Welcome once again to Lyric Shrink. This edition features a departure from the line-by-line analysis seen in the previous articles. The inspiration of this edition is a humorous analysis of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” in this Twitter thread.
And that thread got me thinking about cognitive reframing; the intervention used by some therapists to help clients view situations or thoughts through a different perspective. The framing device I used in the thread was humor. What if Bob Seger was just reminiscing about past loves and got a little horny over the memories? Voila, Night Moves! I know this horny retrospective is not Bob Seger’s stated case for writing the song, but it’s fun to play out the thread and explore the possibilities.
The ultimate goal of reframing is to find more adaptive ways to think about life’s issues.
Hopefully, the new thoughts are adaptive and accurate, but they do not have to be. Looking at an embarrassing situation through the lens of humor doesn’t make the situation any less embarrassing or awkward. It does help you resolve feelings of guilt or shame. It might also help you see that the people who laughed, were laughing at the situation and not you specifically.
Sigmund Freud considered humor a defense mechanism, a way of dealing with difficult or taboo subject matter indirectly. “You have sexual thoughts about a co-worker so you crack a joke about penises” would be a rough approximation of Freud’s theory on dick jokes. But I take humor to be a more adaptive reframing device. A way to look at the absurdity of a situation and explore the bizarre possibilities of their origin.
In my Twitter thread on Seger, I note his use of slang, fondness of recalling past loves, and the absurd nature of teenage sex romps.
When we look back on past events our imperfect memories and present contexts create a new framing device that views these events as usually more pleasant than they actually were. It is funny to me to hear a song about those early attempts at romance from the perspective of an older man. The Bob Seger of age 19 and age 30 have completely different frames of reference for the love affair described in the song.
Per Seger’s interview with In The Studio, Seger details the origins and writing process he went through for “Night Moves”. Inspired by equal parts Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen, “Night Moves” chronicles a teenaged Seger and his frivolous relationship with a 20-year-old girl with much more experience than him. While the song paints a picture of midwestern innocence and angst-ridden nostalgia, Seger admits he was heartbroken by the end of his romance with the older woman.
However, through his own personal growth, he can look back fondly and laugh at his younger self.
One of the inspirations for me looking at “Night Moves” from a humorous perspective was a bit on 30 Rock where Liz Lemon sings, “Night Cheese” and is caught by her boss Jack Donaghy. The moment is completely embarrassing and relatable. I hope we’ve all had the opportunity to sing along to a song with parody lyrics and had a good laugh. Songs with a serious slant with new humorous lyrics are comedy gold. Just ask Weird Al. The humor doesn’t take away from the original; it only enhances it by breathing new life into the meaning of the song. That’s the goal of cognitive reframing. We knock the dust off a memory or a thought and with it the unhelpful beliefs or un-helpful points of view previously attached to them.
We can reframe our own misfortunes too. Ask yourself, “Would the person I am 10 years from now really be this disheartened by this mishap”? “What if I treated this incident right now as if I were that more mature person”? I think you might even laugh at yourself for being so broken-up. The goal with reframing isn’t to avoid the problem or find a way to laugh it off. Rather, the hope is that you find an adaptive perspective on the problem. And if you laugh, it is with the realization that your overreactions are in vain and a bit foolish. Who knows, maybe you’ll write a hit song about the experience?