On my way to yoga this afternoon I heard a bit on NPR about the song “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon. You remember the song, it’s addressed to some mysterious man who wears a fruity scarf and apparently has a big ego.
At the end of the segment there was a query from a listener that packed a punch. (Paraphrasing the NPR listener) She sings “I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you?” Why would she sing that? After all, the song is about him.
At first I thought that the listener just didn’t understand the point of the barb: She is saying that he is so vain because when he hears a song about someone he assumes it is about him. But after thinking for awhile, I see that the listener was onto something.
Is it vain to think that a song is about you when indeed it really is about you? Can you be accused of being vain just for being right? What if the guy has never before thought a song was about him. Maybe this was the very first time in his life that he ever thought a song was about him, and he had good reason to because in fact it was about him and indeed all the clues were laid out in previous verses?
She could have sung “I bet you think those other songs, like you know the song about turning brown eyes blue, by Crystal Gayle, or the one by the Carpenters about birds suddenly appearing, you know those songs, I bet you think those songs are about you. Well I got news for you, they are not. In fact those singers have never met you, duh.” But she didn’t.
Even worse, the song clearly accuses its subject of being vain. If he thinks the song is about him, then he is acknowledging his own vanity. Certainly the guy gets humility points for recognizing his own vanity, right?
But wait. The subject knows that Carly knows that the subject’s recognition of himself in Carly’s song is an admission of vanity, and hence an act of humility. And therefore “I bet you think this song is about you” translates to “I bet you think you are humble.” And given that, since the subject indeed recognizes himself in the song he is in fact claiming to be humble, an act of sheer vanity.
So Carly’s lyrics cut deep indeed.
(Postscript: before today I actually thought the song was about me.)
Cheap Talk 
11 comments
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March 3, 2010 at 7:42 am
tomslee
Well I know you know this, but someone has to say it.
Of course he knows that recognizing himself is a claim of humility, and that claims of humility are vain. So he knows that recognizing himself is, despite initial appearances, vanity. And so we return to him acknowledging his own vanity.
The only end I can see to this is irony. Knowing that he has been caught in a recursive game (is that the right term?) he sees himself, sees his own simultaneous vanity and humility, and smiles ironically.
March 3, 2010 at 7:43 am
David
I have taken the song to be about Carly’s getting over the gentleman. She’s using the song to put her own feelings to rest, so the song is really about herself. Now who is vain?
March 3, 2010 at 10:15 am
Jordi Soler
Wasn’t that song about Warren Beatty? Maybe you should ask him what his feelings were when he heard it for the first time on the radio, and you’ve got your mystery solved. 🙂
March 3, 2010 at 11:02 am
Liz
Chait has been overanalyzing this all week – I find his commentary on the vanity this issue pretty amusing:
“If we take this argument seriously — and I see no other way to read pop music lyrics — then Simon is imagining that, if her unnamed target were not vain, he would listen to the song and think, “Well, I did have a fling with Carly Simon several years ago, and I also once won money at a horse race in Sarasota, and then immediately flew in a Lear Jet to Nova Scotia to watch a solar eclipse. But my scarf was more of a peach color than apricot, so she’s probably singing about somebody else.” Obviously that’s absurd. It would be vanity if he thought that other songs were about him, songs that were actually about somebody else.”
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/simon-gate-the-mystery-continues
March 3, 2010 at 12:16 pm
John Perricone
I always understood the song to be about Mick Jagger, and that she had written the song some time after after he and Carly had separated.
March 3, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Mike
I doubt it gets recursive because the man who thinks the song is about him probably thinks “it’s not really vain to think that this song that is obviously about me IS about me; that’s just Carly being bitter”.
anyway, I think the point of the song is Carly gets to sing it and all her exes think it’s about them, and N-1 one of them really ARE vain to think so.
March 3, 2010 at 1:54 pm
jeff
Your last point occurred to me, but it doesn’t work. Let X be the set of all Carly’s exes and let V be the subset of X that the song is about. Let’s assume your premise that every element x of X will think the song is about him.
Because the song says “i bet *you* think this song is about you” then the song is sung to any element x of X that Carly thinks might think the song is about him. That is, V equals X.
So every x in X is correct that the song is about him.
(This does assume that Carly is right that every one of her X’s will think the song is about him, but we can get essentially the same conclusion by restricting to the subset of X’s that she suspects of such vanity.)
March 4, 2010 at 4:28 pm
Mike
that Carly was pretty clever! though I think the overall effect of the song is to think she’s being unfair, maybe because she’s bitter. I know whenever I hear the song I think “but the song IS about him!”
March 5, 2010 at 9:20 pm
Popeye
I have taken the song to be about Carly’s getting over the gentleman. She’s using the song to put her own feelings to rest, so the song is really about herself.
This has always been my interpretation as well. Someone who says “You’re so vain that you think that I’m obsessed with you” — when she is in fact obsessed — is in a world of hurt.
March 13, 2010 at 10:56 am
Anonymous
On my way to yoga this afternoon I heard a bit on NPR…
March 13, 2010 at 2:38 pm
jeff
i left out the part about my lunch (alfalfa sprouts and a plate of mashed yeast.)