Song: “Misery Business”
A song about bullies in high school gets briefly bullied online
High school remains mysteriously redolent as life goes on. Cliques, peer groups, bullies, and social hierarchies resurface repeatedly, leading to mutterings of things like, “What is this, high school?” as people encounter these years later and in far different settings.
Paramore singer Hayley Williams wrote “Misery Business” about real events in her high school — a mean girl ruled her school and terrorized her classmates. Skinny (“A body like an hourglass”) and popular, Williams sings to this girl about how being popular doesn’t make you great, and how her bag of tricks isn’t new (“There are a million other girls who do it just like you”).
The song hit a nerve when it was released in 2007, becoming Paramore’s breakout hit. It has since gone 6x Platinum.
The song title appears to be related to the 1990 film Misery, based on the Stephen King novel and starring Kathy Bates and James Caan. However, given the flexibility of the phrase, the song has been assigned meaning to everything from various relationships to traveling through Heathrow.
Written in F and with a moderate tempo of 86 bpm, the song was at the center of a social media controversy in 2015. The word “whore” appears in the second verse, which stirred up criticisms on the socials. In 2022, Billie Eilish performed the song with Paramore, and edited the word out of the second verse as she sang. Later that year, social media forgave and forgot, acknowledging that the word “whore” was allowable again.
As Williams said at the time, “Make it make sense!”
It all seems pretty much like high school.
Enjoy!
Zombie Science
Not all business is misery. Canadian Science Publishing had some fun this month, putting together a curated collection of published materials with a Halloween theme in a virtual journal dubbed the Canadian Journal of Zombie Science.
Some articles are . . .
