Back when I was in high school, our English teacher gave us a poem to read. We all thought it was about a man’s final moments on his death bed. Turns out, it was actually about him losing his virginity. Art’s interpretation is in the eye of the beholder.
Why am I telling you this? Back in 1986, a movie called Pretty In Pink came out. The film was inspired by the 1981 song of the same name. However, Richard Butler, the lead singer of The Psychedelic Furs, says that John Hughes mistook the meaning of the song.
In the coming of age of flick, it about Molly Ringwald being pretty in a pink dress. Butler told Sky News that it is not the pink he was talking about in the song.
“John Hughes – God rest his soul – kind of got the wrong end of the stick with that song.
“He made it to be literally about a girl that was wearing a pink dress and it wasn’t about that at all. It was about a rather unfortunate girl. Me saying pretty in pink meant somebody who is naked. It was a metaphor.”
Is Butler seeing red because the iconic filmmaker got it wrong? He told the interviewer, “…given that, the movie did us a lot of good. It was a double-edged sword because it increased our audience but a lot of people that were the darker set of our fans thought: ‘It’s a brat pack movie scene now and we are not really into that.'”
You can’t win them all.
If you think about it, Hughes’ mistake turned out to be a good thing for them. Who knows if they would still be touring (when bands can tour) today if it was not that misunderstanding of a birthday suit for a pink dress? Their original fans would have left them anyways, but that movie will be a coming of age movie for many decades to come. Therefore, that tune is giving them new fans all the time.
Now that you know the real meaning behind the song, listen to it again. You will hear how different it is than you remembered. It is like the red light in your head went on. Mind blown.
