Artist	Song
Movie: Alice in Wonderland	Mad Tea Party
Benny Goodman with Jack Teagarden	Texas Tea Party
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band	Boston Tea Party
The Kinks	Have a Cuppa Tea
The Mad Caddies	Cup o' Tea
The Newsboys	Cup o' Tea
Dennis Brown	A Cup of Tea
Tsuneo Imahori	Gunpowder Tea
Desensitized	Oolong-cha
Alien Ant Farm	Pink Tea
John Scofield	Green Tea
Liquid Lounge vs. Jazzanova	Lemon Tea?
Nirvana	Pennyroyal Tea (unplugged version)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds	Opium Tea
Tiny Tim	Strawberry Tea
Sam Brown	Tea
Barrett Tagliarino	Teabag
Cat Stevens	Tea for the Tillerman
Tommy Dorsey Orchestra	Tea for Two Cha-cha
Peter and Gordon	Sunday for Tea
Tintin	Toast and Marmalade for Tea
Janis Ian	Tea and Sympathy

Comment:

It was, I think, my Eighteenth Evil College Girlfriend who didn't believe in metaphors. Oh, she didn't question their existence -- she had read about them and was fairly adept at recognizing one. She simply didn't believe in them and felt that people who used them exhibited bad taste. "Why can't people just say what they mean?" she'd frequently say, with a delightful nervous hand-gesture and not a little anguish.
It wasn't just me, though I was certainly high on the list of offenders. No, I'd been to her parents'. Her father was an intellectual property lawyer and her mother a public health nurse and the trajectory of the imagery at the dinner table there was about as straight as a leprechaun's blackthorn.
At the time, I was an English major with an unhealthy attraction to the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century. And being also a terrible coward, whenever we'd argue, I'd set up elaborate analogies to justify whatever it was I had said or done - this annoyed her. And, not surprisingly, unreconstructed hell would break forth.
"Honey, I can't help it -- that's the way people talk."
"Not all people," she'd counter. "Not people who say what they mean. Not people who know what they're talking about. Not polite people."
In the midst of one such row, I took a new tack. "Cup of tea?" I suddenly asked with great conviction.
She agreed to that. And I immediately started digging around for the teapot and the little kettle and the Earl Grey, gaining valuable thinking time while I was at it.
Pressing my advantage, I asked, "Milk and sugar?"
There was an unpleasant pause. She said wearily, "We're not talking about the tea, are we?"
She was, of course, dead right. We hadn't been hanging out long, but certainly long enough for me to know how she took her tea. (Milk and two pink packets of saccharine, not blue aspartame, thank you.) And in that little pause, I could hear the bat squeak of destiny. The reign of the Eighteenth Evil was almost over. Long live the Nineteenth Evil.
Thus, twenty-odd songs not about tea. Oh, several of them claim to be about tea, but chances are the lyricist simply doesn't recognize a fossilized metaphor when he uses one. Our tenor passes the vehicle on the right and we no longer know what we're saying. The years go by and we silver over with varying grace. My jejune taste for Earl Grey has mutated into a mild obsession with dragonball jasmine. The Eighteenth Evil is now a flackstrix for Condi Rice.
We're never really speaking of tea, after all. That doesn't mean you can't have a cuppa while you listen. Cheers.

Feedback: