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Nagging question about the Bryan Adams song of this name: was it deliberately intended to be a sexual double entendre?

I don't think Bryan is that creative and more importantly considering his age when the song was released I'm guessing he would have been a teen during the actual summer of 69. That's just my guess.

Stravo wrote:I don't think Bryan is that creative and more importantly considering his age when the song was released I'm guessing he would have been a teen during the actual summer of 69. That's just my guess.

"Me and my baby in a '69"

I suppose he could be talking about the car...

IIRC he did intend it to be about the position, but all the sources I can find are trivia sites and Wiki.

Yeah, I'd buy that it was intentional. Love and sex and pretty much all the guy sings about(the only thing that looks good on me is you).

Stravo wrote:I don't think Bryan is that creative and more importantly considering his age when the song was released I'm guessing he would have been a teen during the actual summer of 69. That's just my guess.

He was actually nine years old that summer. I've heard that that title was chosen because it sounded good, and not for the sexual innuendo angle.

But yeah, he's not that creative.

I do think it's a contender for most annoying song ever, but then again that can apply to most of Bryan Adams' songs anyway.

Yes it is deliberate according to interviews with the annoying bugger.

For some reason it does annoy as much as James Blunt's recent song, which also has some random year in it.

Bowling for Soup (the best named band ever) did a passable cover of Summer of 69. The Bryan Adams version got really old after the millionth time I heard it.

Damn, this whole time I was confusing Summer Of '69, with The Boys Of Summer by Don Henley until I just started humming it.

Hey, I like Summer of 69.

It's fashionable to be down on songs that were popular for past generations, much like those people in my generation who made fun of Elvis even though the guy was a great musician for his time.

This kind of behaviour lets everyone know how superior you are to regular folk, without having to actually accomplish anything special.

Darth Wong wrote:It's fashionable to be down on songs that were popular for past generations, much like those people in my generation who made fun of Elvis even though the guy was a great musician for his time.

This kind of behaviour lets everyone know how superior you are to regular folk, without having to actually accomplish anything special.

Ironically, it's equally fashionable to do the opposite and say you listen to nothing but music that was popular last generation and say everything new is crap, to let everyone know how superior your musical tastes are. Sort of like the conversation I was once where most of the people there were having a one up contest to say that they were into the most old school punk (somehow "The Clash" isn't old school enough... you got me there).

That's not to say that it doesn't seem like alot of the new stuff is crap and that we just aren't producing the Jimi Hendrixes and Eric Claptons of yesteryear and instead have turned to mass produced disposable talent, but snobbery goes in both directions.

The people who hold the old school as being better in quality than the new stuff either suffer from selective amnesia or are ignorant fucks. The fact of the matter is that during the days of drug, sex, and rock & roll there was plenty of shit music. Just like today, there was an endless supply of insipid, repetitive, unimaginative, boring, and just plain bad music. What happened to all of it? It was simply forgotten, because it was shit. Only the classics are remembered, because they have a quality that make people want to remember and compels them to remember, that's why they are classics in the first place.

Adrian Laguna wrote:The people who hold the old school as being better in quality than the new stuff either suffer from selective amnesia or are ignorant fucks. The fact of the matter is that during the days of drug, sex, and rock & roll there was plenty of shit music. Just like today, there was an endless supply of insipid, repetitive, unimaginative, boring, and just plain bad music. What happened to all of it? It was simply forgotten, because it was shit. Only the classics are remembered, because they have a quality that make people want to remember and compels them to remember, that's why they are classics in the first place.

Fully agreed. Except that on the flip side, I can't find anything nowadays that lives up to these classics.

Bryan Adams' music is dead cheesy, but I love "Run to You", one of the better songs from GTA: Vice City's memorable soundtrack...

Why do people keep saying Bryan Adams isn't creative enough to have made the connection of 1969 and the naughty kind of 69? How creative do you have to be to think of that, really?

Oh, Dartzap, James Blunts song is '1973', which is nonsense because no way was James Blunt the age to be part of whatever scene he's talking about there. I think he just chose it because it's the year Life On Mars is set in. [/i]

Darth Wong wrote:Nagging question about the Bryan Adams song of this name: was it deliberately intended to be a sexual double entendre?

I haven't read the topic, but apparently Adams would have been 9 years old in the summer of 1969, so we have to assume that it was an entendre.

Additionally, according to Wikipedia (gets out salt shaker)

Robert's has said that the song has "nothing to do with the year it was sung by him on 1984 & 1969",[3] in which he was just 9 years old. In Anthology 1980-2005, he told journalist Dave Marsh that the title was simply about sex and his answer to Bob Seger's "Night Moves", one of his favourite songs, that follows a similar theme of nostalgia and summer love.

At the end of the song Adams sings the final lyric "...me and my baby in a '69[4], which supports the idea that the song is based on sex.

YT300000 wrote:Fully agreed. Except that on the flip side, I can't find anything nowadays that lives up to these classics.

I can, there's lots of good music out there. I mostly have trouble finding good consistency, however that applies to pretty much all periods. The only band that I would honestly say is pure goodness with a high degree of variety and originality are the Beatles. Everyone else has some good stuff, but either significant parts aren't as good, or it gets repetitive. Even the Beatles aren't perfect, their early stuff is basically Beach Boys Mk2.

You can't tell which songs are "classic" until 20 years go by, and you check to see if anyone younger than 30 still likes them or even knows them.

Mind you, there are certain bad musical trends which are somewhat unique to the present-day era, and which defy the knee-jerk "it was just as bad in every era" retort that you so often hear. Specifically, shameless lip-syncing is a fairly new development. If you were caught lip-syncing a concert in the 1970s, people would turn on you like rabid hyenas. Today, it's no big deal. We also have tone-correction equipment, which helps bad singers sound like good singers; that technology didn't exist in the 1970s.

Darth Wong wrote:Mind you, there are certain bad musical trends which are somewhat unique to the present-day era, and which defy the knee-jerk "it was just as bad in every era" retort that you so often hear. Specifically, shameless lip-syncing is a fairly new development. If you were caught lip-syncing a concert in the 1970s, people would turn on you like rabid hyenas. Today, it's no big deal. We also have tone-correction equipment, which helps bad singers sound like good singers; that technology didn't exist in the 1970s.

I'll admit that I wasn't thinking of that when I was saying that all eras have their share of shit. It is very unfortunate that the public nowadays doesn't seem to care about lip syncing. Though note that I never liked any of the singers that I know enhance themselves in such a way, even before I knew.

The lip-syncing thing is also a side-effect of technology, specifically an after-effect of the maturation of the video era. The rise of MTV and similar channels began in the 1980s but did not really happen in earnest until the 1990s. One of the side-effects of this development was a reduction in the importance of live performance ability; many bands became very popular selling music that they were incapable of performing live, as long as the video was well-done. As a result, the public's attitude toward lip-syncing began to soften; it was happening so much (because these bands had no choice; they really couldn't perform their acts live without the lip-syncing) that people stopped getting outraged about it.

Milli Vanilli: People seemed to care about that one. Although they did get a Grammy for it, I think.

The big deal with Milli Vanilli was when it was revealed that Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus didn't actually sing whatsoever on the group's first album, and their Grammy was taken back days later. Morvan and Pilatus were basically camera-friendly frontmen because the group's founder didn't think the actual musicians were marketable enough.

Darth Wong wrote:....Specifically, shameless lip-syncing is a fairly new development. If you were caught lip-syncing a concert in the 1970s, people would turn on you like rabid hyenas. Today, it's no big deal.

Yes and no. Virtually all televised music performances in the 1950's and 60's were lip-synced (even The Beatles did it), and that has always been fairly common for manufactured pop acts, even when performing 'live'. That was one reason (of many) that rock music became so popular in the late '60's: real people actually playing and singing their songs live. And even though a lot of those guys lip-synced on television just like everyone else, they had fun with it. Check out John Sebastian at ~1:11 in this Lovin' Spoonful clip.

We also have tone-correction equipment, which helps bad singers sound like good singers; that technology didn't exist in the 1970s.

Along with a requisite cue track, a modern high-end pitch-shifter can do it on the fly in a live setting. Many of the big pop stars rely on them to sound good live. Another common trick is to sing along with themselves -- that is, the singer is singing live, but a studio performance track (often recorded specifically for a live show) is mixed together with the live performance.