Do you ever have that moment where you’ve been listening to a sunny pop song endlessly, maybe as background music at work or as a distraction from the insufferable people riding public transit with you, when suddenly the sinister lyrics click into place and you realize what the song is really about? And then, when that happens, you suddenly can’t remember how you felt about the song previously, and now this is the only version of the song you know, a dark thematic undercurrent ruining a perfectly good pop song?
Well, reddit user Euchrid_Eucrow has made sure you will never hear the Barenaked Ladies’ rap-pop classic “One Week” the same ever again. In a lengthy, half-joking but also somewhat legit analysis of the song’s lyrical content, Euchrid_Euchrow proposes that the song is about a man who murdered his girlfriend and has been sitting with the corpse for days on end. It’s dark stuff–certainly not the darkest, most horrendous stuff to come from a Canadian pop-rock band member–especially considering that the lyrics playfully reference The X-Files, Akira Kurosawa, and eating various foods that you know are bad for you. Still, it’s a compelling argument. At the very least, “I’m the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral / Can’t understand what I mean? / Well, you soon will” does sound pretty incriminating.
[via Reddit]