| The Dead Milkmen – (Theme from) Blood Orgy of the Atomic Fern Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| The spoken part between "Sunday is gloomy..." and "God, I hate poetry" are the English lyrics to "Gloomy Sunday." | |
| The Dead Milkmen – Sri Lanka Sex Hotel Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| "The Killer Inside Me" is a pulp novel by Jim Thompson about a small town sheriff who is secretly a murderer/sociopath. | |
| The Dead Milkmen – I Tripped Over The Ottoman Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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To further expand what the previous commentator said, and to assist people in future generations: this song is largely full of references to The Dick Van Dyke Show. Robert Petry was Van Dyke's character, and Morey Amsterdam played one of his coworkers. In the show's intro, sometimes he tripped over his ottoman and sometimes he didn't. |
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| The Dead Milkmen – Happy Is Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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The first four lines (Happy is the bride...) are an actual proverb, earliest recorded in 1607. Yes, including the corpse part. |
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| The Dead Milkmen – Bad Party Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Ricky Kasso was a teenager who killed another kid in 1984; it may have been drug deal-related. The media tried to blame it on heavy metal, which was the scandal of the day; Kasso was reported to have told the victim to say "I love Satan." | |
| Barnes And Barnes – Cemetery Girls Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| "Fresh souls in the cornfield"--the chorus is a reference to the Twilight Zone episode It's a Good Life, in which Bill Mumy, half of Barnes and Barnes, starred. | |
| Oingo Boingo – Witch's Egg Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| The Queen's song from Forbidden Zone. | |
| Oingo Boingo – New Generation Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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I really like this line: "Why don't you break that leash," said the heifer to the sheep People love to feel superior; seeing the mote in their brother's eye before the beam in their own. |
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| Oingo Boingo – No Spill Blood Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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You're all correct! (Except for the Animal Farm guy.) Elfman took the chant from viewing Island of Lost Souls... which is a movie adaptation of the book The Island of Dr. Moreau. (Interestingly enough, Devo's "Are we not men?" chant in "Jocko Homo" is also from Island of Lost Souls.) |
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| Oingo Boingo – Commando Girls Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| I could have sworn it was from one of the EPs, but apparently it's just a live song. (I first encountered it on a bootleg; shhh.) | |
| Electric Six – I'm The Bomb Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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Gerrymandering is an Americanism for redrawing the lines of voting districts in order to affect the results--outlining an ethnic area or an economic one. He's saying this kind of tampering must have happened, because "who elected you judge and jury"? Of course, she wasn't actually elected, but that's the joke. |
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| Electric Six – I Belong in a Factory Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Agree with this, with the addition that it seems to address the people of leisure who "open your mouth and sneeze all over my working mans salary," because in his situation doesn't have the time/money to be artistic or intellectual. I think the person he's talking to might be equally poor, but underemployed; a grimy steelworker trying to tell a pierced barista they aren't so different. | |
| Electric Six – I Belong in a Factory Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Agree with this, with the addition that it seems to address the people of leisure who "open your mouth and sneeze all over my working mans salary," because in his situation doesn't have the time/money to be artistic or intellectual. I think the person he's talking to might be equally poor, but underemployed; a grimy steelworker trying to tell a pierced barista they aren't so different. | |
| Electric Six – I Belong in a Factory Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Agree with this, with the addition that it seems to address the people of leisure who "open your mouth and sneeze all over my working mans salary," because in his situation doesn't have the time/money to be artistic or intellectual. I think the person he's talking to might be equally poor, but underemployed; a grimy steelworker trying to tell a pierced barista they aren't so different. | |
| Electric Six – Electric Demons in Love Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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It's a touching, homey domestic scene--starring two people who usually come across to outsiders as scary or at least cooler-than-thou. Even the demons get to find love, sometimes. |
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| Electric Six – Doom and Gloom and Doom and Gloom Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| The "headless horseman without a horse" makes me wonder if they've played Team Fortress 2, home of the Horseless Headless Horsemann (added 2010). | |
| Electric Six – Dirty Ball Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| "My stance is too hot for that stall / Are you gonna out me?" is a reference to the 2007 arrest of Sen. Larry Craig for lewd behavior in a bathroom stall; he claimed he wasn't soliciting gay sex, he just had a "wide stance." This album is from 2008. | |
| Electric Six – After Hours Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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"You can't go blind blowing your load/And that's why God's a liar" is a quick refutation of the old wives' tale that "masturbation makes you go blind." The rest--it sounds like fresh meat getting a quick and dirty introduction to the night life and/or the underworld. |
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| The Billy Nayer Show – Apartment #5 Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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I think this whole song is a fantasy; the narrator is looking around his lonely apartment "where I spend all my days, all alone" and imagining what what it would be like to show it off to another person. Why not imagine an entire date, then? And really embroider the fantasy, add dinner after a lunch date to keep it going. And then, as long as you're imagining things that would never ever happen--like having another person over--why not go all the way and imagine that person would marry you, too? I think this whole album is about being incredibly lonely, and this song is the thesis statement. |
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| They Might Be Giants – Ana Ng Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| This is incorrect; the author may be thinking of Genie, whose real name is not known but who is not Vietnamese. | |
| David Byrne – Now I'm Your Mom Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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I think the first three lines might well be in implied quotation marks -- the little girl is being told "he's a boy, you're a girl, it'll never change" by someone with a more concrete/simplistic sentence structure, before the person who's her mother now comes by to give a different perspective. The rest of the song is by the same narrative voice--maybe the mom quoted that three lines of dismissal to the daughter before trying to explain her own point of view. It does feel disjointed but enthusiastic, maybe an explanation that all poured out at once as the singer tried to articulate the experience of "turning into a butterfly" but got overwhelmed by it. |
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| David Byrne – Lazy Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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I think the singer is meant to be the opposite of lazy. In the first verse he claims he's lazy while he speaks, walks, dances, talks... a lot of things going on, for a lazy man. He's working very hard, in fact, to put up the impression of being uncaringly, untouchably cool: No tears are falling from my eyes I'm keepin' all the pain inside That doesn't sound easy to do. Why is he doing it? Now don't you want to live with me? I'm lazy as a man can be Oh. He can't be seen to put forth this much effort to appear effortless; it would ruin his image as being carefree and attractive. It's "hard keeping it all inside," so much so that he'd "almost stop." He's closer to the people who clean the street than the ones with money and decisions, but he can't appear to envy them or the ignominy of his position catches up with him. The music underscores this; a fast, hard-driving rhythm for the continual assurances that he's very, very lazy. Really. Just listen to him. So lazy. |
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| Elvis Costello – Green Shirt Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| II got the impression that the narrator was describing an oppressive government in between chastising a friend for ignoring it and being more concerned with flirting and appearance - the "green shirt" maybe being a uniform, like he's in some fascist group for the outfits and the girls. Meanwhile, the news is controlled and the phones are bugged and people are in jeopardy. | |
| Devo – Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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The "Smart Patrol" part is repetitive on purpose, I think; they're explaining themselves as the average above-average suburban kids; nothing special - so why are they the only ones noticing how the world's going to hell? I'm confused about the "Mr. DNA" part, really. I get that there's a battle, but why are Devo/the Smart Patrol fighting him? Or are they fighting together? Mr. DNA is "a man from the past" and "here to spread some genes" - could he be a post-evolution but pre-devolution human, at the prime of the species? But why is he a kamikaze, and why does he decide Devo should sacrifice themselves? That being said, I really feel the scream of "This monkey wants a word with you!" at the end. |
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| Devo – Mechanical Man Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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Those are both pretty devo (small d) notions; overdependence on technology leads to deevolution and atrophy, robots are people too. The change from "me want what you want" to "what you GOT" reminds me of the last line reversal from "Freedom of Choice" - "freedom FROM choice is what you want." Also, if you make a robot that wants what humans want, it's going to want what the humans have because there's never enough to go around. It's like Blade Runner. |
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| Devo – Supercop Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| This song was written for the eponymous Jackie Chan movie. I haven't actually seen it, but there's probably some plot parallel. | |
| Iggy Pop – Repo Man Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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Iggy Pop wrote this song specifically for the Alex Cox movie "Repo Man." He actually wrote it after reading the script, before the movie was filmed - the line "using my head for an ashtray" is supposed to reference the other repo men putting a cigar out on Otto's head (in the scene where they're trying to get him to tell them who beat him up), but that didn't end up getting filmed. |
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| Iggy Pop – Shades Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I think this song is one of the most romantic songs I've heard. The narrator's talking specifically about the gift of a pair of sunglasses - he's surprised and very happy, but also worried that he doesn't deserve them or that he'll ruin them somehow - but he's also saying the same thing about his love. He didn't expect to find a girlfriend, and he doesn't feel completely worthy of her love - "I never thought I was worth much or that anyone would treat me this way" - so he's worried that he might do something "wrong" and lose the best thing in his life. "I hope I don't break 'em / I hope we don't break up" - he's using the shades as a way to express his emotions, and admits this at the end. |
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| Aqua – Doctor Jones Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| Is the "Dr. Jones get up now" lyric a reference to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? I kind of thought it was but there's nothing else in the song to support that. Then again, there isn't much connecting the verse to the chorus. | |
| Devo – Love Without Anger Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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Yeah, it seems to be saying that if you let yourself feel the extreme emotion of love, you're also letting yourself in for the extereme emotion of hate/anger. There seems to be an undercurrent of "say no to love" in the song; "why fall in love when there's better things to do?" Then again, "love's bark is worse than its bite;" maybe the anger is temporary, beaten by the love. But the "young and in love" guy is new to the whole thing - "you must be kidding me" - so he makes the decision just not to love anymore. Is he immature or is Devo saying that this is a valid choice? |
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| Devo – Post Post-Modern Man Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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"If I Had a Hammer" is the name and first line of a neo-folk song about, you know, injustice and stuff. "Postmodernism" means a lot of things to a lot of people, but in the context of society, I think it's the time after a society has switched from making things to selling people things (especially lattes) and can get a whole lot of channels on the TV. A "post-post-modern man" might be a guy in the wreckage after this all collapses, or, like Alieno said, it might be a guy who lost his place in a post-modern society for some reason and has to evolve. |
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| Devo – Through Being Cool Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I think it's about being true to yourself, not worrying about being "cool," even to such an extent that you fight against "cool" people. The "young alien types" are the disaffected Devo fans who are urged to confront the "evil spuds" - people who might be "cool" but are hurting everyone/society. | |
| Devo – It Takes a Worried Man Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| This song was recorded for Neil Young's movie "Human Highway." Devo play a group of nuclear technicians who practice this song for a talent show. | |
| Devo – The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprise Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I think this song references "St. James Infirmary Blues": I went down to the St. James infirmary, I saw my baby there She was stretched out on a long white table, so cold, and fine, and fair. It seems to me that the song is about a girlfriend in a coma (OK, or a similarly serious condition) who's started to wake up. If you look at the lyrics in that mindset, it's actually kind of sweet - the narrator jumps with joy when he sees his "baby" is starting to recover. |
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| David Byrne – The Moment of Conception Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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It's "born without a conscience," not "conscious." I like the quick line "eat the apples, steal the peaches." In the Judeo-Christian mythos Eve got into trouble for eating the apple of knowledge, and in the Chinese mythos Monkey got into trouble for stealing the peaches of immortality. |
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| The Stranglers – Peaches Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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As an American person, I would like to mention something I had to look up: it's spelled "charabanc" but pronounced "charabang," and it's basically a sightseeing/tourist bus, open-air, kind of like a trolley. He's basically joking that he'll have to stay at the beach (with the women) all summer because the tour bus has left without him. |
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| Golden Earring – Radar Love Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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So basically, the singer is driving to be with his baby; they have an almost psychic connection and he knows she misses him too. This knowledge is making him reckless - "there's a voice in my head that drives my heel" (on the accelerator) - and he's been driving all night, so anxious that the wheel is covered in sweat. He passes a long line of cars (presumably on a two-lane highway, from what comes next) and the last line we hear that's in the first-person voice is "Last car to pass, here I go!" Then we go into an ending that twists earlier lines: "And the line of cars drove down real slow" - a funeral procession "And the newsman sang his same old song One more Radar love has gone" - the singer has died in a car crash that was aired on the news, all before he got to see the lover he was driving towards. It's a more subtle dead lover song than most, and it does have a great tune. |
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| Devo – Dogs Of Democracy Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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Okay, I added lyrics. My idea of what this song is about is pretty basic: I think the old dog and the young dog are both politicians, and despite our hopes that the young dog might change things or the old dog temper the young one, "we'll all get wet" as they sell us out for money. They're all too busy "singing 'bone sweet bone'" and admitting that "money's never wrong" to want to or maybe to be able to change anything. |
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| David Byrne – A Long Time Ago Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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"the singing of the stars" - the static you hear on the dial between radio stations is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, but it's a parallel with the singing of (music) stars on the stations, who might be long gone but whose recorded songs create the impression that they're still alive and singing. This ties in with the fourth verse, about the blood in one's ears sounding like applause (this can be an indication of high blood pressure); things sound better and more interesting than they currently are. I don't know how to tie in the first three verses, though. |
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| The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets – 20 Minutes Of Oxygen Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I really like the image/phrase "ripcord in my destiny" - something that instantly slows the action and takes you out of danger. I also like the term "time door" rather than "time machine" - it's instantly obvious that it's basically the same thing, but it sounds like the singer actually knows what he's talking about. |
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| Oingo Boingo – Private Life Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| On the Outside is more about being an outsider (natch) in society; this song sounds like an agoraphobic's cry for help. He's gotten everything straightened up and organized and has entirely locked the outside world out - now he's lonely and frustrated. | |
| Oingo Boingo – Dead Or Alive Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I like this song; it's like a quick summary of a horror movie. I especially like the "...things stayed PUT!" digression - he delivers it like he's annoyed at the stupid zombies for ruining his picnic. "Get off of my lawn!" |
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| Oingo Boingo – Commando Girls Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I like this song and I love Oingo Boingo, but I feel obliged to point out that tights generally *don't* have zippers. The line "Commando girls, won't you come out tonight?" echos "Buffalo gals, won't you come out tonight?" |
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| Devo – 37 Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| This is a basic Devo mission statement - de-evolution means that the dumber you are, the more you fit in. | |
| Devo – Morning Dew Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| A cover of a song covered by the Grateful Dead, about the aftermath of nuclear war. | |
| The White Stripes – One More Cup Of Coffee Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I actually haven't heard this version, but I read an interview with Bob Dylan where he said this song inspired by the idea of meeting the King of the Gypsies, who turned out to be just some guy living in a trailer. He co-wrote it with Jacques Levy. | |
| Bloodhound Gang – I'm the Least You Could Do Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I have no idea why the lyric transcription is this bad when BHG prints their lyrics in every album. It's about the singer scoring with a woman with low self-esteem; he perceives her as above him socially and is surprised she's with him. Which is odd, because if she's as stupid as he says, she wouldn't really rank above him. It's "the satisfaction of getting fouled" she's after, and the singer is thanking her father for screwing her up psychologically so the only way she can feel worthwhile is through being sexually desirable. This song is like notes taken during an episode of Loveline. |
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| Devo – Wiggly World Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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"They say the fittest shall survive Yet the unfit may live Let 'em wear gaudy colors Or avoid display" This is straight from the Devolutionary Oath, a series of ten (or five, depending on version) contradictory statements by Devo, things like "Fight with your neighbors or untie them. It doesn't matter." |
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| Devo – Whip It Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I have to go with Stoolhardy and BoojiBoy - it's not about masturbation (you guys are thinking of "Turning Japanese" by the Vapors). Mark and Bob 1's dad, aka General Boy, helped a little with writing it - it's a parody/condensation of 1980s self-help slogans. Anyone remember Whip Inflation Now? | |
| Devo – Uncontrollable Urge Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I enjoy that although he spends a lot of time telling us he has to tell us about his uncontrollable urge, at no point does he actually tell us. | |
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