submissions
Walt Mink – Betty Lyrics
| 12 years ago
|
She's a very unhappy homemaker who was forced into hosting parties by her dead husband. She wants to stop hosting parties and be independent, but she's haunted way too much by her husband to do so. |
submissions
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band – Ashtray Heart Lyrics
| 12 years ago
|
Wow, Beefheart must've been through a lot of pain as he wrote this song.
He knew his time was coming eventually, so he wrote a song entirely built on doubt. He's confused that despite all of the influence that his music has outright created (case of the punks), he's still regarded a joke amongst music buyers. He's pissed off at his own lack of success, at his association with Frank Zappa, and how he feels old amongst a sea of continually progressing musicians. He's jaded. I mean, he's depressed. |
submissions
Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band – The Smithsonian Institute Blues (Or The Big Dig) Lyrics
| 12 years ago
|
Typical generation gap song, complete with dinosaur references to add to the outright humor of the piece.
The whole gist of the song is how the old dinosaurs are dying off - and how the new dinosaurs are coming in. It symbolizes the transition from a predominant and then-trite genre of music to something noticeably more edgier (like how pop gave way to rock and roll in the '50s - and how rock and roll gave way to the British Invasion - and how the British invasion gave way to psychedelia - and so on), but at the same time, it's a sarcastic ode to musicians who attempt to keep the '50s style of rock rebellion alive (i.e. Sha Na Na; MC5; Chuck Berry) in an era of radically changing music. Then again, Beefheart shows sympathy for these back-to-roots performers - he knows their hearts are in the right place. He's afraid that they'll be ostracized for "wearing an old dinosaur's shoes."
tl;dr - it's about music fads and how people get ostracized for looking back at the past. Typical Beefheart affair. |
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