The Chorus of Somebody Told Me: A Close Reading
Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend Who looked like a girlfriend That I had in February of last year It's not confidential, I've got potential
The first thing to note about this chorus and the question mark we might call its meaning is that the trans reading of these four lines is not far-fetched, is not ‘too deep’, or phantasmal. It is the single most obvious meaning of these four lines. This chorus does not have a trans subtext, it has a trans text. That is not to say that the text is concerned with a transgender person. It seems rather to be concerned with the possibility of transition. Blurring the lines between gender is not something that this chorus is ‘interested’ in doing or that it ‘might’ be doing. It is the first thing that it does. Before this chorus is about anything else, it is about gender fluidity. Taken as a textual object, this chorus makes use of verse lineation to multiply its potential readings. The opening clause ‘Well somebody told me’ qualifies the grammatical sentence which makes up the first three lines, so that the assertion made by this sentence is put in quotation marks, and thus coloured by the possibility of inexactitude, if not complete falsity. What’s more, these syntactical quotation marks inflect the sentence as it goes on: ‘you had’ would not be in the past tense if it wasn’t for that opening clause. When we encounter gender in this chorus, we therefore encounter it within a socially mediated discursive field. The ‘boy’-ness or ‘girl’-ness of the person in question occurs in the speech of people looking at them — gender is in the eye of the beholder, in this song. Then, the song takes on three different meanings in quick succession. These meanings are created by the pauses in between the vocalist’s delivery which are replicated in text by the line breaks. Let’s walk through these three meanings:
Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend
First meaning: the woman the speaker is attempting to seduce is reportedly in a relationship with a man.
Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend Who looked like a girlfriend
Second meaning: the woman the speaker is attempting to seduce is reportedly in a relationship with an effeminate man, or with a butch woman, or with a nonbinary person.
Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend Who looked like a girlfriend That I had in February
I cut the line off at ‘February’ because the word is, in The Killers’ recording, dragged out for a remarkably long amount of time, so that there is effectively a pause after that word. The third meaning is therefore: the woman the speaker is attempting to seduce is reportedly in a relationship with the speaker’s ex-girlfriend, or the speaker’s ex-partner who transitioned and now presents as a man, or who performs another mode of genderfluidity which allows them to occupy the role of ‘girlfriend’ in ‘February’ and of ‘boyfriend’ in the present of the song. The reading of these lines which posits a full-blown transition is strengthened a little bit by the delayed end of the third line: ‘of last year’, which emphasises the timespan between the moment when the anonymous person was a ‘girlfriend’ and when they were a ‘boyfriend’. But, just as the gap between these moments is widened by this addition, the syntactical structure of the lines narrows it by putting the present-tense (masculine) presentation of the anonymous person before their past-tense (feminine) presentation. Instead of a clear meaning, these first three lines leave us with only a clear sense of fluidity. Fluidity, therefore, offers us a way into the final line of this chorus:
It’s not confidential, I’ve got potential
‘It’s not confidential’, that is to say, it is publicly known. That is to say, perhaps, it is publicly made — much in the way that gender is, as this song has previously established. ‘I’ve got potential’: I posses the ability to become what I am not already. Another way of phrasing this line would therefore be: ‘It’s a social fact, that I could become different.’ In the chorus’s final moment, one which is distinguished from the rest by its syntactical detachment as a standalone sentence, and thus emphasised as a conclusion, the socially mediated gender fluidity of the anonymous third party is projected back onto the speaker, who realises the full extent of their fluid possibilities.