Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince
“No cameras catch my pageant smile”
“They whisper in the hallway, "She's a bad bad girl”
“Now I'm feeling hopeless, ripped up my prom dress”
“We're so sad, we paint the town blue”
“We're so sad, we paint the town blue”
Twists the "paint the town red" celebration idiom, going out, riotous joy, by swapping the single load-bearing word, so the action of painting the town stays but the affect flips from raucous celebration to collective sadness. In the song's frame the line indicts a generational mood: the speaker and her peers go through the motions of celebration ("paint the town") while feeling its opposite ("blue"). The dead metaphor is reactivated by holding its grammar intact and changing only the colour.
absent-wise-men
“Boys will be boys then, where are the wise men?”
“Wise men once said” — The Albatross
Community readers connect the song's repeated wise men to Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince and its question of where the wise men are — the same appeal to a guiding authority that either never arrives or arrives only to mislead.