These Songs Aren't About What You Think They're About: 9 Surprising Meanings Behind Hits

You may have heard them hundreds of times, but truly understanding these songs takes more than a few casual listens (or even bar-side belting).

Noah Cyrus’ “Good Cry”

The singer was inspired to write the emotional track from her new EP, which is also called Good Cry, after the death of fellow musician Avicii.

“‘Good Cry’ I wrote a couple months ago when I was in Bali. It was the night Avicii had passed away, actually,” she told Entertainment Tonight earlier this month. “I had stayed up all night crying over that, and I had gotten into a fight with my ex, and everything was just kind of tumbling down. And I was really, really far away from home, and I wanted to just go to my mom’s house and cry.”

“It just was a really heavy night. Everyone in America had just gotten the news that Avicii had passed and I was going asleep,” she continued. “So it really was just insane and it was a really long night. And I stayed up until, like, 6 a.m. crying and ended up writing ‘Good Cry.'”

Cyrus counted the late DJ and producer, who died in April 2018 of what his family later implied was a suicide, among her most influential musical idols. “One of my favorite songs, like, ever written is ‘Addicted to You.’ And so it was a dream of mine to work with Avicii, and I love him so much,” she said.

Christina Aguilera‘s “Infatuation”

During her judging stint on RuPaul’s Drag Race, Aguilera revealed that her 2002 Stripped track was written about an ex-boyfriend who came out as gay.

“It was heartbreaking because I found out he played for your team, not mine,” she told the queens.

Contestant Vanessa Vanjie Mateo noted, “he goin’ to see this, he goin’ be mad,” and the singer admitted, “I hope so.”

Lady Gaga‘s “Poker Face”

“Poker Face” refers to Gaga attempting to hide her secret fantasies about women while making love to a man.

The Joanne singer explained all while talking about a remix of the song that Kanye West worked on.

“It’s funny because a lot of my fans were like, ‘Gaga, Kanye wrote a song … and it’s not about what your record’s about. Your record is about gambling. And this song is about dirty sex things,'” she recalled. “I said to them, ‘You’re wrong. Kanye was right.’ That’s exactly what this song is about. The record is about how I used to fantasize about women when I was with my boyfriend.”

Rihanna‘s “S&M”

The 2011 chart-topper wasn’t written just to be a BDSM anthem. “The song can be taken very literally, but it’s actually a very metaphorical song. It’s about the love-hate relationship with the media and how sometimes the pain is pleasurable,” Rihanna explained to Vogue. “We feed off it — or I do. And it was a very personal message that I was trying to get across.”

According to the Fenty Beauty creator, even the steamy video was supposed to be more thought-provoking than titillating: “I wanted the video to say that but still play off of the theme of S&M. And I mean, wow, people went crazy. They just saw sex. And when I see that video, I don’t see that at all. I wanted it to be cheeky. There’s no other way to take it.”

Selena Gomez‘s “Fetish”

While discussing the music video with director Petra Collins, Gomez revealed the title of her 2017 song isn’t a clear-cut summary of what it’s about.

“I made it very clear to you that I didn’t see ‘Fetish’ how most people know the word at face value. When most people hear the word ‘Fetish,’ they think of S&M and all that sexual s—, but you didn’t. You knew why I loved it. You told me, ‘I think this song is about love, something crazy and complicated.’ I wanted the video to be contextualized,” she told Collins in aDazed feature.

“If a guy shot ‘Fetish,’ I bet it would look way more sexual. That’s what I love about how you captured my breakdown moments — it’s shown to the viewer as creepy and I honestly think that there are some guys out there who would make those moments more sexy than it was or should be,” Gomez added.

The director also emphasized that the video “came out of our discovery that we are both avid horror fans.”

Britney Spears’ “… Baby One More Time”

Turns out, the insanely popular single was never about getting slapped.

In his book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, writer John Seabrook explained that the confounding lyrics stemmed from Swedish music masterminds who misunderstood American slang.

Songwriters Rami Yacoub and Max Martin, who penned the earworm, believed that “hit” meant “call,” as in “hit me up.” They intended for “… Baby One More Time” to tell the story of a girl who was desperate for an ex-boyfriend to dial her number once again.

Taylor Swift‘s “Bad Blood”

After Swift discussed it in Rolling Stone, haters and fans alike assumed the 1989 track was written about Katy Perry. However, the star implied in subsequent interviews that there was a completely different target.

“I know people will make it this big girl-fight thing,” Swift told Rolling Stone. “But I just want people to know it’s not about a guy … She did something so horrible. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies.’ And it wasn’t even about a guy! It had to do with business. She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me.”

Recalling her Rolling Stone interview a year later in GQ, Swift seemed to backtrack on her statements implicating Perry and hint that the song was about someone else entirely.

“You’re in a Rolling Stone interview, and the writer says, ‘Who is that song about? That sounds like a really intense moment from your life,'” she remembered. “And you sit there, and you know you’re on good terms with your ex-boyfriend, and you don’t want him — or his family — to think you’re firing shots at him. So you say, ‘That was about losing a friend.’ And that’s basically all you say. But then people cryptically tweet about what you meant.”

“I never said anything that would point a finger in the specific direction of one specific person, and I can sleep at night knowing that,” she continued. “I knew the song would be assigned to a person, and the easiest mark was someone who I didn’t want to be labeled with this song. It was not a song about heartbreak. It was about the loss of friendship … So I don’t necessarily care who people think it’s about. I just needed to divert them away from the easiest target.”

Chance the Rapper‘s “Same Drugs”

The rapper turned to Twitter to make it crystal clear that despite the title, his Coloring Book track isn’t about recreational substances:

If you pay attention to the Peter Pan and Hook references in the lyrics, it’s clear the emotional song is more concerned with growing up and growing apart.

“Same Drugs had like 20 versions and it was the hardest to write,” Chance shared during a Reddit AMA, only coyly adding that “drugs” are a metaphor for “stuff.”

Hanson‘s “MMMBop”

Prepare to feel a bit depressed. The bubbly pop song no one could stop singing in the late ’90s actually deals with the brevity and frailty of life.

“It’s the most misunderstood successful song of all time,” Zac Hanson told Entertainment Weekly. “Even at the height of 1997, it’s a song nobody understood. Ninety-nine percent of the people who have any reference from it don’t understand it.”

“MMMbop represents a frame of time: ‘in an MMMbop they’re gone’ it says in the lyrics of the song,” he added on The Kylie and Jackie O. Show. ” The whole song’s about the fact that almost everything in your life will come and go very quickly. You’ve got to figure out what matters and you’ve got to grab onto those things.”