As we have often seen, songs can have an intellectual as well as emotional impact upon the listener.
If you are not a Cyndi Lauper fan… why not? This small-statured bombshell is a font of boundless energy. While she often portrays herself as being shallow, she is anything but.
If you ever get the chance to see her in the wonderful comedy, Vibes, with Jeff Goldblum and Peter Falk, jump at the chance. The movie is filled good characters and a story that will leave you wondering if there could ever be another Lauper-Goldblum movie.
You Don’t Know, today’s song, comes in multiple flavors. Breaking custom, I am providing two of them today.
First, the version from her album “Sisters of Avalon“. Note: this version is restricted, and cannot be embedded, thus the link.
The second version, an upbeat remix has its own special charm. I love both of these for the lyrics, for the music, and especially for Cyndi Lauper’s unique voice.
Uphill Writing 
You don’t know where you belong
you should be more careful
as you follow blindly along
you just need to belong somehow
Relying on rhetoric
not well versed on topics
any idea what you’re talking about?
revisions of history
fair well in some company
but don’t shove that bullshit down
my throat
You don’t know where you belong
you should be more careful
as you follow blindly along
to find something to swear to
till you don’t know what’s right from wrong
you just need to belong somehow
Left suppresses right
right suppresses left
so what’s left, and what’s right?
You’re told what to wear,
you’re told what to like
it’d be nice if you’d think for yourself sometime,
but you don’t.
You don’t know where you belong
you should be more careful
as you follow blindly along
to find something to swear to
till you don’t know what’s right from wrong
you just need to belong somehow
you just need to belong somehow
Mix sheer hypocrisy with mediocrity
you’ll play it safe every time-
so life turns up empty
and you’re so dissatisfied
who are you blaming this time?
don’t you know?
You don’t know where you belong
you should be more careful
as you follow blindly along
to find something to swear to
till you don’t know what’s right from wrong
you just need to belong somehow
you just need to belong somehow…
Wow. If I listen to it one way, it could apply to me. But then again I’m a critical philosopher, and the transcendentalists, of the day, in saying that we just cannot know, are not making the mistake of saying that they have found the answer in some metaphysics, be it of spirit and the world. We’ve already been that way. It’s been proved just another ego trick! So in a way, I can rejoice that I’m one of the blind one’s, who really can’t have the knowledge to blatantly distinguish between what is ego and what is the ego-conception of spirit!
Much prefer the second version. Yes we all need to belong, and what we have the earth – is something that we have to make a home (Heidegger, etc. etc. etc.) And we don’t know what we’re talking about. That’s been proven. I’m with you – I love her voice. Anyway, It’s certainly is the truth, that we’re not here alone, so yes, we do need some tolerance of others, -the other- and can’t live as if our happiness alone was the most essential thing – that is a blindness .
But yes, these lyrics certainly describe me if I try to hard to be a people pleaser, as my daughter says. But then if we don’t recognize our ‘faults’ and what others say, how can we ever learn, and yes, how can we really belong…. to ourselves, at least…… The best.
(More confessional analysis, here, after all, I can only be wrong! grin grin)
Oh! And in case it belong here, there is another song I like that is also ‘philosophical’ It begins… (in case anyone makes the mistake of thinking like me) “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you”.
In other words, we can’t, even in our personal knowledge, surmount the ‘liar paradox’ or the problem of ‘self -reference’. – The central Portal of Paradox….. I am finding that the work I did on the draft is OK. Just have to fill out the theme with more support from the philosophers, and I think I’ll have a book. Thank you, Richard.
I shouldn’t have said I have a book: after all it says that Penny is not ‘the only one who is insane’….
So I went downstairs and found something that I think you will like Richard, and that nrhatch will like with respect to the play.
Derrida regards the need to overcome ‘the book’ – the notion of a piece of writing as aimed at accurate treatment of a subject, conveying a message which ….might have been conveyed (in more fortunate circumstances) by ostensive definition or by injecting knowledge straight into the brain – as justifying his use of any text to interpret any other text. (My philosophers!!!) The most shocking thing about his work – even more shocking than, though not as funny as his sexual interpretations of the history of philosophy – is his use of MULTILINGUAL PUNS! joke etymologies, allusions from anywhere to anywhere and phonic and typographical gimmicks. It is as if he really thought that the fact that (an example here) then a skip. He doesn’t want to write a book about the nature of language; he want to play (for nrhatch) with the texts which other people have thought they were writing about language…….
Just because I think the above might be of interest to some writers, with respect to their writing, and about what writing is and is not all about…… the difference between what we think we are saying and what we are not saying…. oh dear – have I gone to far or nor far enough!!!!!! This is a writing blog, though.
Interesting and in-depth series of replies, Loreen.
I’m embarrassed to admint I had not run across Deridda in my reading, but plan to remedy that at the first opportunity.
Thanks for the views and the news.
I just find it interesting to study philosophers as personalities, and persons who are part of the unfolding or what ever it is that is unfolding…….
I agree with you, and with these philosophers, that we have not yet reached a definitive explanation, or answer as to what constitutes ‘spirit’. (in or out of capitals) but that we certainly can have the ego to think we have…..
Excellent pik, Rik!
Love songs that encourage us to look within for answers instead of constantly playing follow the leader.
Just what I needed for Happy Hour today.
And I’ve added Vibes to my queue. Can’t wait. What a cast. Peter Falk, Cyndi, and Jeff.
THANKS!