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Song Stories

“Ridin'”

Chamillionaire | 2005

Chamillionaire's tour bus — featuring a large picture of his face on the side — was driving through Oklahoma when police pulled the driver over, then searched the bus using narcotics dogs. "They tore the bus apart," said Chamillionaire, noting that they found nothing. Although no arrests were made, he was still angered by the stop, so he wrote this song about police trying to catch him "ridin' dirty." "Somebody had to speak on it," he said. "There are cops who be racially profiling." Chamillionaire says he was honored by "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody version, "White and Nerdy."

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Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

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