Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #3: Ace of Base--"All That She Wants"

While I can only speak from my limited experience in this case, when someone mentions "unintended pregnancies" I think of them as typically being unintended by both partners. However, as Heart's "All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You)" has clearly shown, it is possible for the pregnancy to be intended by one half but not the other (although the roadside hunk in Heart's song is hardly blameless here since he clearly didn't use any protection that night--so many times, so easily, no less). We have a similar case with Ace of Base's "All That She Wants," although the motivation here is quite a bit different than in Heart's case:

In "All That She Wants" the song is quite literally about a woman who goes out and has sex with guys in order to get pregnant. Now, some have claimed that when the chorus goes "All that she wants is another baby," it only means that she wants is another lover (someone to call "baby") since the opening does say that "She leads a lonely life," but I don't think that meaning holds up as well as the unintended pregnancy one. She is clearly dedicated to one-night stands, as the lines "She's gone tomorrow boy" and "It's a night of passion / But the morning means goodbye," make clear. However, the whole predatory angle that the song goes for--"She's going to get you" and "She's a hunter you're the fox"--suggests something more "sinister" is going on here.
 
The explanation that she wants to get pregnant works with the one-night stand angle, her loneliness, and the whole "She's going to get you" aspect of the song. Not only would having children (in her mind at least) help with her loneliness, but the song suggests a financial motive as well. At the beginning of the song she has woken up "late in the morning" and her first thought is "Oh what a morning, / It's not a day for work / It's a day for catching tan." These are not the signs of someone especially committed to working for a living (and I've seen the sign, and it opened up my mind), so we can assume that another baby will provide her with material as well as emotional comfort.

While I can't say that sounds like her life is going to get any less lonely any time soon (especially since if its another baby then she already has at least one), I guess she's in pretty good spirits on this particular sunny morning, so more power to the cheeriness of this song about unintended pregnancies!

Just watch out, she going to get you...either that or the sheer catchiness of Ace of Base will.

Musical Mathematics Update (XTC/Flaming Lips/Fleet Foxes)

I am reading Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution and I came across this quote from Durkheim that really captures what I see going on in the ritualistic/animalistic  moments of XTC's "Sacrificial Bonfire" and the video for the Fleet Foxes' "The Shrine/The Argument":

Commencing at nightfall, all sorts of processions, dances and songs had taken place by torchlight; the general effervescence was constantly increasing...One ca readily see how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act different than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer. It seems to him that he has become a new being: the decorations he puts on and the masks that cover his face figure materially in this interior transformation, and to a still greater extent, they aid in determining its nature. And as at the same time all his companions feel themselves transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures and their general attitude, everything is just as though he really were transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him. (Quoted in Bellah, 17-18)

I think these songs are trying to recall this kind of transformative experience, and the animal costumes and symbolism capture some of what that transformation is supposed to be about: being transformed into a being closer to the natural world and to the powerful energies that still run through it underneath our civilized veneer.