After watching the faces of fellow listeners for more than two decades, it's become obvious that "If being strong is what you want, than I need help here with this feather" is the arrow to the heart lyric for a majority of the fans of The Replacements' "Swinging Party". It's simple, it's painfully honest, and it's delivered without an ounce of self-pity or opportunity for useless arguing. The image it conjures is perfect in capturing the inertia felt by so many who came of age in the eighties.
However, it only describes the symptom and to find the cause, we move to the second verse: "Pound the prairie pavement, losin' proposition, quittin' school and goin' to work and never goin' fishin', water all around, never learnin' how to swim now." It's there that Paul Westerberg succinctly describes what was, what wasn't, and what seems unlikely to be: reminding everyone that even the simplest childhood dreams don't come true for everyone. Deftly using swimming as a childhood rite of passage, he reminds us that he is barely treading water in adolescence and that he will probably drown in the sea of expectations of adulthood. "Swinging Party", for better or for worse is the latch-key kids' anthem.
Early fans of The Replacements were quick to sell out when the band began to expand their sound but if "Swinging Party" is the product, the price was well worth it. I suspect that those same fans were the ones who drowned, who acknowledged only the symptom, who failed to explore the cause.
