Way-Homers in Music

In Raising Arizona, we learn of the way-homer, the joke you won’t get until you’re on your way home. That tends not to happen with jokes for me, except, for, I guess, the joke about Janice’s being not a lesbian but rather Lebanese from Mean Girls. But I have remarked before how songs come back from my youth to haunt me—like “Zehn kleine Jägermeister.”

So it happened again. I came across the Commodores’s “Nightshift” the other day (by which I mean, I downloaded it). I hadn’t heard it since it was a mega-hit in 1985, and I remember asking my mom about the lyrics, since I had no idea what a “night shift” was. She explained, and then I think either she told me or Kasey Kasem told me that the song was a tribute to some dead guys. I always just figured someone in their band died or something.

And then I listened to the song in 2005. I don’t know if maybe in some way the song is weakened by incorporating Jackie Wilson, whose death just doesn’t strike me as quite as tragic (though definitely drawn out), but the way the song reaches out to Marvin Gaye… Man. So it’s just amusing to find out that a song I liked at age nine that I thought was about some dead member of the Commodores, turns out, instead, at age 29, to be about Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson.