If you’ve read any opinionated piece I’ve put out, you’d know that there are a lot of things that truly annoy me to an embarrassing degree.
I’m the kind of person to say ‘it’s never that serious, calm down’ and immediately get upset over something very trivial.
Which brings me to my freshest grievance: people misinterpreting songs.
Recently I’ve noticed that a lot of people believe that “Me and My Husband” by Mitski is a love song, when in reality it is a depiction of a woman who feels like the world doesn’t see her as anything but an accessory to her husband.
She talks about only feeling alienated and unloved without him, but artificially happy and uncomfortable when he’s around, because she is aware of how her relationship is the only thing that people pay attention to.
They give other songs this same treatment—it is romanticized and treated as a love song when the lyrics detail a toxic relationship that ruins the self esteem of character.
It bothers me so deeply when something that isn’t up for interpretation is recontextualized to fit the audience’s narrative when the original intent is clearly presented.
As someone who writes a ton, I’d hate for my words to be misconstrued so that someone could post pictures of their boyfriend to it on their Instagram story.
I’m not saying every song has only one meaning, but a lot of the time, they do, and if people actually took the time to comprehend what they were listening to instead of blindly singing along. Media literacy extends to music and lyricism—even art that isn’t visual requires a level of contemplation and comprehension that I feel a lot of people lack.
