songs written in the second-person perspective

It's like watching quadriplegics having a pillow fight.

The Dancing Queen is only 17, so the song's lyrical perspective is an omniscient narrator speaking directly to this young nymphet who can dance, jive and have the time of her life. We are not all Dancing Queens.

I guess you can argue that, but the same argument could be made about "Captain Jack" or "Suzanne"... After all, we're not all drug addicts, or in love with someone named Suzanne.

I don't think it's an uncommon storytelling technique to talk of "you" when you really mean "me", usually it's done to add some distance to the narrative. For example, the interpretation of "Dancing Queen" that I've often heard is that the narrator is an older woman talking to her 17-year old self, that's why she's using "you" instead of "me".

I have no quibble with "Dancing Queen" & suspect those who do of male chauvinism

At first I was gonna write something about how exuberant repetition of the "dancing queen" epithet creates the illusion of a character more powerfully than the use of the second person can contain it; but then I realized, Nah, it's just that I'm a manly man & I tune out when the radio calls me a dancing queen, otherwise I'd be getting in a lot of dumb fights with the radio

Dylan owns this one. Positively 4th Street is another

You got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend
When I was down, you just stood there grinning

and so on

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

As mentioned above, "Suzanne" by Leonard Cohen does this, and I find it extremely irritating. I realized that if read in another voice, it could basically pass for one of Garrison Keillor's monologues on Prairie Home Companion. Try it:

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river, and you can hear the boats go by, and you spend the night beside her, and you know that she's half crazy, but that's why you want to be there... And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China, and just when you mean to tell her, that you have no love to give her, then she gets you on her wavelength, and she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover... and you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind, and you know that she will trust you because she's a nice girl, raised in the Lutheran tradition, just like you were

hehehe

Gold Panda - "You"

― nxd, Wednesday, July 23, 2014 1:38 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

BAKER STREET, yo

Pink Floyd - Pigs (Three Different Kinds), Shine on You Crazy Diamonds
Frank Sinatra - (Love is) The Tender Trap

Billy Joel - Vienna
http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/77983/

Hold Steady - You Can Make Him Like You

Kleenex - "You"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjQJeE79nDg

Bruce Springsteen - Night

More Dylan songs from the same era as others cited above – “She’s Your Lover Now,” “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” (maybe others I’m not immediately thinking of...)

The Magnetic Fields – “You You You You You”

Napalm Death - You Suffer

Later Dylan – “Tight Connection to My Heart”

Mid-period Dylan: “Up to Me”

With all due respect, I'm not sure those two Bob songs qualify.

I noticed that this happens so much in Belle and Sebastian songs.

xpost
Why not – or am I misunderstanding the premise?

Hmm maybe I am

also - a lot of Leonard Cohen (like Suzanne, most prominently).

was gonna mention every single Pet Shop Boys song but I guess that's been covered

lotta Frank Sinatra, including Tell Her You Love Her, Come Blow Your Horn, Love and Marriage, Young at Heart

xp Being Boring a wonderful exception to the rule tho!