Sonny Charles, "One Eyed Jacks" (1982)

 There are various reasons to like a song apart from how you feel about it as music. Both Ben and I, for example, have a fondness for a meta-genre which I have just this instant decided to call Overextended Metaphor Groove (OMG).

As the name suggests, these are songs where the artist has committed to shoe-horning all their passions/joys/torment into the framework of a single over-arching metaphor. Sonny Charles' "One-Eyed Jack" for example, is basically a song about player-hating expressed mainly with reference to playing cards (and with total sincerity).

"The one-eyed jack is a mysterious card,

only one side you can see."

Taking a scientific approach, I quickly counted the total number of lines in the song and divided by the number of lines that contain explicit card game references (chorus counted only once). This gave an OMG compliance ratio of 53.33%, i.e. just over half of all lines in the song have some nonsense about card games in them. This is actually much lower than I expected and definitely shows the value of taking a hard-nosed, evidence-led approach (to my dismay Sonny went off the rails on the second verse and neglected to mention playing cards at all).

By the way, I have made a shortened edit of this song as after the two minute mark it does nothing but repeat the fairly ordinary chorus for another three minutes (yes, this song has a "chorus-til-fade" segment that lasts longer than the song proper - better to go for a breakdown when you've run out of ideas I'd have thought)

Sonny Charles - One-Eyed Jack

More OMG will be posted as it comes to my attention!