LogFAQs > #913419959

Sloop John B: Well, that was one heck of a nostalgia bomb! I heard this song (and most of the rest of the Beach Boys' greatest hits) so many times on the oldies station, but I don't think they've played it in a long time... feels like it has been years since the last time I heard it. Or most of their songs, honestly; they don't play too much from the 60s these days, so Kokomo is the only one I know is still getting a lot of airtime.

I've never been too big a fan of the band--never tried to avoid their music, but I've also never sought it out either. They were always there with so many big songs, then eventually they just kinda...weren't? Never really thought about them or the sudden lack of their songs playing on a seemingly endless loop. Might try listening to a Greatest Hits collection later... feel like I could go for Good Vibrations or Little Deuce Coupe at the moment.

"Sloop John B"'s not a bad song. The chorus is a bit too repetitive for my tastes, but it is infectiously catchy... I've had it stuck in my head for hours now. This is also the first time I've ever really paid attention to the lyrics and apparently I've had some very, very wrong interpretations about it. I thought it was an anti-war song, or at least anti-military. The chorus' repeated refrain of

Let me go home, let me go home
I want to go home, let me go home
Why don't you let me go home

I thought that was someone begging to be released from military service. Then you look at everything other than the chorus and...uhh...nothing even remotely points toward that being a valid reading of the song? And it's actually an old folk song from 1916? No depth, no hidden meaning, just an old boating tune. Nothing wrong with that, but where did I get the idea that the song was anything else?

A quick Google search offers a plausible explanation: "In the movie Forrest Gump, this plays when Forrest is in Vietnam, and the camera shows the latrines. The lines, "This is the worst trip I've ever been on... I wanna go home" are emphasized."

I have no specific memories of the film, though I did see it once. Is it possible that scene implanted the "this song is about Vietnam" thought in my mind and I just never questioned it, even after I couldn't remember anything about the scene itself? Probably. The timing seems about right.



The song also inspired a lot of really weird memories. Something about the higher pitched way the band sings the word "home" was giving me a vision of singing dogs... it was quite disorienting and took me a while to follow those memories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQySZpkBdGQ" data-time="

The 80s Pound Puppies intro! Something about the way the dogs and the Beach Boys sing the word "home" seemed similar to me, or at least brought up memories of each other. Hadn't thought about 80s Pound Puppies in quite a few years either--I loved that show when I was really little, but that thing really did not hold up, at all. Tried watching an episode or two after I was grown up, but they were almost painful to sit through.

((I rather liked The Hub's updated Pound Puppies cartoon that came out around the same time the current MLP series started--at least, the first season of it, since it had a drop in quality afterwards--but that was short-lived and not terribly relavant to anything.))

Inexplicably, the last time I remember watching the 80s cartoon when I was an appropriate age, was renting an old VHS of the show at same place that rented the Fist of the North Star Game Boy fighting game. Which is weird and kinda uncomfortable.

...well either way, the song I'm supposed to be talking about is alright. Not sure how I feel about all these unrelated flashbacks being triggered by the song, but it was certainly an experience.
---

Marshmallow unicorns forever!