3 thoughts on “The High-Fiver: Songs About Food (Sort Of)

  1. Left off the list:
    -U2 – “Lemon”
    -Presidents Of The USA – “Peaches”
    -Rufus Wainwright – “Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk”
    -Sarah McLachlan – “Ice Cream”
    -Jimmy Buffett – “Cheeseburger In Paradise”
    -Led Zeppelin – “Tangerine” (this really should’ve beat out “The Lemon Song” in my book).

    And perhaps most inexcusably, The Buckwheat Boyz – “Peanut Butter Jelly Time.”

    Explain yourself, Jason.

  2. Spencer, keep this for the archive: it appears that the difference between my High-Fiver and your “left off” list is your inability to make it as far down into the gutter as I.

    Whereas your list seems to make comparisons based on things like musical/lyrical quality (e.g., your point that “Tangerine” should beat out “The Lemon Song”), my High-Fiver was exclusively focused on songs about food that are really about sex. In fact, the more outrageous the attempt to cover up the sexual content with a food title, the more likely I was to include it on the list.

    With this simple rule in mind, some quick googling would rule out much of the “left off” list. U2’s “Lemon” has been described as an “attempt to preserve memory through film” that was inspired by old video of Bono’s late mother; although “Peaches” borrows riffs from Bad Company’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” I don’t see its lyrics of eating lots of free peaches as coming close to the suggestiveness of “Cherry Pie,” “Brown Sugar,” or “Poundcake”; “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” is described as addressing “decadence and desire” in the form of an “ode to subtle addictions and the way our compulsions rule our lives”; “Ice Cream” is getting close but I think of it as a rather straightforward love song; and as far as I can tell, “Cheeseburger” is just about a guy wanting to eat a cheeseburger. Lastly, I have no idea what the hell “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” is about.

    Bringing it all back to “The Lemon Song” versus “Tangerine,” my analysis was a simple comparison between “I was her love, she was my queen” and “Squeeze me baby till the juice runs down my leg.” Using my simple rule, this was a no-brainer.

    I admittedly could have been more explicit in my High-Fiver title by making a direct reference to songs about food that are really about sex, but I thought I’d take a page from the artists I included in my list and just let the content reveal the true meaning of “Songs About Food (Sort Of).”

    • That might be the best rebuttal in the history of rebuttals. I am officially destroyed! Except to say that I’m pretty sure that “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” is somehow about sex.

Go ahead. Say something!

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s