Time to get pedantic: He says “where” not “because”. These are just examples of things in the paradise city, not the criteria.
It’s people thinking liking big butts somehow makes you unable to lie all over again.
Wait, are you telling me the lyrics aren’t, “I like big butts therefore I cannot tell a lie”? I’ve been singing it wrong for years.
It was actually a deep discussion of sociopolitical topics of the time, if you listen to the whole album.
Your telling me that Sir Mix a lot has more than one song? Doubt.
Big if true
More than one that became popular? No, much to his dismay. More than one at all? Holy crap yes, I think his discography contains no less than 4 albums.
yeah but they’re clearly the top selling points. when you describe a place you’d go for the important details. not like… “we should go to new york city; they have traffic signs and some buildings are gray”
The lyrics of the rest of the song aren’t that great
Strapped in the chair of the city's gas chamber Why I'm here, I can't quite remember The Surgeon General says it's hazardous to breathe I'd have another cigarette But I can't see, tell me who you're gonna believe Take me down to the Paradise City Where the grass is green and the girls are prettySo either the chorus is pure sarcasm, or his day to day to life is so unbearable that he genuinely wishes to go back to a time/place where the grass is green, and a time when he was still attracted to women
The chorus is a vision of an ideal world while the verse is a picture of harsh reality. It points out the fallacy of the American dream.
Realistic and achievable. The secret to paradise is merely not to put it out of reach. Pretty deep message when you unpack it a little bit
‘Grass normal color’ might eventually be a luxury with global warming and ecological collapse.
The grass is part of the problem
Lawns? Yes. Grass? No.
Native grasses are good for the ecosystem as long as it is not a monoculture.
I live in California where the normal color for grass is a pale brown.
I live in the South, where the grass is extremely green and human rights are almost nonexistent
I come from the Midwest where the color of grass and presence of human rights are wildly inconsistent
And the “grass” they reefer to in the song, might just get you prison time.
and the leaves? and the sky is gray?
Maybe the message is that if you’re easy to please, life is amazing.
Lots of philosophers have independently come up with the idea that you can’t get happiness by consuming more and more. Basically none have pushed the opposite (Ayn Rand is not a philosopher).
You know what they say.
Wherever you go. Well… There you are.
“Paradise” comes from Persian and means “beautiful garden”
It literally means “encircling boundary wall”. It then started to mean “something encircled by a wall”, which often happened to be gardens, and then it started to mean “garden”.
Sooo back in the days a prison and a paradise would use the same word to describe it
I guess it’s more that the word paradise (paridayjah) could be used to describe anything encircled by a wall, whether it’s a prison or a garden. I think at that time (when some form of proto-iranic was spoken) a paradise (as in heaven) would be something like hácmā.
This is why I almost always ignore sing lyrics. I almost always walk away disappointed, and feel down any time I hear the song afterward.
I bet you think I wrote this for you to read. You’re so vain. You, the person I’m talking to are so vain to think I’m talking to you.
TTFN
You, the person I’m talking to are so vain to think I’m talking to you.
Believing something like that without evidence, even if it’s true, is crazy. That’s what that line is about. It doesn’t matter that the song actually is about them. The fact that they can believe it among all the other possibilities is why they’re vain.
That’s still a bit silly, given that the rest of the lyrics imply that they have history together. If I assumed that Alanis Morissette was singing about me, that would be absurdly vain, but Alanis Morissette’s ex assuming that is much more reasonable.
Someone I had a history with once posted something long on Facebook that I thought was about me. It wasn’t remotely.
There are a lot of ugly women and ugly lawns out there.
So, mostly anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.
