So there’s this Facebook application that I was playing around with the other day (“application” = “program” for those of us who remember a time before Facebook and smart phones). The idea is that if you type in your birthdate, the application will tell you what the chart-topping songs were in the US and the UK on that day in that year.
I plugged my birthday into the program and it spat out “Light My Fire,” by the Doors as the chart-topper in the US. In the UK, the top song on the bright and shining day of my birth was “All You Need is Love,” by the Beatles. I thought about these for a few minutes and realized something interesting: the lyrics of those two songs seemed to correlate with parts of my essential personality. The thought crossed my mind that, perhaps, when we’re born, we’re infused with personalities that are direct interpretations of that day’s top US and UK songs.
Of course, lots of people spend their lives looking for the right partner, someone to love, to share their world with … the person that they feel they can spend the rest of their lives with. I’ve traveled around the world looking for that person (and written about it now and again, too), so it seems apt that both of my songs are about that. “All You Need is Love” is fairly self-explanatory, especially with lyrics like “All you need is love, all you need is love, / All you need is love, love, love is all you need.” Those Beatles could really write the lyrics, they could. Still, that song is also all about the power of positive thinking: “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done, / … No one you can save who can’t be saved, / … Nothing you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.” Upbeat, like me most days. Well, except on those days when Paris Hilton is in the news.
Anyway, it always seemed to me that I spent a lot of time trying to find the Girl of My Dreams. Then, after that, it all became about convincing the Girl of My Dreams that it wasn’t such a bad thing to be the Girl of My Dreams (henceforth referred to as the GoMD), which is where the Doors’ “Light My Fire” comes in. Sure, you could see “Light My Fire” as a straight seduction song, what with lines like “Come on, baby, light my fire / Try to set the night on fire.” But I’m going to focus on “The time to hesitate is through / No time to wallow in the mire.” Okay, okay, so it’s probably a seduction song. Still …
I began to wonder if I was onto something here, so I asked a couple of my friends to try out the application and see what they came up with.
One of the ones who did got “Stayin’ Alive,” by the Bee Gees, and “Uptown Top Ranking” by Althea & Donna (that’d be the British one, if you couldn’t tell). My friend hasn’t had the easiest time in life, but she perseveres through the rough parts and keeps her head above water for her sake and her children’s, so “Stayin’ Alive” fits pretty well: “Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother, / You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, / Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’ / And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,” and, more to the point, “I’ve been kicked around / since I was born / and now it’s all right, it’s ok / … You’re stayin’ alive, staying alive.”
“Uptown Top Ranking” was a reggae re-recording of the instrumental version of the 1967 Alton Ellis song “I’m Still in Love” (thank you, Wikipedia). “Uptown” is about … Um. Er. Well, with lyrics like “See me in me heels and ting / Dem check sey we hip and ting / True them no known and ting,” I’m not entirely sure what it’s about. But “See mi en a ‘alter back / Sey mi gi’ you heart attack” definitely expresses how most guys react to her (myself included, especially since she’s the aforementioned GoMD).
Based on this extensive survey – of two people – it seems obvious that the songs topping the charts on the day of your birth really do indicate something profound about your personality. Or maybe it’s like when we see animal shapes in random cloud patterns, or the face of Jesus in a potato chip: we see what we want to see.
But doesn’t that say something profound about our personalities, too?
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The author is currently on a U.S. Navy ship, sailing around the world and seeing what shapes the foreign clouds take.