Songs that went right over your head at the time.

[brucewarren]

I was listening to an old Youtube video of "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" as you do and I thought I would look it up on Wikipedia.
Imagine my reaction when I discovered the central theme of this songs is the child has woken up to find both his mother and
father gone forever. Far from being the cheerful nonsense I thought it was if you pay attention to the words it's not a remotely
happy song.

Then there's another song I'm fond of. "The Visitors" by Abba. When i first heard this I assumed that the hero of the piece had some
sort of mistrust of visitors. I thought it was a social phobia. It never occurred to me that the visitors mentioned in the title are
the secret police and that the fear she has is a very real one of being tortured and murdered by the the agents of the state.

So what songs did you listen to when you were younger with no real conception of what the song was really about?

[Masterbagger]

I went twenty years thinking that an ACDC song was about the dirty deeds thunder chief before the internet corrected me. This was before I earned my tinnitus and the instant availability of song lyrics by internet. I have no excuse. I still hold a mental image of that thunderous chief doing naughty things.

[pjknibbs]

I always used to think Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun" was a happy song--guess I missed all the references about it being hard to die far from your loved ones!

[Chips]

Well, people may remember Black Lace singing songs that became children's party anthems such as "Agadoo", "Hokey Cokey", "I am the music man", "Do the conga", "Birdie Song" and "Superman".

So think this absolutely qualifies as going right over the head of their usual demographic: Black Lace, Gang Bang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn3aPweeZVQ

[Len5]

The song Luisa Maria from Luis Miguel del Amargue is the first one that comes to mind.
In my case it's a bit different because the song is in a different language and the span of time wasn't that long. My Spanish wasn't that good when I heard the song for the first times and heard it only in some clubs, so I wasn't really paying attention to the lyrics that much.

At first I thought the song was somewhat about the singer that had a girlfriend in the past that left him, as in many bachata songs.
Some years later when I listened to the song's lyrics at home when my Spanish was better, I learned that it's about a 15 year old girl silently running away from her home in a small village, looking for freedom and a better life in the big city, leaving her parents behind in pain.
Without money she ended up working in a nightclub and years later she returned home very ill and died in the arms of her mother at only 20 years of age.

It's one of, if not, the saddest songs I know. And certainly a lot sadder than I previously thought.

[Bishop149]

One of my current favorite social media trends is middle aged men suddenly realising that Rage against the Machine might be just a liiiiiiittle bit left-wing and suddenly hating their former favourite band.
I mean in my teens I lacked the political education to FULLY understand what those lyrics were saying but I wasn't quite so dense that I didn't at least get the gist.

The one that jumps to mind for me is "Just a Girl" by No Doubt . . my education in feminism was obviously lagging behind my political awareness because that song is very obviously about the living as a women within The Patriarchy and I hadn't a single clue.

[Ronald Sandoval]

i admit i did not get this one at the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCp2h5jslKY

[Redvers Ganderpoke]

I was listening to an old Youtube video of "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep" as you do

You may, but I never want to hear that song ever again. It's awful. I still know all the lyrics and it's taking up my limited memory.