Belated thanks to those who wished me a happy birthday - it was, upon which I may expand later - and apologies for the protracted silence which must have left an immeasurably small hole in the lives of the four of you who actually read this. Goodness knows what disappointment it wrought on the 1239 people (according to blog.co.uk's fabulously fictional statistics) who have visited since I last posted here and found nothing new. 168 people on January 15 alone, allegedly.
I had the misfortune yesterday to hear Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'. Twice. Twice in 20 minutes, in fact. This is a song I've disliked since I was a child, for the same reason I dislike many songs - lack of internal logic. Lack of internal logic is why I have issues with Busted's 'Year 3000', and also why I have a problem with John Lennon's 'Happy Christmas - War Is Over'. However while those two fall broadly under the heading of poor chronology, 'You're So Vain' just doesn't add up.
"You're so vain", it goes, "you probably think this song is about you. You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you, don't you, don't you?"
But it IS. It IS about him. So how can he be vain to think it's about him? He's just correct. Perceptive if you will. It's asinine to sing a song about someone and then tell them that if they realise it's about them that that's vanity. It's just insightful.
Here's the double whammy of ill logic which marks this one out as special though. Because if the subject of the song really is vain, he's unlikely to think that the song is about him, because as a person "having or showing an excessively high opinion of one's appearance, abilities or worth" he's not going to perceive himself as being flawed by vanity. The man this song is about is so vain that he won't even consider a song called 'You're So Vain' could be about him. So the lyric makes even less sense. If she'd written another song about some fabulous chap and he thought that one was about him, that would be vain. But if he thinks this one is about him then he's displaying a level of self-awareness immediately at odds with vanity. What she needed to be singing was:
"You're so vain
You probably don't realise this song is about you
You're so vain
I'll bet you think this song is about someone else, don't you, don't you?"
Happily, in checking the lyric for this entry I've found another reason to dislike the song. Namely, its first verse. It starts off well enough:
"You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht"
Quite a nice image, assuming one reads it as walking with a confident swagger rather than swaying unsteadily from side to side with the swell of the ocean, which isn't the best way to walk into a party. After that, however, it takes a turn for the slightly forced:
"Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot"
Apricot? Hmm, methinks you needed a rhyme for yacht and that was the first one that came to mind. Can't say I often hear scarves described as apricot. However, I could have let it pass were it not for:
"You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte"
Gavotte? Gavotte?! The medium-paced French dance popular in the 18th century? Suddenly the image of the smooth ladies' man conjured up by the title has taken a bit of a knock. Now we've got a chap wobbling into a party, lurid of scarf, hat obscuring his vision, using his one functional eye to watch himself do a Napoleonic jig. I think a more apposite title might have been 'You're So Sad'.
