Lyrics for the Game of Thrones Theme Song
A couple got into it at dinner and things got Thronesy.
Went to dinner alone last night. Empty restaurant except for a couple a table away. I heard their entire conversation. Multiple times throughout dinner, while the woman half-listened, the guy brought up how well-composed the Game of Thrones theme song was. He praised its time signature, melodic progression, its implementation of fourths and fifths. He name-dropped a handful of other terms I dimly recognized from music theory. The woman cut in to say she’d never seen Game of Thrones. The guy said he hadn’t either. He didn’t even like television or the fantasy genre. He was a music fanatic and had come across the song in a subreddit he followed for people who liked to nerd out on the structures of jingles and themes and melodies and tones that pop culture was often ensconced in. He pulled out his phone and found the Game of Thrones theme song on YouTube and played it. After a show of reluctance the woman leaned over and looked at the screen. The man turned it up. The woman looked at me. I looked away, pretending not only to be unbothered by the music but to be unaware of the couple’s entire conversation. Then she asked him to turn it down. He turned it up instead, explaining that she wouldn’t be able to hear all the things he was pointing out about it unless the volume was high. He began to point out the technical patterns and key transitions as they were happening in real time, and then he started badgering her to say whether or not she could recognize those patterns in the song. The woman seemed even more put off. That’s why I was so surprised when, slowly at first, she started nodding along to the beat and kind of swaying in her chair. Then she was smiling, and pointing at the phone in his hand as if to say yes, she did recognize the unfolding patterns he had outlined and was continuing to outline. I was staring at them both in disbelief now, the Game of Thrones theme song blasting out into the otherwise silent restaurant. The man’s strategy of browbeating his dinner companion had miraculously elicited the reaction he was after—or seemed to—because this is the point at which the woman shocked us both (the man and I) by breaking into a freestyle rap over the Game of Thrones theme song It is impossible describe how bizarre this was to witness in physical reality. It’s the type of thing that happens, or is staged, all the time on TikTok, but there, there’s always this protective layer between you and the crazy bullshit you see. If anything, the arm’s race of the spectacular endlessly unfolding before us online only makes non-Internet reality seem even more inert, almost like an neighboring planet we’ve never landed on, even though we live there. Seeing something so unexpected occur on that planet, it was like meeting God outside of church, or Tom Hanks in the airport, or Gandalf at a rave, or something like that. Before I get into what she said in her rap, I need to convey how surreal it was to see someone who, by all accounts seemed to be no rapper, breaking into a rap with no advance warning, in a public place, with no one filming. Her lyrics were half-clever, and her flow was awkward at best. That’s no real criticism. She far surpassed anything I could’ve done in the same situation, and any deficiencies in her style were more than compensated for by her confident delivery—and the content. Everything she said was a direct indictment of man. I watched in astonished awe as he stared back at her helplessly while she roasted the shit out of his pretensions at knowledge regarding the structure of music, with every one of her syllables arriving on beat with the Game of Thrones theme song. They were only a few feet from each other, and she never even blinked. It was easily the most vicious verbal dressing down I’ve ever seen. I don’t remember everything she said—the stunning audacity of the effort seems to have overridden much of my memory—but one lyric I do recall was this: “You call yourself a theme song aficionado / but your analysis is soft and green like an old avocado,” and she said it just as the Game of Thrones song swooped into its slow, sad, sawing violins. Another one went something like “You don’t love music, you’re obsessed with your reflection. / You can’t appreciate it if I don’t have the same impression.” She also had one line where she rhymed “enjoy” with “Coconut La Croix,” and the Coconut La Croix line referred to how unappealing she found his attempts to connect.
Most of us know instinctively that we must seek connection in order to thrive. It’s not even conscious, it’s woven into our routines. But if we undergo a prolonged period of loneliness, we start to become conscious of the problem. Painfully, we become more aware of how lonely we are, and this motivates us to take greater risks in pursuit of connecting with others. If those bids for attention fail to pay off, we may begin to slow or even shut down our efforts to connect. Before long, the majority of our energy is devoted, not to connecting, but to fretting about why connecting is so difficult. We may even start to believe we are fundamentally broken or otherwise incapable of connection. This is, admittedly, where I spend most of my time in this sad, unsatisfying cycle.
What I almost always forget, however, is that actively seeking new connections isn’t the only way to find them. You can also feel less alone by passively witnessing the catastrophic backfiring of someone else’s attempt to connect. In fact, sometimes that’s the only thing capable of helping us appreciate the connections we already have (that have become invisible to us). Watching a bigger loser than ourselves plunge into a deeper echelon of isolation than the one we currently occupy can make us feel like we are soaring to new heights of connection, even as we remain at the same level of isolation.
On the other hand, I would be less happy, not more, the joy that I experienced watching that guy get verbally reamed was reducible to simple schadenfreude. I don’t want my escape from the prison of solitude to require the imprisonment of others. I let myself off this particular hook when I realized that I felt for the guy in spite of how much I judged him and in spite of how much he deserved what he got. Conversely, I didn’t envy or want to be the woman either. Even though she was clearly the victor, she probably left the restaurant feeling just as disappointed by her date as he left feeling humiliated by his.
The more I thought about it, the more I wished these two would have been fictional. I wished that what would’ve happened to them wouldn’t have had to happen to them in real life, but that I would still get to experience it having happened to someone. This urge—the urge for real things to have occurred in a figmentary context—I think underpins our entire relationship to history. Speaking for the species, I mean. Though this is probably a topic for another, much longer essay.
There are two more lyrics of hers that I remember. This one happened somewhere in the middle of the song: “Game of Thrones theme song is weak as hell / I faked liking it to make your ego swell / but these arpeggios are staid as shit / if I’ve heard a more repetitive arrangement, I can’t remember it.”
A more obvious reason why I felt so blissed out after witnessing what I witnessed dawned on me later. The simple truth is that I love Game of Thrones. I’ve seen the show all the way through seven times. I’m such a fan that I don’t even hate the final season, nor the gratuitously sexualized violence the series is known for. A lot of more discerning fans do hate those things, and I respect them for that, but I’m more low-class about this type of thing than most people I know. I actually like it that there are several scenes in this show that I simply cannot watch. I prefer to watch a show, in fact, that has parts in which I have to avert my eyes, than the alternative: entertainment that glides frictionlessly through me without inspiring any uncomfortable emotions, without the hideousness that makes it stick in memory. What can I say other than that ugliness in entertainment is one of the only things I have found that wakes me to the world and makes me question who I am.
I’ve also read all the Game of Thrones books that have been published, including those ancillary to The Song of Ice and Fire series like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Fire and Blood, not to mention several other books by George R. R. Martin that are not set in Westeros and have nothing to do with Game of Thrones. And I’m not even 1% mad that he hasn’t finished and probably never will finish The Song of Ice and Fire series. I guess I have a kind of unconditional love for him as an author based on the fact that what he has given to the world has been so much more than anything I could have given. All of this is, of course, just my opinion.
But perhaps that is why I enjoyed what happened so much: simply getting to consume some free in-real-life Game of Thrones content made my dinner experience feel like a particularly thoughtful and unexpected gift from the universe.
I’ll end with the woman’s closing line and a description of the aftermath for the man.
The Game of Thrones theme song is two minutes long, so she’d been going for almost that when she dropped the final line, which coincided with the end of the song: “Never seen the show, on that we agree / but the beat I’m rapping over . . . means nothing to me.” She was staring dead at him when she said it, dropping the mic with her look alone. The subsequent silence so cold, so merciless, so full of reckoning, it almost transported back to Westeros itself: to a world with no forgiveness—at least no easy forgiveness—and where redemption, if it comes at all, is always painfully bitter. And where justice exists only in scraps. Scraps that have to be clawed at enormous expense, through sheer force of will, blind luck, lunatic courage, or all three, from the Closed Hand of Fate . . . Why can’t more shows be about this? I wondered. Nothing’s realer.
When the woman left, the man sat frozen at the table. For him, Winter had finally come. But then it was Spring, and he started to weep. First one tear, then another, falling off his cheeks, baptizing the leftovers on his plate. He just kept crying like that, softly, unhurriedly. There was a lot of snow that needed to melt. The tears pooled around the food and eventually filled the plate, making the scraps look like little continents on a flat, round planet. Then the tears overflowed the edges of the plate.
I left a tip and then left the restaurant, thinking on my way home that thought I’ve thought seven times before and never once regretted: I need to watch Game of Thrones again.
Firing it up at home, I turned up the theme song and wished I could have remembered some of the things the man said about it, but those details, too, were memories the woman’s rap had obliterated.
Almost crashed my car while reading this. That wouldn't have been a Thronesian death—too banal, too accidental—and, in fact, it would have been an honorable one.
This is hilarious and brilliant. I see what you did there with that image of tears in the end.
How are you doing, anyway? Haven't seen you since Iowa.