A considerably bleaker take on Sweet Home Alabama can be found on Warren Zevon s 1980 album Bad Luck

You know what would really get Neil Young s goat? A response to his thoughtful, political Southern Man that basically says, Oh yeah, Neil? We ain t innerested in yer progressive views no-how! And thus was born Sweet Home Alabama, which cracks Young with the cutting line, I hope Neil Young will remember / a Southern man don t need him around anyhow. The song also references Governor George Wallace in what might be construed as a positive light, though Ronnie Van Zant claimed it was misinterpreted, and that his song was more complex than it s usually given credit for.
The story of Sweet Home Alabama didn t end with the death of Ronnie Van Zant; so epic was the song s impact that, decades later, Drive-By Truckers dissected its origins (albeit with a few historical inaccuracies). On Southern Rock Opera , Patterson Hood, defending the legacy of Van Zant while also embracing Neil Young, namechecks Southern Man, Alabama, Sweet Home Alabama, and, for good measure, Powderfinger, all with a passion that belies the ambiguity of the whole affair. mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals It s one of the band s best songs, and one that wouldn t exist without Hood s fierce feelings about its main characters.
A considerably bleaker take on Sweet Home Alabama can be found on Warren Zevon s 1980 album Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School . Typical of Zevon s cynical take on both celebrity and the simple pleasures of American life, Play It All Night Long cited by David Letterman as the only popular song in American history to mention the cattle disease brucellosis in the lyrics paints a dreary portrait of life on the farm ( There ain t much to country livin shit, piss, jizz, and blood. ) Then, in the chorus, the dagger to the heart: Sweet Home Alabama, Zevon sneers only two years after the plane crash that killed Ronnie Van Zant; play that dead band s song.
John Lennon purposefully added nonsense lines to I Am The Walrus to mess with fans and critics who were over-analyzing Beatles lyrics, looking for hidden meanings and drug references. Even though Lennon sang the words and played the walrus in the I Am the Walrus mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals video and in Magical Mystery Tour , the band further tweaked listeners mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals with the line The walrus was Paul in The White Album s Glass Onion. The song also references Strawberry mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals Fields Forever ( I told you about strawberry fields / You know the place where nothing is real ), Lady Madonna ( Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet, yeah ), Fool On The Hill ( I told you about the fool on the hill / I tell you man he living there still ), and Fixing A Hole.
In 1994, the Chicago mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals alternative group Veruca Salt scored a success with its first single, Seether. The band referenced the song in a later hit, the 1997 song Volcano Girls, with the lyrics I told you about the Seether before / You know the one that s neither or nor / Well here s another clue if you please / The Seether s Louise. That s obviously an homage to the Beatles Glass Onion the title of the band s second album, Eight Arms To Hold You , was the original title of the movie Help and like Glass Onion, was also probably a misleading joke, as Nina Gordon sang lead on Seether, not Louise Post.
On 1999 s Keep It Like A Secret , Doug Martsch used lots of classic-rock inspiration to build You Were Right, a slow-moving piece of dramatic distortion that weaves together lyrics from 10 well-worn songs. The chorus finds Martsch disagreeing with Bob Marley s assertion in Three Little Birds that everything s gonna be all right, but the rest of the time the indie guitar god has history on his side in his quest to humorously prove that life pretty much sucks. Quotes come from Stairway To Heaven, Dust In The Wind, Another Brick In The Wall, Manic Depression, You Can t Always Get What You Want, A Hard Rain s A-Gonna Fall, Against The Wind, Jack Diane, and The End, and closes with Martsch asking repeatedly, Do you ever think about it? That life s a bitch? Yeah, Doug, we think about it all the time.
Leftist rocker Billy Bragg has never been shy about his politics or his taste in music. His songs are threaded with homages overt and covert, from the wistful evocation of the Four Tops singer in Levi Stubbs Tears to the punning Kinks nod he launches at the target of Accident Waiting To Happen : You re a dedicated swallower of fascism. (They re not all great ideas: Sub Pop disliked mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals Bragg s Blueberry Hill -flavored cover of Mansion On The Hill enough to cut it from its Springsteen tribute album.) Bragg s referential nature reaches its apex, or perhaps its nadir, with this 2007 benefit single, released under the pseudonym Johnny Clash. The story of aging punk-rockers trying to balance their system-smashing ideals with the responsibilities of middle age, the song opens with the story of a mate who lives in Vermont and couldn t find the music he wants. The solution? Start a radio station of his own, on which he plays Billy Bragg and a bit of Green Day / and I m So Bored With The U.S.A. Although Old Clash Fan is basically celebratory, there s a melancholy truth beneath its surface about the way that pop-culture badges mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals that once signified political conviction become an identity in themselves. Bragg has had his strident moments over the years, but for once he s cutting his audience too much slack.
Clem Snide s Eef Barzelay loves to sing about pop culture, from Nick Drake Tape to Enrique Iglesias Mole. On Yip/Jump Music, from 1998 s You Were A Diamond , Barzelay sings about driving through Texas playing that tape, makes us feel all right. The tape is Daniel Johnston s 1983 classic Yip/Jump Music , which features the song Worried Shoes. Barzelay sings, Heard you were wearing worried shoes, and they re too tight. For an update of the original song, check out Karen O s version on the Where The Wild Things Are soundtrack.
In addition to being tourmates, Jimmy Eat World and The Promise Ring were a couple of late- 90s emo s best bets for mainstream success, though at the time most people had their money on the latter. mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals JEW, of course, was the one that struck gold with Bleed American (which became self-titled due to 9/11, but returned mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals to the original name when it was reissued a couple of years ago), whose live-like-you re-dying second track, A Praise Chorus, is littered with titles or lyrics from other songs sung during a cameo by The Promise Ring s Davey von Bohlen, including his own Why Did Ever We Meet and All Of My Everythings. Other references include Crimson And Clover, Madness Our House, Bad Company s Rock N Roll Fantasy, They Might Be Giants Don t Let s Start, and M tley Cr e s Kickstart My Heart, but for some reason JEW s Jim Adkins waits until his buddy has rattled them all off before exclaiming, So come on, Davey, sing me something that I know! Later on the album, the emo-goes-sock-hop The Authority Song joins in the name-checking fun, with John Cougar Mellencamp s Authority Song, The Jesus And Mary Chain s Automatic , and The Velvet Underground s What Goes On all getting shout-outs.
The Beastie Boys are so generous in tipping their hats to their collaborators and influences that they ll bury a mention of one artist in a song about another artist. In the 1998 homage to DJ Mix Master Mike in Hello Nasty s Three MCs And One DJ, Mike D notes, Kenny Rogers Gambler is my gambling theme before getting back to giving Mix Master Mike props for his scratch routine.
A roll call of 60s soul stars, Sweet Soul Music was the only hit single for journeyman singer Arthur Conley, which is just as well considering the man was as much of a fan as a performer. Conley reworked Sam Cooke s Yeah Man with Otis Redding for Sweet Soul Music, and he made sure to put the spotlight on his mentor by quoting Redding s Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song) amid shout-outs to Lou Rawls, Sam Dave, and Wilson Pickett. Appropriately, Conley reserved king of em all status for James Brown, who was already the godfather mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals of soul by the time Sweet Soul Music hit the charts in 1967. More than 40 years later, Sweet Soul Music still is a solid primer on the glory years of soul music for neophytes.
A spirited Nashville MC with a small but fervent cult, Count Bass D also played most of the music on his debut, Pre-Life Crisis . That album s lasting underground reputation is owed in good part to his shaggy-dog story about getting hit on by the TLC singer, in which he name-drops Ain t 2 Proud 2 Beg and Baby-Baby-Baby. The jazzy chorus and lazy swinging piano give the song s light G-funk groove the air it needs for Bass D to tell his tale of New Year s Day of 1992, when an Atlanta concert by his friends in Leaders Of The New School turned into a romantic opportunity: I guess she saw me with the Leaders and assumed I had a record deal / but I was mesmerized with her sex appeal.
Including a song by the Kiwi freak-folk parodists is a bit of a cheat, since they specialized in riffing on other musical genres and performers, but Bowie is just too good to pass up. Engaging in a loopy fantasia about the Thin White Duke s most cosmic 70s excess, Bret McKenzie crafts an overblown musical parody of his music while Jemaine mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals Clement does an uncanny vocal impression. The lyrics about Afronauts and telescopic nipple antennae mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals are alternately ridiculous and oddly appropriate, mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals and when Clement slips in a lyrical reference mesa arizona mobile home vacation rentals to ch-ch-changes, it s clear that he kids because he loves.
Craig Finn crams a dozen song-title references into one track on We Can Get Together, name-checking Meat Loaf s Paradise By The Dashboard Light, Pavement s Heaven Is A Truck, The Psychedelic Furs Heaven, and, keeping with a theme, the band Heavenly in just a couple of minutes. It makes sense, since the song is about the joy of sitting around listening to music. The Hold Steady s fellow Minnesotans in H sker D get special attention, with Do You Remember, Makes No Sense At All, and The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill all getting swift, sneaky mentions.
As the son of Waylon Jennings , Shooter Jennings is country royalty. But it isn t his dad or e