What is the song Factory Girls by Flogging Molly really about?

Answer 1

I just Googled the lyrics and read them. I might very well be completely wrong about this, but my guess would be that the song is about women like Nico and Edie Sedgewick, who hung out with Andy Warhol at his Factory, and appeared in many of his films and plays. Andy Warhol's studio/headquarters was called the Factory.

Andy was a really nice guy, and he "employed" (read: took in off the streets) a lot of messed-up street people: you know, druggies and crazies and wannabe artists. He basically had this whole group of rather shady, sleazy people hanging around him all the time. But after one of them -- Valerie Solanas -- shot him and nearly killed him, he began to distance himself from these types of people. (Solanas shot him because she was crazy, basically. She thought he had stolen her masterpiece -- the SCUM Manifesto, SCUM standing for Society for Cutting Up Men -- so she shot him. There seems to be some confusion about her motive, actually. I read in the book Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, that she actually shot him for no reason at all. She wanted to shoot someone else, but she couldn't find him, so she went to Warhol's Factory and shot himinstead).

A movie came out in 2006, about the life and times of Edie Sedgewick. It was called Factory Girls.