mitchco a go go!

Lady Gaga & a wary Stephin Merritt

Lady Gaga has a proposition for you: want to be her “Summerboy”? More specifically, in her track of the same name she sings,

Crazy, get your ass in my bed
Baby, you’ll just be my summer boyfriend

But beware the limitations of this arrangement, as outlined in the chorus:

Don’t be sad when the sun goes down
You’ll wake up and I’m not around
I’ve got to go oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
We’ll still have the summer after all

Doesn’t sound all that bad, right? You get to be Gaga’s summer fling, and who wouldn’t want that?

Stephin Merritt, for one. All the way back in 1992, The Magnetic Fields released the track “Summer Lies” on The Wayward Bus, and it cautions us against just such a thing:

All the sweetest things you said and I believed were summer lies
Hanging in the willow trees like the dead were summer lies
I’ll never fall in love again

In fact, as if predicting Gaga’s “Don’t be sad when the sun goes down / You’ll wake up and I’m not around,” “Summer Lies” concludes with:

I pine and wane, pale and wan, never knowing
when it’s dawn, curtains drawn, hiding in my room,
wasting away, cutting myself.

Yowzah. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to choose; we can summer with both Merritt and Gaga. Even if they’re both none the wiser, that doesn’t mean that we can’t be. Here for your listening pleasure, both a fling and a cautionary tale:

Lady Gaga – “Summerboy”

The Magnetic Fields – “Summer Lies”

Tags: lady gaga, summer jams, the magnetic fields

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 6:36 am and is filed under music. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.