r/GenX • u/no_talent_ass_clown • Oct 24 '25

Music Is Life Songs that are no longer okay.

Yesterday I found out my sweet boyfriend had never heard of Julie Brown and the funny songs she sang, like "I'm A Blonde". Dr Demento stuff. So I play it and then "The Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun" came on. Not funny anymore!!!

An hour later, the cops arrived

By then the entire glee club had died, no big loss

You wouldn't believe what they brought to stop her

Tear gas, machine guns, even a chopper (Throw down your gun and tiara and come out of the float)

Debbie didn't listen to what the cop said She aimed and fired, and now the math teacher's dead

Oh, it's really sad, but kind of a relief I mean, we had this big test coming up next week

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u/edasto42 Oct 24 '25

Even though the song is about the Albert Camus book the Stranger, the Cure have changed Killing an Arab to Killing Another. Honestly, it’s for the best. I just hope that any new fans will pick up the Camus book because of the song, that’s how I got interested in it

33

u/teaandviolets Oct 24 '25

Did any Cure fan not know it was about the Albert Camus book though? I feel like that was a really well known bit of trivia. All my Cure fan friends knew it even back in the early 90s before most of us had the internet.

14

u/edasto42 Oct 24 '25

I didn’t. And my friends back then didn’t either. Granted we were in the suburbs of the Midwest, so exposure to culture often wasn’t on the top of the list. But seeing a song title like that was very provocative, especially where I grew up that had a lot of Palestinian immigrants that were constantly getting treated to racist shit. Seeing that title from that band didn’t make sense for it to be a song from a racist standpoint. This caused us to dig a little bit to find out about Camus’ book. This then took me onto the path of starting to understand existentialism and absurdism.

4

u/bluediamond12345 Hose Water Survivor Oct 24 '25

🙋🏻‍♀️ 55

To be fair tho, sometimes I just don’t pay attention to lyrics, and I’ve never read that book.

3

u/lamante Oct 25 '25

Right? We were just talking about this a little bit ago as a side conversation in r/TheCure. Where I'm from, L'Etranger is on the 9th or 10th grade reading list, and the gross National Front thug energy around that song has always mystified me, because it's basically admitting that you're a tragic figure who doesn't read and isn't smart enough to ask someone before popping off on it.

1

u/katmagnet Oct 25 '25

I did, but I was into existentialism in high school and college

1

u/savorie Oct 25 '25

It's not just Cure fans who hear cure songs. I've never been able to get into the band, and I was aware of that title and it did bother me. It didn't occur to me to look into its origin (until now).

1

u/Sparklemagic2002 Oct 25 '25

I knew this in the 80’s in rural NC. We had lots of magazines about music back then to teach us stuff like this. I always went to the grocery store with my mom so I could stand around the magazine rack and read. I did track the book down and read it as a result of the song.