Misunderstood songs: "Coffee & TV"

Considered by most Blur fans to be one of the group's greatest songs, "Coffee & TV" is probably best known by American fans as "that video with the milk carton walking around."

Yank or Brit, who doesn't live Milky?

But it's not the music video's protagonist that I want to discuss.

I've been listening to this song since high school and I always thought I knew what the lyrics meant. It's not that the lyrics are particularly difficult to discern (my friend Roberta recently confessed to me that she spent the better part of a decade believing Mick Jagger was singing "I never smelled your pizza burning" rather than "I'll never be your beast of burden.")

It's just that Blur made their intentions known from the get-go. They were always a band that championed British culture and criticized the banality of late 20th Century life (It's not too difficult to figure out if you glance at the title of their sophomore effort, "Modern Life Is Rubbish"). They were trying to make a statement and combatting the world's obsession with Grunge because bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden didn't say anything at all to musicians who were forming bands across the pond in the early 1990s.

I always assumed guitarist and sometimes-singer Graham Coxon was disenchanted with modern life, fame and the London scene that, by the mid-1990s, was birthing bands who wanted a piece of Britpop's golden ticket to fast album sales and loose women.

Coxon sings in the song, "I've seen so much, I'm going blind and I'm braindead virtually," before emploring, "take me away from this big bad world and agree to marry me so we can start over again."

Pretty clear cut?

It turns out Coxon was actually reeling from an attempt to give up alcohol. Ever the angry drunk from some accounts (John Harris' now out-of-print "The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock," for one), the song was Coxon's way of dealing with sobriety:

"Your ears are full but you're empty, holding out your heart to people who never really care how you are"

Just think about these lyrics, literally, and you might listen to the song in a different way:

"Your ears are full of their language
There's wisdom there, you're sure
'Til the words start slurring
And you can't find the door

So give me coffee and TV..."

There you have it folks. Disenchantment with modern life, perhaps, but most definitely Graham was trying to cope with giving up the bottle. What was the remedy?

Coffee & TV