submissions
| Pet Shop Boys – Suburbia Lyrics
| 13 years ago
|
|
It's not about London it's about Downey, California--but not Karen Carpenter's Downey--Downey by way of the 1984 movie Suburbia--dissaffected punk youth, middleclass anomie, and a motley pack of runaway dogs gone feral. |
submissions
| Vampire Weekend – California English Lyrics
| 15 years ago
|
To Live and Die in LA like the French Connection is a William Friedkin movie.
Condos that they'll never finish--housing/real-estate collapse hardest hit in California--the collapse of global intgerests--
the whole song gives me a feeling of California as pacific rim--the east as a decaying empire--megatrends post-multi-cultural kind of moment.
For a period, the California "accent" (disregarding the whole surf/valley subculture) was considered one of the most unaffected accents in the US.
|
submissions
| Vampire Weekend – Horchata Lyrics
| 15 years ago
|
|
as much as I like this song, I can easiy imagine it in a commercial for Royal Caribbean Cruise--they've got a lust for life. |
submissions
| Joanna Newsom – Jackrabbits Lyrics
| 15 years ago
|
This is one of the most haunting songs on the album lyrically and musically--even her unaffected vocals here sell the song's dejected stance--I think the main imagery "So I swung through here like a brace of jackrabbits With their necks all broke"is the key to this song. Fight or flight, except here they are one and the same, the jackrabbits knowing nothing but to flee, only worsening their fatal injuries--the singer of the song is both trapped and emancipated by their emotions and convictions "My faith makes me a dope"
Lots of lines with darker double-edged meanings "A length of rope" The tricky game of negotiating between friends and lovers, Undying love as an unmendable wound (never change in size), the very implements of healing (poultice) only signaling a death knell (vultures), salvation coming as a snake.
|
submissions
| Joanna Newsom – Good Intentions Paving Company Lyrics
| 16 years ago
|
I love that she's channeling a bit of Dolly Parton in her new vocal stylings, much more controlled than I've heard before-"The'Ol Opry house rang..."
I look forward to her long and impassioned career. |
submissions
| Panda Bear – I'm Not Lyrics
| 16 years ago
|
|
Just discovered the source of the opening vocal sample to this song: S01E06 of the British comedy show the Mighty Boosh: the music that comes on when the character Howard Moon looks at a photo of kittens to squelch an angry fit. One of the side stories in the episode is two pandas being coerced into breeding. |
submissions
| Echo and the Bunnymen – The Killing Moon Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
|
I was on my way to the church of the black nazarene in the seedy Quiapo district of Metro Manila, weaving my way through through the labyrinth of hawkers and vendors clustered around the church proper, when I heard the opening strums of this song emanating from an empty machine shop. Total Gothic moment. |
submissions
| Butthole Surfers – Sweat Loaf Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
|
The rest of the song after the dialog, is Gibby Hanes on another clairvoyant binge, rhapsodomancing from the future and trans-nationally, any number of sigur rós songs. |
submissions
| Gorillaz – 5/4 Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
5/4 = 1.25
1.25 = dollar and a quarter
dollar and a quarter is a song by R&B legend Jesse Belvin
Belvin died with his wife in a head-on collision.
All songs are love songs.
Love is a drug.
This is a drug song. |
submissions
| The Cure – Why Can't I Be You? Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
stinkoman, you dirty bird! that isn't a cunt in the video! it's a pair of over-sized lips turned sideways!
this song makes me think lately of Genesis P-Orridge (R.I.P.)
"In 2003, Genesis P-Orrdige changed his identity to Genesis/Djin Breyer P-Orridge along with life partner Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge (a.k.a. Mother Jack/Miss Jackie). He began a performance series called Breaking Sex that was initiated by both he and Lady J. Breyer. This project is about re-union and re-solution of male and female to a perfecting hermaphroditic state and has been named Pandrogeny by P-Orridge. The project includes having cosmetic surgeries that blur the lines between their sexes and bring them nearer to being one physically." (from www.discogs.com) |
submissions
| Pixies – The Happening Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
|
I used to loathe Black Francis' UFO songs—like a bad x-files episode too much schwa and Hopi indian mysticism. But now in retrospect seems like more of the same new american gothic (bikers, lou reed and cholitas) that first Enticed Ivo over at 4AD. |
submissions
| Echo and the Bunnymen – Bring On The Dancing Horses Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
|
compare this to the song Jimmy Brown, an earlier incarnation and you can see how they play with lyricism and meaning. Like other E&TB songs it's more impressionistic imagery (old timey stage works and passion plays) than straightforward narrative (though they shared the same era as the new romantics, they had more literary pretensions than the dance floor hit of the day, hence the doors influence: descant out with your cock out). If you watch the video, it kind of feels like a dumb show--the last refrain (bring on the new messiah...) the band stops lip syncing, staring mutely at the camera. So the song maybe is a sweepingly agnostic take on the dubious power and salvation of love, an anti-pop song, an un-love song: the stoic and the clown as poor players, and the bearers of passion, the dancing horses, are headless, have no free will of their own beyond what they've been trained, like the legions singing the same sentimentalists' lies, the tired aphorisms, the sleepy sonnets. And all is ephemeral skin and bone, even Jimmy Brown the stoic, our abject and makeshift constructions, our grandiose plays at love but poor gestures on an empty stage, who can save us from ourselves, bring on the new messiah, wherever he is, if he is. But then ironically or as if in counterpoint the music seems to deny such an existentialist limbo. |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Ocean of Noise Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
|
The closing refrain of the string and brass always kills me, it sounds so optimistic and sorrowful like the closing lines, it's such a brilliant progression from the dark surf swell of the opening--I hear affinities to Beirut or God Speed You Black Emperor. |
submissions
| The Aislers Set – Mission Bells Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
|
Just posted to the moderators the corrected lyrics modernrocksong requested over a year ago... and in true modernist fashion, the true lyrics are even more opaque. One of the only things I can lend to the song meaning is geographic: "Get me from this Capp Street veneration", referring to one of the seedier streets of the Mission district in San Francisco (Hence Mission bells. There are pockets of the Mission district that for whatever reason defied or were overlooked by the overall gentrification of the district), by veneration does she mean convolescence? as in with all the trade (read trannies) going on outside (not to mention the shooting galleries and drunk day workers), I mostly stay indoors--as to where the narrows are in SF...? (like so much of this song another anglophile affectation...) Lobg live the aislers set |
submissions
| Nirvana – Pennyroyal Tea Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
If you're life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.
--"Sisters of Mercy" Leonard Cohen |
submissions
| Radiohead – Videotape Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
this is the last song on the album, like a coda, a final benediction, a last wish, an elegy. whether you think the drums plod on like war drums, the ratcheting of war machinery, whether you think this IS about a suicide bomber, whether you think it is a more intimate more apolitical narrative, this song is absolutely about death and regret, the ties that bind us, the choices we make and are forced to make, the shame we live and leave behind, maybe hidden in the last line is the hope of absolution in oblivion, the tapes will degrade, the memories will tarnish, the entropy that blesses us all.
That said here is my videotape:
http://www.aniboom.com/Player.aspx?v=210843 |
submissions
| R.E.M. – So. Central Rain Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
the city on the river there is a girl without a dream
love this line, when is a Michael Stipe line ever this concise and transparent |
submissions
| Vampire Weekend – M79 Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
I totally love that this sounds like Mothersbaugh's score for The Royal Tennenbaums--how come all the reviews hating on them never mention this aspect and only harp on the co-opted African pop?
And despite all the ridiculous comparisons to graceland, the line about Jackson Crowt(h)er does feel like a nod to Paul Simon ("Where have you gone Joe Dimaggio...) |
submissions
| Vampire Weekend – The Kids Don't Stand a Chance Lyrics
| 17 years ago
|
according to the album lyrics it IS devastating backstroke
And it's MORNING not MOURNING (although maybe meant as a double entendre?)
It just occurred to me that possibly the pin striped men of morning dancing with the pure egyptian cotton is a poetic image of morning sunlight on bedsheets and that this is most likely a morning after song.
An amazing night somewhere dressed to the nines and then later some devastating maneuvers, and in the heat and magic of the moment it is nothing but momentous, but come the morning, it is apparent that nothing else will/could come of this triste, hence the kids don't stand a chance.
dont know about the business or the practice or the 40 million maybe it's the plot to another independent film. |
submissions
| The Shins – New Slang Lyrics
| 18 years ago
|
I remember loving this song when I first heard it as a single (for some reason the album version isn't as lovely), and then when I saw them play with the Aisler's Set at the bottom of the hill for SF Noispop, and they sang this song it was so hushed (the song and the audience) and all the the lovelorn boys pressed up against the stage with their heads tilted up like it was puppy love or some kind of emo pedagogy.
James Mercer, god bless him, seems to have a way with writing the most opaque, obliquely spun lines--not quite non-sequitors, but not much more telling--and phrasing them in his yodelly singsong way so that they sound like they should make perfect sense. Nothing about this song is transparent--although what shins song isn't about heartbreak and vulnerability-- but some of the most beautiful imagery he's ever written:
If you'd a took to me like a gull takes to the wind...
God speed all the bakers at dawn, may they all cut their thumbs and bleed into their buns till they melt away... (I think this is the mundane made fantastic--the red dots that mark the buns that have filling.)
and BTW I FUCKEN HATED Garden State--Every line gave me a butt curl--Without the Shins, Nick Drake et al this movie is as poignant as a bad farting attack, it's what would've happened if John Hughes remade The Graduate. |
submissions
| Pixies – I Bleed Lyrics
| 18 years ago
|
In high school I did a watercolor for an art exhibit based on this song. In the painting there's an adobe hut in a small dim cave below one of the bases of the golden gate bridge, writhing on the ground is a pale naked figure positioned as if imploring the viewer (cribbed from one of those bhutto dancers that slowly descend hanging upside down from a great height as a rope coiled around their ankles unravels.) His hands are bound together at the wrist and blood drips from his palms like a stigmata.
I really don't want to find out that this is some theory of Black Francis' about Anasazi blood cults and extra-terrestrials. I wan't to cling to my own idiotic illusions. |
submissions
| Wire – 12XU Lyrics
| 18 years ago
|
|
Artfags flying their pink flags? Weren't they fans of the Ramones (53rd and 3rd). Isn't this song about gay cruising/hustler culture? Is it Mag or mack as in a truck. Cottage is gay brittish slang for loo, as in: "Dont think I didn't see you busting it up with that trucker the other evening, I got your number," he says breathing down his neck in the urinal, "don't worry I won't be much rougher than him" |
submissions
| The Cure – Close to Me Lyrics
| 18 years ago
|
this song is about fucking and getting off in the same way that all songs ever written are about fucking and getting off whether they were penned as such or not.
swallow this proposition and realize that this song is about performance anxiety: angst in your pants. |
submissions
| Joanna Newsom – Emily Lyrics
| 18 years ago
|
When I came back from the Philippines having visited my elderly parents, I listened to this album repeatedly. Drove to the bay area from LA with only this CD on repeat, and in particular listened to this song many times over, like chain smoking. It fit my mood, somewhere between sentimental and and not-quite-breakdown. The tone and the words of the song so closely matched each other that you couldn't separate the music from the verse. There are so many startling lines in this song but one line never fails to slay me: "the ties that bind they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever."
Friends totally chide me for liking her stuff, nevermind her unusual voice, they want to lump her in with all the other ren-faire-confabulists: bats for lashes, those hipster art school brats that draw unicorns and birds and chimeras for group shows—I do agree that I hate all that neo-hippy naturalist bullshit--I never understood the thing with having your whole ouevre be about birds, but somehow in Newsome's songs especially this one even with the almost-too precious imagery of flora and fauna there it is an overwhelming undertone of naked complicated emotions, barbed and spined.
As for the meteoroid v. meteorite contention, astrophycisists—the obvious poets among physicists—of all people should realize that she is right and the nomenclature is off; meaning is nothing if not assonance.
the meteorite is what causes the light...
and the meteoroid is the stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee |
submissions
| Pixies – Here Comes Your Man Lyrics
| 19 years ago
|
If Black Francis wrote a song about hiroshima, it would sound more like his uptempo ditty "I've got a broken face" something more nihilistic, grotesque and cynical--nothing poignant and heartfelt because he's no Bono and thank fucking-god for that.
If you look up the cover to the single, you'll see a cute bull terrier, not a fucken a-bomb or radiation-sickness casualty. Vaughn Oliver as art director must have had some inkling as to what that fat cherub was warbling about.
15 Yr old charles thompson with his big big love for Lou Reed did a spin on waiting for my man, and that clever boy made the narrator a dog, ha! He made it charmingly upbeat and it's about dead hobos, ha and ha! Musically the song reminds me of velvet underground's Sunday Morning. |
submissions
| Pixies – Gigantic Lyrics
| 20 years ago
|
|
Considering Charles Thompson the III had a penchant for writing songs with ethnocentric caricatures: fumanchus, mexican maids, cholitas with tattooed tits, means this song probably IS about a white or lighter-skinned /lighter-caste girl wanting to get fucked by a big black stud. Whether or not you read this song as being about liberation in the same way Hanoi Jane is being liberated by those hot black panthers in Sonic Youth's cool thing or whether you think Black Francis is just another privelaged white crooner in the long standing tradition of Minstrelsy we call Rock and Roll is totally up to you. I love the pixies for their atmospheric pandering, but I don't see myself seeking spiritual or moral guidance anytime soon from some round-limbed, screeching man-child. |
submissions
| Pixies – Caribou Lyrics
| 20 years ago
|
|
there's this jeepney driver in manila, or maybe a pedi-cab driver in San Juan, Puerto Rico who believed he used to be a caribou, he figured he'd rather be plowing fields and swatting flies off his ass than hauling a bunch of american sex tourists around the red light district, so he goes to the fields and slashes his wrist. Humanity is a bitch. I'm sure Black Frances meant none of this and the song was just the impressions of a rich white boy baking in the hot third world sun. |
submissions
| This Mortal Coil – Song Of The Siren Lyrics
| 20 years ago
|
|
This is the story of Calypso, the siren who lures Odysseus to her island and promises him immortality, but after 7 years is forced to let him go. As a modern trope I read it as how love and desire is as much about loss as it is about possesion. The siren in the end dies of grief. Love is a temporal thing, passions can only be in flux, immortality is stasis and therefore passionless. But maybe the Greeks were just stating the obvious: ALL MEN ARE DOGS. Wave those yellow braceletts in the air, wave them like you just don't care. |
submissions
| Xiu Xiu – Fabulous Muscles (Mama Black Widow Version) Lyrics
| 20 years ago
|
|
This used to be my thing. Hook up with some steroid queen from Gold's, all swollen muscle bellies, striated limbs, veins like a tangle of electrical cables, shrivelled hormone-addled cock and recessed balls. I would imagine being overpowered by him, my neck between his lats and hammy triceps, being crushed under his heaving bulk, all blood and cum, just before my eyes pulled into their sockets and my lungs collapse the last thing I see is his towering indifferent figure, toweling off like he just finished a set. |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.
