Just a certain nostalgia ('those old crazy dreams') and the fact that he's stayed put - perhaps he thought he'd break out of his small town once and yet he didn't, for whatever reason. What do we make of this 'young man in a T-shirt'? On the one hand, he's got 'greasy hair' and a 'greasy smile,' suggesting both that he is probably of working class background (grease here being both a hair style and also a suggestion of 'grease monkey' or gas engines), and possibly that there's something 'greasy,' slippery, or self-serving about him. Just kinda came and wentIf the first verse fits easily into a common social commentary (the blight of black America), the second does not. He says, 'Lord this must be my destination.'īut just like everything else those old crazy dreams I'm going to skip the chorus for a second and move to the second verse: There's a young man in a T-shirt He's got a wife and a house and he remembers when they were young and in love. We can guess that they've gotten the short end of the stick, in that there's an 'interstate runnin' through front yard' and yet the man 'thinks he's got it so good.' He's not wallowing, even though by the simple fact that he's black, we intuit a larger social commentary about race and society and the way it must affect his situation - in essence, why an interstate would have been built through his neighborhood and not a more affluent neighborhood. 'Hey darlin', I can remember when you could stop a clock.'We're presented with this image of a couple, an older couple, a black couple. You know he thinks that he's got it so goodĪnd there's a woman in the kitchen cleanin' up the evenin' slop He's got an interstate runnin' through his front yard Here's the first verse: There's a black man with a black cat livin' in a black neighborhood Instead, it uses a few snapshots to suggest a larger commentary. 'Pink Houses' is a song built on a narrative impulse, but it is not really a 'story song,' in that it doesn't tell one simple story. In it, he talked about his folk influences, and the 'four songs' that he wrote, over and over. I heard Terry Gross's interview with Mellencamp on Fresh Air last night. He was orginally packaged as 'John Cougar' - a sort of market-driven caricature - but as his success allowed him some independence, he the name on the albums to John Cougar Mellencamp and then to John Mellencamp. He came up in the music business at an interesting time, in the early days of MTV. His songs are not quite as inventive or fine-crafted as a Bob Dylan or a Bruce Springsteen, but they are simple, accessible, and come grounded in a small-town American heartland sensibility. As a songwriter, Mellencamp has kept it simple throughout his career. The lyrics of 'Pink Houses' by John Mellencamp ( listen to the song on Mellencamp's Last.fm page) are a social commentary, packed carefully into the confines of a three-minute pop song.

Little pink houses john mellencamp