Buffy Speak / Music

• They Might Be Giants: Multiple songs:
  • "They'll Need a Crane" consisting of this sort of thing. It tells the tale of a dysfunctional relationship in strange metaphor, while referring to the two people only as "Gal" and "Lad", where Jim Beam is used to indicate Gal Drowning My Sorrows:
    Lad looks at other gals.
    Gal thinks Jim Beam is handsomer than Lad.
    He isn't bad.
  • Or in "No One Knows My Plan", with a Shout-Out to the Platonic Cave:
    They're like the people chained up in the cave
    In the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy
  • They do this a lot. In an interview, they were asked what the song "Don't Let's Start" was about. They said, "It's about not let's starting."
  • The album, Nanobots:
    • "Stuff Is Way", which is entirely devoted to examining this trope:
      "You say stuff is way
      Way to go, go away..."
    • "Insect Hospital":
      Walking down to the insect hospital to set the insects free
      'Cause we are like, literally, literally
• Barenaked Ladies have "There's a Word For That" in which they lament not knowing the proper word to describe a certain thingy that's right on the tip of their tongue.
• In "O'Malley's Bar", Nick Cave sings about killing one of his victims "with an ashtray big as a really fucking big brick."
• From an interview with Frank Zappa:
  Zappa: ... then it goes into a song called "The Torture Never Stops".
  Interviewer: Which is about what?
  Zappa: Er, it's about torture not stopping.
• Strapping Young Lad named their first album Heavy as a really heavy thing.
• It just hit me like a two ton... heavy... thing...
  • Used in the opening for the album cut of Queensrÿche's "Empire"
  Answering machine voice: Next message: saved Saturday at 9/24 p.m.
  Caller: Sorry, I'm just ... it's starting to hit me like a um ... um ... two-ton heavy thing.
• From Pam Tillis' "Spilled Perfume:" "Girl, if I ever saw one, that's an 'I can't believe I did that' look."
• From the fictional 1960s pop band The Wonders, stars of That Thing You Do!: "And if I know you, you're doing that thing/Ev'ry day, just doing that thing/I can't take you doing that thing you do!"
• Carrie Underwood's "Undo It": "You stole my happy, you made me cry/Took the lonely and took it for a ride".
• America's "A Horse With No Name": "There were plants and birds and rocks and things..."
  • As a Shout-Out, Power Pop band The Loud Family (no, not them) called their debut album Plants And Birds And Rocks And Things.
• Phil Vassar's "Everywhere I Go" has a real gem: "I was living in that happy-to-be-right-where-I-am space/And God knows that's a hard-to-get-to kind of place".
• From Parry Gripp's song "Black Hamster":
  Evildoers, you will cower in fear when he arrives on the scene, as you will be... in big trouble!
• "Love Type Thing" from Tegan & Sara's So Jealous album.
• "Sex Type Thing" by Stone Temple Pilots is a subversion, in which the Buffy Speak is left on the title. The "thing" in question is rape.
• When Lindsey Stirling is explaining the process of making her music, she describes how she will just do away with dictionary words altogether when trying to express what she wants to do. This is followed with a rather amusing demonstration.
• Deep Purple rented The Rolling Stones Mobile Studio to record their album Machine Head. Their misadventures are recalled in the classic "Smoke on the Water," and the studio is dubbed "the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside."
• This was how the Slint album Spiderland got its name: Singer Brian McMahan's younger brother said that the album sounded "spidery". Within the album itself, the song "Breadcrumb Trail":
  I pulled back the drape-thing on the tent
• The God Help the Girl song "I Dumped You First" contains the line "I'm gonna run like a deer/swim like a swimmy thing"
• In the song "More Than Just The Spare", an outtake from the Frozen (2013) soundtrack, Anna describes herself as "Like a button, like a horseshoe, like a girl who's bad at metaphors".
• Ian Anderson often refers to the accordion as the "squeezy thing."
• Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" has some of that, like "all kinds of nasty and ugly things" and stuff, sprawled throughout the song.
  • And "the cop equipment" at the police station.
• "Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains)" by Connie Converse:
  Up that tree there's sort of a squirrel thing
  Sounds just like we did when we were quarreling
• "Obstacle 1" by Interpol:
  Her stories are boring and stuff
  she's always calling my bluff
• The World War 2 song The Thing-Ummy-Bob involves a female production worker making a complicated war-winning weapon, its name and purpose unknown.
  It's a ticklish sort of job making a thing for a thing-ummy-bob
  Especially when you don't know what it's for
• "Hoist Up the Thing", by the Longest Johns, has it right there in the title. The song is about a college dropout who finds himself a job as captain of a ship that has men for every other position; assuming being in charge can't be that hard, he makes himself look good and yells the following chorus:
  Hoist up the thing
  Batten down the whatsit
  What's that thing spinning?
  Somebody should stop it
  Turn hard to port
  (That's not port!) Now I've got it!
  Trust me, I'm in control!
• One scene captured in the 'recording the album' portion of the documentary A Year And a Half in the Life of Metallica had producer Bob Rock asking James to re-sing a particular line, because, in Bob's words...
  Bob Rock: Going back to the 'D' was a little frotzed.
  Randy Staub: (*stares*)
  Bob Rock: What?
  Randy Staub: "Frotzed?"

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