| Dr. Dre – Bitches Ain't Shit Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I think the last verse, starting "And now I gotta do some...", isn't Jewell but instead The Lady of Rage (look her up on Wikipedia), as she's featured on the song according to Wikipedia and this page on The Finest Hip Hop blog: http://finesthiphop.blogspot.com/2009/07/dr-dre-chronic-1992.html In fact, the full "featured" list for this song is quite long. It should be: Bitches Ain't Shit [ft. Daz Dillinger, Kurupt, Snoop Dogg, Jewell & The Lady Of Rage] |
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| John Vanderslice – Exodus Damage Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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John Vanderslice is a songwriter whose best songs are about more than one thing at a time. Yes, this song is about 9-11. And about Timothy McVeigh and domestic right-wing terrorists and militia. And about fascism. And about conspiracy, propaganda, religion, government corruption, and the intersection of interpersonal relationships and political acts and beliefs. This song was also my first exposure to Vanderslice, and everything else of his work I've heard since has also been consistently excellent. My current fave Vanderslice song is a recent discovery: "They Won't Let Me Run" from his 2004 album "Cellar Door". If you've got an iTunes acount and a spare dollar, go buy "They Won't Let Me Run" now. You will deem it a dollar very well spent, I warrant. |
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| Bright Eyes – No One Would Riot for Less Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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It seems one cannot add images to these posts, at least not with standard html tags, and I see no indication of any other way to do it. This would explain why these pages look so dreary. It's nought but text, as far as the mouse can click. How very 1992. Oh well, go to that page I mentioned above and scroll about halfway down to read more about that terrible Dec. 28, 2001 day of I-80 destruction in Pennsylvania, and look at the wild photographs. They are something to save and show the grandchildren what life was like back in the Automobile Age, when the richest, strongest, and most scientifically and technologically advanced civilization in human history decided to radically transform its entire socioeconomic infrastructure on the assumption of universal car ownhership, an endless supply of cheap fossil fuel to run them (and everything else) on, and a magical exemption from the principle of cause and effect allowing a limitless amount of chemicals, toxins, industrial effluent, and waste of all kinds to be pumped into a closed dynamic system of interdependent feedback loops such as planet Earth without having any ill effect or potentially dangerous future consequences. Bringing this back to Bright Eyes' "No One Would Riot for Less", the song includes what is probably the single most urgently needed and powerful course of action to preventing the apocalyptic collapse he describes, expressed in the song to the loved one he is trying to keep safe in the midst of chaos, while relevant to anyone in the broader sense as an essential first step to heal our world and our future: "Wake, baby, wake....." |
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| Bright Eyes – No One Would Riot for Less Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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As promised, here's one last comment for this evening on Bright Eyes' "No One Will Riot for Less", and the lines in the first verse that go: "In the breaths between the markers On some black I-80 mile." I knew I-80 referred to an American interstate highway, but I had no idea where it's located or if there's anything in particular about it relevant to the song beyond just being a big major highway. I learned that it's the 2nd longes interstate, running from just outside NYC to San Francisco in an almost straight, slightly southward slanting line -- there is a map in the Wikipedia article on the I-80. As to possible specific relevance of the I-80 in this song, there may well be some in its presentation as one of the places one might meet death "in the breaths between the markers [roadmarkings I assue] on some black I-80 mile", especially if Conor Oberst was living in or near Pennsylvania on December 28, 2001. On that day there were two massive multivehicle accidents at separate locations along the Pennsylvania stretch of I-80. Both were caused by treacherous winter road conditions and sudden squalls of fiercely blowing snow that caused instant complete whiteouts, reducing visibility from normal to zero in moments and persisting long enough for vehicles to start hitting each other, which on that busy highway with bad visibility and icy roads, quickly multiplied with chain reaction collisions as new vehicles kept running into the growing carnage. In the end at least 113 vehicles were involved in the two accidents, including many transport trucks, one of which carried flammable materials and exploded on collision, helping spread the flames that eventually engulfed many vehicles. Scores of people were hospitalized, and nine people died. But what made the incidents most traumatic and infamous was not the casualty figures but the nightmarish descent into apocalyptic industrial devastation that survivors experienced, and millions saw depicted in grisly detail on the news. The whole story is told about halfway down this page: http://www.pahighways.com/interstates/I80.html where you'll also find some amazing photos of some very black I-80 miles indeed. I'm going to try including some of the photos in this very post -- if the server software allows it. Let's see. |
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| Bright Eyes – No One Would Riot for Less Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I'm still curious about some remaining uncertainty about the exact lyrics. The most prominent example is the line "the final scraps of [?]". Opinion seems to be about evenly divided between "life" and "light" among posters to this thread, and across the web generally I discovered when investigating the question. Personally I prefer "life" because it fits in better with the theme of extinction and apocalypse, and it goes with "scraps of" much better than "light". Another example is "leave that blanket around you, there's nowhere [?] safe". Again, opinion is fairly evenly divided between "as" and "we're". This is a more significant differernce than the previous item, because the overall meaning of the statement with one word is the opposite of its meaning with the other. "There's nowhere AS safe" suggests some degree of refuge and protection, or at the very least a philosophical acknowledgement of a catastrophe so complete that one place is as safe or unsafe as any other, so it's not worth worrying about. "There's nowhere WE'RE safe" is just out and out bleak and hopeless, and kinda makes one wonder "well why bother about the blanket at all, or waking up, or leaving this place?" So I vote for "nowhere AS safe". The version of the song I have and that underlies all the above is a richly produced studio recording (5:12 in duration) with synth-strings, backing vocals, bass, drums, and synth added to Conor's guitar picking. It's a free mp3 distributed widely when the Cassadaga album was released a few months ago, and that according to its id3 tags is from that album. Listening closely revealed two more variations from the lyrics given on this page, and that I can hear so clearly that there's no debate as far as I'm concerned, but it does raise again the question of multiple versions of "No One Would Riot for Less" with slight variations in the lyrics. Anyway, on my version, I am almost certain he sings "in the breathS between the markers" -- i.e plural "breaths", not singular "breath" as this page and most others claim. I'm pretty sure that I'm hearing a real "s" at the end of that word, and not just a moment of excess sibilance in Conor's delivery. The 2nd case also concerns pluralization. I can detect no hint of a pluralizaing "s" at the end of the last word in this line: "From the madness of the government." The line's meaning changes somewhat - "government" in the singular which could either be a reference to the particularly extreme and dangerous madness of the current US govt as it transforms into the Evil Empire of the Star Wars movies. OR it could just refer to "government" as a mad thing in general This is too long already, so I'll post my last point separately -- it's a doozy. |
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| The Decemberists – Los Angeles, I'm Yours Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| One of the most mysterious phrases in the song is "an empty fallow fount". Some lyrics sites render it as "an empty fellow found", but though that make sense given the previous line "all the boys you drag about", its almost-but-not-quite literal fit seems less likely to be correct to me than the out-and-out obscurity of the first option. "Fallow" means literally land left unseeded for a season, and figuratively something with dormant, unrealized potential -- referring to LA manhood? Or by extension, to the stunting and deferral of responsible adulthood encouraged by a consumer culture of distraction and material acquisition? | |
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