Gotcha

 Via @tooheymatt

Five years

"And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people
And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people
I never thought I'd need so many people"

Opposite songs special: Cake

I've given up sweets for most of June, so I'm thinking a lot about Cake.

Cake made it into the Opposites Playlist twice, once with Shirt Skirt/Long Jacket.

I love the lyrics to this song, and so I'll quote a bit more than necessary to point out another opposite in them:

I want a girl who gets up early
I want a girl who stays up late
I want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity
Who uses a machete to cut through red tape
With fingernails that shine like justice
And a voice that is dark like tinted glass

She is fast and thorough
And sharp as a tack
She's touring the facility
And picking up slack

I want a girl with a short skirt and a lonnnnng....  jacket

The other Opposites Playlist song had to be 'Sheep go to Heaven, Goats go to Hell'.




Both of the song titles use ancillary antonymy--antonyms in parallel structures in order to create a secondary contrast, so skirt and jacket are contextual opposites here, as are sheep and goats.

Heaven and Hell have a special place in my heart (or brain) because they are an example in Alan Cruse's Lexical Semantics that gave me some good food for thought when I was writing my first book, where I'm claiming that oppositeness is about minimal contextually relevant difference. So here's a big excerpt from my chapter 5:

Using Heaven/Hell as an example, Cruse notes that that opposition embodies others, including good/bad, up/down, and bliss/torment (and others, like light/dark and good/evil, are easily added to the list).  If so many differences are relevant in contrasting Heaven/Hell, how can we claim that their opposition involves minimal difference?  And even if we can make this claim, should we?

            Assuming that we are considering the semantic field of Judeo-Christian afterlife locales, the field allows at most (if you’re Catholic) two options to choose from when selecting an opposite for Heaven:  Hell or Purgatory.  Heaven and Hell, unlike Purgatory, have much in common:  they’re where one spends eternity, they reflect a definitive judgment on a person’s life, they have imagined physical locations, and each is the home of a supernatural lord and countless souls.  Nevertheless, this is probably an oversimplification of the problem.  The fact is, Heaven/Hell are similar because they have the same types of properties (such as judgment, location, inhabitants), but opposite instantiations of those property-types.  Each has a lord, but they’re opposite lords (god/devil).  Each has a location, but they’re opposite locations (up/down).  Thus, their similarities beget differences, and so it could be said that Heaven and Hell are as different as they are similar.

            Such differences-within-similarities are often favored over straight similarities in choosing opposites.  Let’s consider a larger contrast set:  winter/spring/summer/autumn.  Of these, winter/summer are most strongly contrasted as an opposite pair, and we can again see differences within similarities.  They both involve extreme temperatures, but one is hot and the other is cold.  They both (officially) start with solstices, but one involves long days/short nights and the other long nights/short days.  If opposition favored greatest similarities, then we should expect winter/autumn to be better opposites than winter/summer, since both are cool and dark.  But instead, we prefer the two that differ in symmetrical ways.

            The lesson to be learned from this is that similarity [...] runs deep in a good complex antonym pair.  Rather than the superficial similarity of contiguous temperatures (winter/autumn), we prefer the pair that is similar in extremity of temperature.  It matters less to us what the temperature is, than what type of temperature it is.  It’s this deeper similarity that makes the contrast between summer and winter symmetrical, diametrical, and truly incompatible (whereas autumn and winter could arguably overlap).  So, winter and summer are more similar in types of attributes than either is to autumn or spring.  (Murphy, Semantic Relations and the Lexicon, 2003)

Are control and ecstasy opposites?

"Normally we think of control and ecstasy as opposites, but in Prince, they were just the two ends of the same breath — inhale, exhale. We need both to live."

--Julie Wittes Schlack

More incompatibles than opposites, I'd think.

RIP Prince

Opposite songs: a Joe Jackson special

Last week I had the pleasure of seeing Joe Jackson in concert in London, so let's commemorate that fact with an opposites-based review of his work.


Jackson's best-charting album in the US and UK was an opposite one: Night and Day (1982). And then he tried again 18 years later with Night and Day II (2000).

Night and Day has the song Steppin' Out (how I love glockenspiels in pop music; the live version was more subdued, but still lovely) with the line we are young but getting old before our time and the repeated contrast between night and light.


Two more oppositey album titles were Body and Soul (1984) and Heaven and Hell (1997):














No wonder I'm a fan.

I will leave it to you to decide whether the title of his 1991 album Laughter and Lust is also an opposite.

His song Right and Wrong from 1986's Big World made it to the birthday opposites playlist, but not into the concert.




The man is definitely into binary oppositions and contrast, with lots of songs with two or other or negation in the titles, and of course different.

In his album of jazz covers Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive are a few oppositey gems, most particularly What's the use of getting sober (when you're gonna get drunk again?) and the negation-fuelled Is you is or is you ain't my baby?. 

I'd be up all night if I tried to find all the opposite lyrics within non-oppositely titled songs, so let's leave it there. But Joe Jackson, I do love you.

Opposite songs: an OK GO special

One of the songs in my birthday opposites playlist was OK Go's Upside Down and Inside Out, for which they released an amazing new video last week. It's not on YouTube officially, and the Facebook embedding looks like this, but do click and check it out. It involves vomit comet choreography. 

OK Go - Upside Down & Inside Out
Hello, Dear Ones. Please enjoy our new video for "Upside Down & Inside Out". A million thanks to S7 Airlines. #GravitysJustAHabit
Posted by OK Go on Thursday, 11 February 2016

The video is even more impressive when you know more about how it was made.

When I was making the birthday playlist, I also considered OK Go's Needing/Getting. You can argue among yourselves about whether those are opposites, but as the man says, "Needing is one thing, and getting's another".



I've been thinking lately about how certain bands/musicians are my opposites heroes, so I'm going to do a few more posts like this featuring particular artists.

Opposites playlist+

The party invitation

Part of the reason for starting this blog is that I've promised many people that I'd share the playlist from my recent birthday party, where the theme was (can you guess?) Opposites. This was the second opposites-themed party I've had. The first was nearly 25 years ago when I passed my preliminary examination for my doctorate--which was also opposite-themed. The compilation tapes from that party were lost sometime after I stopped owning a cassette player. The first time round, I was more of a purist: only songs with the opposites in the title were counted. This time, I was more interested in having more recognizable and (later in the evening) danceable songs, so I allowed songs by artists with opposite-containing names or songs in which opposites were a big part of the chorus (though not in the title). There are also some pairs that make an opposite if they're played one after the other.

So here, for what passes on the internet for posterity, is this year's playlist.  (Many thanks to many FB friends for suggestions and to Phil for downloading/uploading all the songs.)  I've copied this table from an MS-Word file and some formatting has gone wonky. But I am determined that this blog is not going to be TOO much of a timesuck, so we'll live with it.


What we actually played:

song [further explanation]	artist
Opposites Day	Lloyd Cole
Hello, Goodbye	The Beatles
Let's Call The Whole Thing Off [tomayto-tomahto, etc.]	Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
The Lady Is a Tramp	Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga
Night And Day	U2
Black Night White Light	Frankie Goes To Hollywood
All Or Nothing	The Small Faces
Walk, Don't Run	Ventures
A Hard Day's Night	The Beatles
Sheep Go to Heaven (Goats Go to Hell)	Cake
Sound And Vision	David Bowie
Love And Anger [this was cheating a bit, but I like it]	Kate Bush
Knowing Me, Knowing You	ABBA
You're the First, the Last, My Everything	Barry White
Female of the Species [is more deadly than the male]	Space
Video Killed the Radio Star	The Buggles
Istanbul not Constantinople	They Might be Giants
Step It Up ['to the left, to the right...']	Stereo MC's
Save it For Later [‘Sooner or later...’]	The [English] Beat
Cruel To Be Kind	Nick Lowe
Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)	Otis Redding
Happy	Pharrell Williams
Head Over Heels	The Go-Go's
Heaven Is a Place On Earth	Belinda Carlisle
Opposites Attract	Paula Abdul
I Started Something I Couldn't Finish	The Smiths
Slap And Tickle	Squeeze
Right And Wrong	Joe Jackson
Should I Stay or Should I Go	The Clash
You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)	Dead or Alive
Hey Boy Hey Girl	The Chemical Brothers
Rise [‘I could be right I could be wrong…’]	Public Image Ltd.
Girls & Boys	Blur
Push It	Salt-n-Pepa
West End Girls [‘East End Boys and…’]	Pet Shop Boys
Praise You	Fatboy Slim
River Deep Mountain High	Ike & Tina Turner
Live and Let Die	Paul McCartney
Good Lovin'	The Rascals
Bad Romance	Lady Gaga
Lovesong	The Cure
This Is Not A Love Song	Public Image Ltd.
Master and Servant	Depeche Mode
Love to Hate You	Erasure
Upside Down	Diana Ross
Black Or White	Michael Jackson
Penthouse and Pavement	Heaven 17
Bitter Sweet Symphony	The Verve
Short Skirt/Long Jacket	Cake
Somebody Told Me [that you had a boyfriend, who looked like a girlfriend…]	The Killers
One Way or Another	Blondie
Tubthumping    [I get knocked down,      but I get up again]	Chumbawamba
As Above So Below	Tom Tom Club
September	Earth, Wind & Fire
Don't Stop the Music     [samples Michael Jackson’s Wanna     Be Startin’ Something’]	Rihanna
Hot 'n Cold	Basement Jaxx
Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)	The Icicle Works
Stand Or Fall	The Fixx
Hot N Cold	Katy Perry
Big When I Was Little	Eliza Doolittle
All Day And All Of The Night	The Kinks
The Sun and the Rain	Madness
With or Without You	U2
Say Hello, Wave Goodbye	Soft Cell

But there were lots more that came to mind or were suggested that we didn't like well enough to put on the playlist (often because we felt we had too many 'slow' songs).  And then there were a few that I had put on the list that I just discovered aren't here because apparently Phil vetoed them. I am shocked and hurt, I am. Ok, it's more than a few:

song	artist
Forever Live and Die	Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Move your feet	Junior Senior
Friend or Foe	Adam Ant
Take It or Leave It	The Strokes
Up for the Down Stroke	Parliament
Needles and Pins	Ventures (or Ramones)
Licht und Blindheit [Atmosphere]	Joy Division
Gotta get up to get down	Marmalade
The night we called it a day	Frank Sinatra
Up and Down	The Mr T Experience (orig. Sesame Street)
Girl from Ipanema goes to Greenland	The B52s
Now and Then	The Proclaimers
Boys & Girls	Pixie Lott
Man Smart, Woman Smarter	Harry Belafonte
Forever Now	Psychedelic Furs
Flesh & Blood	Roxy Music
Both Ends Burning	Roxy Music
Love & Hate	Marcus Collins
Stuck in the Middle with You ['clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right']	Stealers Wheel
Karma Chameleon ['you come & go']	Culture Club
Say you, Say me	Lionel Ritchie
Black and White Unite	Belle & Sebastian
Woman make man	M
Not a sinner nor a saint	Alcatraz
Hunting high and low	A-ha
Up and Down	Vengaboys
Now and Then	Suzanna Hoffs
Body and Soul	Tony Bennett & Amy Winehouse
Black and White	Three Dog Night
Sugar and Spice	The Searchers
Leather and Lace	Don Henley & Stevie Nicks
Ain't no mountain high enough [ain't no valley low enough]	Diana Ross
Yes or No	The Gogo's
Spirits in the Material World	The Police
First and Last and Always	Sisters of Mercy
Don't it make my brown eyes blue	Crystal Gayle
Alone together	The Strokes
Colourless Colour	La Roux
Bicycle Race ['you say black, I say white...]	Queen
Back and Forth	Aaliyah
Ebony and Ivory	Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder
Wanted Dead or Alive	Bon Jovi
Same old brand new you	A1
Pushing forward back	Temple of the Dog
Man I feel like a woman	Shania Twain
The winner loses	Bodycount
The Hokey Cokey (or Hokey Pokey)	[right/left]
Downside Up	Peter Gabriel
Geisha Boys and Temple Girls	Heaven 17
Back and Forth	Cameo
The Hunter gets captured by the Game	The Marvelettes
Good times, bad times	Led Zeppelin
Both sides now	Joni Mitchell
Hate this and I'll love you	Muse
White boy, black girl	INXS
You and me song	Wannadies
Let's stay together [good/bad, happy/sad]	Al Green
Rise and fall	Craig David
Head to Toe	Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam
The Fire and the Flood	Vance Joy
Androgyny	Garbage
True/False Fake/Real	Hercules and Love Affair
YYY/NNN	Soulwax

I can't include links to all of them, but I do love this:


Which is a cover of this:



You might be able to guess what age I turned from this selection. If your fave opposite song(s) is/are missing, please add them in the comments--they might make the list for the next party!