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ms_brightside27 said:
The common misconception with this song is that it’s about a boy Brandon used to have a crush on high school.
The story behind it is that during his schooldays, a boy named Andy teased Brandon about his surname, effeminising it and implying that because of his surname, Brandon was gay. That is where the lyric ‘hey shut up, hallo shut up, yeah’ comes from. There is a possibility that the abuse ties in with ‘leave your number on the locker and I’ll give u a call’ – Andy could have prank-called Brandon and Brandon wanted to prank him back. (It could also be a metaphor for Brandon wanting to repay Andy with the same pain he endured.)
As for ‘Andy you’re a star/In nobody’s eyes but mine’, I think there is a dual meaning.
1. At the time, Brandon couldn’t stand up for himself because Andy was populair and Brandon wasn’t. Fast vooruit, voorwaarts to when The Killers had just scored their first record deal and were writing songs for Hot Fuss, a period of time where Brandon’s future looked bright and the world was his oyster. Andy’s situation went downhill after he graduated – he became (possibly still is?) a lamely high school gym teacher. zei lyric could be Brandon’s way of telling himself, “I used to think that because of his popularity, Andy deserved to push losers such as myself around, because it was the ‘status quo’. But now, the tables have turned, so why did I ever think for a seconde that he was better than me?”
2. This is a bit meer complicated. As mentioned above, Andy made Brandon feel insecure door implying, and possibly spreading rumours saying, that Brandon was homosexual. A simpler instance of something alike is expressed in the below example:
Kid A sees that kid B has a cold, and being the aggressor that he is, kid A accuses kid B of having ‘cooties’. This spreads and becomes a mob mentality as meer and meer kids are led to believe that kid B has cooties, and this leads to a large number ganging up on kid B, surrounding him and taunting him. But then something remarkable happens: Kid B marches right up to Kid A and sneezes on him, giving him the ‘cooties’.
Can u understand what took place in the example? Brandon used this song as a tongue-in-cheek way of turning the exact thing that Andy used to taunt him into something that would attack Andy instead. This could also explain the lyric ‘In a car with a girl/Promise me she’s not your world’ because Brandon is implying that it is Andy who is gay and he is using this girl, as well as the attention he draws to Brandon, as a deflector. (This may of may not be true since I can’t claim to know Andy personally, but it’s what Brandon is implying.)
As a sidenote, door no means am I likening homosexuality to cooties (because that would be ridiculous), and in no way is Brandon implying that being homosexual is a bad thing. He wrote the song because what Andy accused him of was untrue.
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