My Happy Ending by Avril Lavigne

First impression: Is this song about what I think it's about? [quietly giggles with anticipation]

The song begins with moaning and Avril lamenting her inability to get a happy ending. She then asks to talk it over, saying "it's not like we're dead/was it something i did/was it something i said?" Avril obviously was much to forward when asking for a happy ending and scared off the person massaging her. Much like a stray cat, you must be slow and meticulous when requesting a happy ending. You must flirt with the subject, eventually getting what you want. Quickly thinking on her feet, though, Avril successfully covers her bases and rectifies the situation, not wanting to lose out on a happy ending.

She says "Don't leave me hanging," with the meaning of that being obvious for a male singer, but slightly disturbing for a female. I think, though, that she is using the term "hanging" metaphorically, like a woman saying "you're breaking my balls." She then says she is in a city that is dead, and she obviously just wants a little something to liven it up a bit. She says she is "held up so high/on such a breakable thread." This could be a reference to the fact that she is high up on a massage table which is held by ropes, but this is a weird image. Most massage parlors use the new invention of the four-legged table, which offers more stability than the older, rope-based tables. This parlor is obviously not quite up to snuff.

Lavigne then laments the fact that she thought she had a connection with the masseuse. It was meant to be, she says, it was supposed to be, she says, but they lost it. It comes to a head (pun intended) when she says "all this time you were pretending/so much for my happy ending." Lavigne fell so deeply in lust that she thought the masseuse actually cared about her, when really it was just for the money. She is probably the type of person who falls in love with strippers, too.

The song then takes a psychological turn, as Lavigne talks about the life/relationship she has imagined between her and her special massage-buddy. She laments that the masseuse's friends (who Lavigne has never met) think she is difficult. She is obviously projecting her own insecurities onto the situation. She then makes it the friends' fault, saying that they don't even know her. This is a great strategic move on her part. Blame the friends for never meeting her, even though they have no need to and in fact have no idea she exists.

Driving the point home, Lavigne finishes this fire-filled rant with this dagger: "It's nice to know that you were there/Thanks for acting like you cared/And making me feel like I was the only one." She obviously feels betrayed by the fact that the masseuse has other clients. She thanks the masseuse for the comfort she felt during the time they shared, but wishes it could be more. Her heart longs to be with this man who has touched her so tenderly, but alas, her Canadian-ness has turned away yet another lover.

In an ode to the post-massage release, Lavigne strikes upon the deep problems with becoming too close with your masseuse too quickly. Relationships need time to grow naturally. It's not fair to think that paying someone to rub you with oil and then (hopefully) finish the job will result in anymore connection than a one night stand. Lavigne is lucky. She rushed too fast into the relationship and didn't even get a happy ending. In the end, though, it is for the best. That must pleasure would have only resulted in even more pain. The scars will heal much more quickly this way.

Live Like We're Dying by Kris Allen

First impressions: "Sometimes we fall down, can't get back up." sounds like someone needs Life Alert . This song is about elderly people and how we should imitate them (in a respectful, subtle way) whenever possible. This is supported by the second line "We're hiding behind skin that's too tough." Here, Allen artfully mocks the wrinkly, tough skin of the elderly while also remaining in their favor by including himslef in the group of people with tough skin. This seems to be a Colbert-esque song which mocs old people right to their face.

If this song is indeed about old people, then someone old in his life did not openly express their love for him. He woefully asks "How come we don't say I love you enough?" Yes, grandma, why do you withhold your "I love you's" and instead only give me awesome presents and fresh baked cookies? I want love, not tasty morsels!

The next verse mocks the elderly's inability to feed themselves saying "Our hearts are hungry for a food that won't come/And we could make a feast from these crumbs." The elderly (as any old person will tell you) ate very little during the great depression and WWII. They made meals of shoe leather, tree bark, and young children. This resourceful generation only needs a crumb to survive, but Allen, much like the Grinch, has taken everything from them, leaving so little that even the elderly complain (and we all know how infrequently they do that).

The next few lines describe staring down the barrel of a gun and your life flashing before your eyes. This is presumably hunger-induced mass suicide, effectively eliminating an entire generation. And, again mocking old people, Allen taunts them with opportunity passed, saying "What do you wish that you would have done?" Yeah, old man, now that your joints all ache, don't you wish you had skydived when you had the chance? Sucker.

In the fourth verse we finally get to the title line of the song "[we've] gotta live like we're dying." To help us understand what this means, I think a checklist is in order. Here are a few things that are necessary to be old and dying:

[note: this order is more or less in order. Thus, the first half is necessary to ensure you're acting old, and the second half is to ensure you're living your life like you're dying.]

• Have dial-up internet.
• Read the newspaper.
• Pay for everything by check.
• Have that distinct old person smell.
• Eat all meals before 4:30 pm.
• Wear pajama pants for all occasions.
• Move to Florida to live with other old people.
• Consolidate all your pills into one easy to remember place, such as a pill box.
• Knit (for women), play cirbbage/dominos/checkers (for men).
• Never drive over 20 mph.
• Drive an Oldsmobile or Cadillac.
• Complain about "darn kids," and blame them for the woes of the world and your own life failures.
• Compare everything you see to how it was when you were the age of the person you're talking to.
• Make the bed and the toilet interchangeable.
• Require oxygen tanks to breath.
• Ride an awesome scooter
• Eat you meals through a straw.
• Forget your loved ones names.
• Make a will.
• Live the rest of your life in an Alzheimer's induced blissful ignorance.

WIth the list well on its way, we can move on. After showing off his math skills and thus proving he is not elderly, Allen moves into some more literal examples of dying. He says "And if your plane fell out of the skies/Who would you call with your last goodbye?" I think the better question is what carrier do you have that your cell reception is reliable at 30,000 ft and falling? Also, maybe the phone was the reason for the crash. Just saying. He also says "you never see the crash until it's head on."

The last, oh, 60% of the song is just a repeat of what came before. This makes me wonder if Allen is indeed elderly. He seems oblivious to the fact that he's repeating himself over and over and over again. I think if he took the Wii Fit true age test he'd be at least 55. Let's examine the evidence: he is in a non-rap badn. Strike one for the young hypothesis. He repeats himself and wrote an entire song about old people. What's the first thing you do in highschool when someone tries to say you're a nerd? You make fun of nerds. But in the end, the kids are always right. Ergo, Allen is trying to disown his own oldness, when in fact he is old. Two more strikes and boom goes the old dynamite.

This song makes me happy. Finally, old people get ripped a new one. They've been getting a free ride too long just because they "worked hard" and "paid their dues" and "just want to eat in peace without getting made fun of." If you ask me, we need more of this. No one is immune. toddlers: laziest people in the world. Housecats: aspire to be something of substance, maybe a lion. The list goes on, but I'm glad we can cross old people off of it. Thank you Kris Allen. now go learn how to spell your name.

Ironic by Alanis Morissette

Note: Before I listened to this song I consulted the Oatmeal to determine what constituted irony. You can consult it here, so we're on the same page: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/irony.

First impressions: After one listening, I don't think a single example in Alanis' song is ironic. But just to be sure, let's go through them one by one and examine the potential irony of them.

"An old man turned ninety-eight/He won the lottery and died the next day." This would only be ironic if 1) he played the lottery every week and 2) was in fact killed by the giant check that he got from winning the lottery. (Bonus points if the jackpot was $98 million.)

"It's a black fly in your Chardonnay." Not even close. That's just minorly annoying. It could only be ironic if the wine was called something like "fly repellent" or "no fly zone," but then who the hell would drink it?

"It's a death row pardon two minutes too late." Nope, that's just really bad luck and timing. It would be ironic if there was a short circuit in the prison electrical lines and the phone call to pardon him set off the electric chair, thus killing him. Otherwise, just bad timing.

"It's like rain on your wedding day." Yet again, just bad luck. This seems like the bride's fault though. Who plans a completely outdoor wedding at a time of year where there could even possibly be rain?

"It's a free ride when you've already paid." This is just Alanis being confused. Once you have paid for the ride, it is then "paid." It cannot be "free" once you have paid for it. That's like saying "I went to Best Buy and gave some guy in a blue shirt $1000 and he gave me a free flatscreen!!" People like this are the reasons scams thrive. On an unrelated note, I need 10 people who love to make money and hate to work to email me RIGHT NOW for a chance at instant wealth and fame.

"It's the good advice that you just didn't take." Now that's just dumb. Why not take good advice?

"Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly/He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye/He waited his whole damn life to take that flight/And as the plane crashed down he thought/'Well isn't this nice...'"
I think this might actually be bordering on irony. But i think the fact that he went voluntarily might convolute things a bit. It is ironic that he avoided something for so long then it killed him. I think it'd be better if he avoided it for so long then a small plane crashed into his house killing only him...while his family was on a long, safe flight to Hong Kong. Well, not really better for him, but better for Alanis as now it is closer to irony.

"A traffic jam when you're already late." No. No. No. No. This is, once again, just shitty luck, and really not all that uncommon.

"A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break." That was poor planning. Here's a suggestion: move 20 feet away from where you are.

"It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife." Just no. As specifically addressed in the aforementioned Oatmeal article, this is not ironic. There is no reversal of fortunes. She had no reason to expect that in a spoon factory (where she obviously is, because nowhere else would have 10,000 spoons and no knife) that there would be a knife. It's like saying you were surprised that there were no penguins in Africa given how many vultures you saw. Both are birds, but neither makes it an ironic situation. Or being surprised that you went to China and didn't see a single Korean person.

"It's meeting the man of my dreams/And then meeting his beautiful wife." By definition, then, the man of your dreams is married. If this man is the man of your dreams then everything he is, even things you didn't know about, are attributes held by the man of your dreams. And since this man is married, then the man of your dreams is also married. This is not ironic, it is more of a wakeup call that maybe you should aspire higher and have better dreams.

The only truly ironic thing in this song is the fact that a well-known songwriter released a single entitled "ironic" without looking up the definition. This is in fact an entire song filled with examples of what she thought were irony but were in fact just a lot of bad luck. The chorus may shed some light onto why Alanis's examples of irony are not ironic. She says "Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you/When you think everything's okay and everything's going right." This is her definition of irony in a nutshell: when your life is going well and something disrupts this trend, then it's ironic. She has clearly confused irony with unluckiness. By her definition, most things in life would be ironic. Whenever you order a hamburger and get a chicken sandwich, it's ironic. When you beat up a hooker and she turns out to be an undercover agent, that's ironic. When your fucking shoe is untied, it's ironic. But I digress. Let's just say it seems almost criminal to build an entire song around a concept and not even use it correctly once.

Elastic Love by Christina Aguilera

Note: I had never listened to this song before I wrote this. It is ridiculous to be sure, but the lyrics warrant a quick read through understand just how nonsensical the song is.

First impression: this girl is all about office supplies. She tries to explain her love by comparing it to a rubber band, a pencil/eraser combo (double analogy ohmygod), a pencil sharpener, and a ruler. Let me try office supply analogies. My love for this song is like a red crayon. At first I am full, excited, and bright, ready to help create something truly special. Then the love slowly shrinks as time (and this song) goes on until I throw away the final useless nubbin of it without even trying to listen to the last nonsensical minute for fear of brain hemorrhaging.

She begins her exploration of love simply enough: with a comparison to a rubber band. She says it comes and goes and pins her like a trampoline. Aguilera is obviously referring to the new invention of auto-rubber bands. They are equipped with micro-sensors which detect a need for rubber bands. They come and go as the need for them shifts. She also refers to the recently revealed "pinning trampoline." unlike every other trampoline in the world which has the sole purpose of propelling the user as far away from it as possible, this trampoline pins you down until you tap. These are currently mainly used to deter children from the recreational use of the dangerous, non-pinning type of trampoline. This verse serves to convince the reader that she is knowledgeable about new technology, and can, by logical extension, serve as an expert on office supplies, and by further logical extension, on love.

Her love of office supplies is fully expressed in the next verse when she tries to describe her love. She could have gone the traditional way and not used office supplies. But she is a rebel, and a nerd. She starts off simply enough: "If I was a ruler, I'd set you straight." Seeing as rulers are used as straight edges, this seems to make sense. But rulers don't in and of themselves make things straight. They can be used to draw a straight line or used as a guide to judge how straight something is. We can gather from this that she means she would physically straighten him out. We can't be certain, but this may refer to his bad posture or perhaps a broken appendage that needs to be set straight. The second option follows Aguilera's wording more than anything to do with posture, so we can deduce Aguilera's boy has some sort of broken leg, etc. We are not sure if he got this as a result of jumping on the dangerous, non-pinning trampoline from verse 1, but the signs do point to it.

Aguilera goes on to say that the comparison fits "Cause once I'm trying to bounce, you pull me back/And when I try to come to you, you give me slack." The first line makes sense if we are indeed talking about truly elastic love. The second takes some deep intellectualizing. So when she comes back, there is slack. This means that either the love has grown or it is stretched out, deformed almost. Or it could be slack like you'd give your dog on his leash. If you don't trust your dog, there is very little slack. If you do, then you slowly give him some slack to test him. If this is how Aguilera meant it, then she is the dog and is being tested by her owner/boyfriend. This could explain her obsession with inanimate office supplies.

Though an office supply aficionado she is, a grammartarian she is not. She says "the rubber band was an analogy, you can even say it was a metaphor." No. It can't be both. They are different things, so it can't be both. It's plainly not a metaphor, as a metaphor would be something like "our love is a rubber band," or "this song is a steaming pile of doodoo." It could have been an analogy if she had said something like "our love is like a rubberband," or "this song is like a cheetah fart." (it stinks and is totally unexpected).

In her last verse in this ballade-ode to the office supply. she says "If we were gaffer tape maybe we could spend the summer/You could say your piece, you could post it on paper/When your love hits, it sticks me like a stapler." For those not familiar with gaffer tape (including myself until I Googled it), it is a very strong tape, much like duct tape. The advantage to gaffer's tape, though, is that it an be removed without residue. Using this knowledge, w can see that Aguilera wants a summer fling. She does not want their love to be like duct tape, where they become too attached and in the end must remove it quickly to avoid it hurting. Nor does she want Scotch tape, which is flimsy and unreliable in high-pressure situations. She continues along these lines, saying he could write his piece on a post-it. From this we see that the communication between the two is shaky at best. Much like the roommate who leaves passive-aggressive post-its around the apartment, Aguilera wants to avoid both confrontation and real communication. His love-filled post-it will no doubt be crumpled up and thrown away, along with every other blank post-its in the house. Our final detail about this troubled love is that his love hits her like a stapler. As anyone knows who has been accidentally stapled, it is only a minor annoyance. Sure, it stings a little, but nothing that last more than a day. Thus, the love between these two is so inconsequential to her that she says she will not remember it after a few days if she's no reminded by a pastel yellow square.

This song really exemplifies Aguilera's strength. She takes an object and writes a line involving some verb/adjective relating to the object. She then takes another and does the same, twisting words and their pronunciations to make them rhyme. In this case, even though it doesn't really make sense for a song about love to be described by random office supplies, she does it anyway. Not one of her analogies makes sense, especially the main one of a rubber band. Yet she perseveres through this minor setback and makes a song that really gets people talking. Even if it is about whether or not she needs to be taken back to the third grade. Again. There's really not much else to say about this hot mess of garbled analogies and mixed metaphors warped and twisted into 4 minutes of nonsensically rhyming, strained lines, which in the end only leave the listener wondering if Aguilera will end up taking that job offer from Staples.