The tune of the chorus seemed really familiar, and it took me a second to realize where it was from: "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi:
Besides the melodic similarity (I guess there are only so many tunes out there, right?), something else the two songs have in common is the incongruous application of phallic weapon imagery to a woman. Bon Jovi has the repeated line "You're a loaded gun," implicitly addressed to a woman. Ava Max sings, "And you might think I'm weak without a sword / But if I had one, it'd be bigger than yours" -- and, lest the Freudian subtext be too subtle for some listeners, drives it home with a Michael Jackson crotch grab. The Bon Jovi song says "I play my part, you play your game"; Ava Max's très maçonnique music video features lots of chessboard imagery and helpfully explains "In chess, the king can move one space at a time / But queens are free to go wherever they like." Bon Jovi sings, "You promise me heaven, then put me through hell"; "Kings & Queens" is from the album Heaven & Hell.
Guns and swords as phallic symbols came up in my November 28 post "Sometimes a banana is just a banana -- right?" -- another theme of which was having no stones. "Never mind the Stones, here's the Sex Pistols." "Let him without stone cast the first cigarette." Check out what the algorithm served up immediately after "Kings & Queens":
Some random Simon and Garfunkel cover? Yes, but take a closer look at that thumbnail:
The next song after that, "Stressed Out," references the idea of a limited number of melodies being recycled by different bands:
I wish I found some better sounds no one's ever heardI wish I had a better voice that sang some better wordsI wish I found some chords in an order that is new
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The Max song has me thinking of the Netflix series based on Naomi Alderman's novel The Power. Girls all over the world spontaneously acquire the power to shoot bolts of electricity from their hands. They are able to pass the power to grown women. Heads of state react in ways stereotypically characteristic of the status of women in their countries.
At the end of the first series, a rebel leader who arose from a group of trafficked women and girls in a fictitious Central European country (a thinly-disguised Romania) gives birth to a baby girl. After vanquishing a detachment of the country's army, she and her sister rejoice that the baby will grow up in a better world. But I wonder why Alderman didn't make the baby a boy, to set things up for conflict in the mother's heart in the yet-to-be-made second series.
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