"Fast car" is kind of a continuation of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." It has all the clawing your way to a better life, but in this case the protagonist never makes it with her love; in fact she is dragged back down by him.
There is still an amazing amount of hope and will in the lyrics; and the lyrics themselve rank and easy five. If only music was stronger it would be one of those great radio songs that you hear once a week 20 years after it was released. The imagery is almost tear-jerking ("City lights lay out before us", "Speeds so fast felt like I was drunk"), and the idea of starting from nothing and just driving and working and denigrating yourself for a chance at being just above poverty, then losing in the end is just painful and inspiring at the same time.
A flourishing plague consumes the masses
Emaciated figures dying in the streets
Boils and sores devour their flesh
Vital organs turn to sludge
This inescapable fate captures humanity
With every hour more victims fall
Mass hysteria becomes the protocol
Civilization turns to savagery
With no hope for a cure in sight
Science becomes futile in the chaos
Disease ridden humans play out their final days as ravenous animals
A bastardized version of man which cannot be reversed
Limbs and appendages rot and fall off
Leaving hideous creatures in tormented hell
Suffering life forms await death in the misery of defeat
Mass graves filled with diseased bodies
Spreading sickness posthumously
Emaciated figures dying in the streets
Boils and sores devour their flesh
Vital organs turn to sludge
This inescapable fate captures humanity
With every hour more victims fall
Mass hysteria becomes the protocol
Civilization turns to savagery
With no hope for a cure in sight
Science becomes futile in the chaos
Disease ridden humans play out their final days as ravenous animals
A bastardized version of man which cannot be reversed
Limbs and appendages rot and fall off
Leaving hideous creatures in tormented hell
Suffering life forms await death in the misery of defeat
Mass graves filled with diseased bodies
Spreading sickness posthumously
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Fast Car
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This is about bronies. They communicate by stomping.
I Can't Go To Sleep
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Some world of people is suddenly hit with a disasterous disease. It's effects are devastating as well as intensely violent and graphic....it's completely unexpected. Life, whatever it was beforehand, has completely shifted into this horrifying terror and it nothing can really stop it. Everything that once was, is now diminishing into chaos before the blink of an eye.
I think the chorus...."A bastardized version of man which cannot be reversed...." simply means that man is now hopeless to this plague and there is nothing that can be done. Everything that slowly dies awaits death and once dead, a sickness is spread to everything of the opposite.
I think the meaning of this song briefly touches on the fact that everything we have can go bad within a second and, in some cases, it can be intense and violent....not quick and easy.