Marty Jones struggled when broke, dreaming "to be big stars" and "When everybody loves me, I will never be lonely". In VH1 Storytellers, Duritz said it was inspired by a San Francisco concert by Jones’ Spanish-based flamenco guitar playing father (David Serva).
At the show, they saw Chris Isaak’s drummer sitting with three women. He relayed, "It just seemed like, you know, we couldn't even manage to talk to girls, ... we were just thinking if we were rock stars, it'd be easier. I went home and wrote the song."
In the Counting Crows’ post-fame concerts he’d change the lines to “We all wanna be big, big stars, but we got different reasons for that" and to "when everybody loves you, sometimes that's just about as fucked up as you can be."
Fans had their own interpretations. Some thought it was about Duritz’s penis, which was instantly denied.
Others called it an “answer” to Bob Dylan’s 1965 Ballad Of A Thin Man in which the bard scoffed at music journalist-turned film professor, Jeffrey Jones, “Because something is happening here/But ya' don't know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?”
The parallel came from Counting Crows’ declaration, "I wanna be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky."
Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen (1984)
Canadian poet Leonard Cohen was 50 years old when he started on Hallelujah. He wrote dozens of stanzas and the song went through 80 drafts.
How frustrating was it to pull together? During one writing session at the Royalton Hotel in New York, he recalled sitting on the floor almost naked banging his head on the door.
He described the first version as "rather joyous", stemming from "a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion."
A Buddhist who lived for a time in a monastery, he later added, "There is a religious hallelujah, but there are many other ones. When one looks at the world, there's only one thing to say, and it's hallelujah."
There have been 300 versions of it, the most notably by Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainright, k.d. lang, John Cale, Brandi Carlile, Regina Spektor, Willie Nelson, Pentatonix, Bono, and Bon Jovi.
In Australia, the highest charting rendition was Karise Eden, winner of the first series of The Voice Australia in 2012. Hers went to #2.
The one by k.d. lang peaked at #13, and Xavier Rudd’s at #20. The Pentatonix and Jeff Buckley covers also charted here.
It is playlisted at weddings, funerals (Chester Bennington sang it at Chris Cornell’s farewell) and countless movies. Each interpretation provided a different meaning. Cohen himself had a different set of lyrics for his live renditions. When Cale asked him for the concert lyrics, he faxed him 15 pages.
For her adaptation, k.d. lang used the approach it was about “the struggle between having human desire and searching for spiritual wisdom. It’s being caught between those two places.”
An entire documentary and book have been devoted to the different interpretations.
Cohen recalled reading a review of the Watchmen movie, which smirked, “Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?”
The poet’s response: “ I feel the same way… I think it’s a good song, but I think too many people sing it.”
You Gotta Love This City – The Whitlams (1999)
With the 2000 Sydney Olympics looming, Sydney was going through a jacked-up period. With a title like that, it was inevitable that The Whitlams’ You Gotta Love This City would be whipped up as a love song to the city, and powered out of every TV and radio network.
After all, Tim Freedman told The Music, “There’s always some wry love songs on a Whitlams album” and they represented “The Whitlams’ trademark of little one-act plays of inner-city romance.”
But, oh dear, actually Freedman penned the song to denote how superficial Sydney could be.
Its character loses his job, partner, and self-respect. He wanders around the dark streets, bottle in hand. The white-flash moment comes “as a cracker explodes/And who the hell is he going to blame?/It dawns on him — the horror — we got the Olympic Games”.
He yelps “My city is a whore!” and leaps into the Harbour to an untimely death.
