submissions
| James Taylor – Rock 'n' Roll Is Music Now Lyrics
| 4 years ago
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Early thoughts on cultural appropriation from James Taylor. Certainly to the extent he appropriated black music, it was in such a whitebread way that few black people would ever identify with it enough to claim that he stole anything from them! |
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| Bob Dylan – I Believe in You Lyrics
| 8 years ago
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It is both sad and joyful to me that almost nobody knows this song. It's amazing that even somebody as great as Bob Dylan is dependent on radio and general cultural mediums to popularize their music. I'm about as far from a Christian as you can be and still be a white American, and yet there is no denying the incredible beauty of this song. I agree with the previous commenter about Dylan's voice. If you prefer a clean, crisp, meaning-bereft delivery like Celine Dion or Adele or Michael Buble to Dylan's penetrating emotional delivery, then I just feel sorry for you as a person. I'm so glad I took the time to delve into an unappreciated Dylan album and found something priceless. |
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| Robert Johnson – From Four 'til Late Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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A little misogynist? Sure! But as someone who often stays up from four 'till late clowning with a no-good bunch, this song really hits home. In my opinion, this is Robert Johnson's best vocal performance, and that's saying a lot. Beautiful lyrics. |
submissions
| Belle & Sebastian – Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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To me, this song is a celebration of the beauty of a intelligent, intuitive girl who is unpopular and not necessarily attractive on the outside, and is also very insecure; the narrator of the song sees her beauty, and sees that her intelligence and strength of feeling, which ordinarily just makes her "weird" to her friends, means that she has the potential to get away from the banality of her junior life-saver job and to live life to the fullest; when i listen to this song, i think of the joy that a left-out kid feels when they finally realize that everyone else was wrong, and that being smart and open to all of life's potential is really the "cool" way to be. |
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| Pearl Jam – Corduroy Lyrics
| 17 years ago
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"Can't buy what I want because it's free; Can't be what you want because I'm...(ME); "Me" is how you should end the line. Imagine him talking to a hot groupie or explaining why he's not satisfied by all the groupies and stardom. Obviously, what he wants is real love and relationships and understanding, which can't be purchased. On the flip side, the hot groupie chick doesn't really want him either, because she really wants the same thing that Eddie wants, even though she might think she just wants hot sex with a rock star. Eddie can't be what she wants because he's a rock star and not even a real person to her. It's impossible to have a meaningful relationship with a fake media product. |
submissions
| R.E.M. – We Walk Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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This song is so macabre it makes me shiver. Google "marat bathing" and you will find a terrifying pre-impressionism era painting of a guy named Marat dead in a bathtub filled with bloody water. I find that the mood of the song is at the same time accepting and defiant of death and the fact that life sucks so bad that people would want to die. Or it could be that they just got off on the juxtaposition of the playful, sing-song melody with such a horrific tragedy. Kind of like: how can we even have moments of pure mirth when we know things like that have happened and still happen on a day to day basis? Kudos again R.E.M. |
submissions
| R.E.M. – Laughing Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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Beautiful interpretation Zinbob. That fits perfectly with the lyrics and the emotional tone of the song. As for me, I don't really think I'm qualified to comment on the meanings of the songs on the album. For the most part I think the sublime emotional content of the music defies true expression in words. |
submissions
| Sex Pistols – Bodies Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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Rockerdude: the establishment in the US is split on the issue, but not in Europe. In Europe you can sue a doctor who misdiagnosis your child as healthy in the womb on the theory that you and your child have been damaged by not having an opportunity to abort the child before it was born.
Jeema: There are meaningful statements throughout this album. Was their main goal to piss people off or was it that they just didn't care if they pissed people off? I hope it was the latter, because if it was the former than their music was no more important than the ravings of a 2 yr old. |
submissions
| The Clash – Hateful Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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I love this song because it shakes the foundations of the "drug culture" that alienated/poor young people often look to for identification. It's sad, but many youths find their personal identity in the fact that they abuse drugs and other people are too chickenshit to do it. This song exposes one of the seedier aspects of that world: the fact that you don't get the drugs for free. Rather, someone is profiting from them at your expense. By doing drugs heavily you're not just "sticking it to the man," you're also often making others rich at your expense. And that is not "cool." That's fucking retarded. |
submissions
| Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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If you like this song, try listening to Beethoven's 6th symphony. Unlike this song, Beethoven 6 gets better, not worse, every time you hear it. |
submissions
| Weezer – Holiday Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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This song isn't about the words. It's about expressing a fleeting and instantaneous feeling of excitement that you get when you, for instance, just get with a new girl. You feel like everything you do will be the funnest activity ever engaged in and you will always have a great time no matter what you're doing, as long as you're with each other. This song is so precious because it's so hard to recreate that feeling and you only get to feel it a precious few times in your life. Yeah, you can hop from woman to woman after the feeling dies down, but it keeps getting harder to feel it at all after you become jaded and know that it will never last. To get the feeling at all you have to find room in your heart to believe that it will last and this relationship is different. Thanks Weezer. |
submissions
| David Bowie – The Bewlay Brothers Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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my god I don't know if I want to know completely. It seems purposefully shrouded in cryptic imagery about something dark in his past. I get the idea that he's talking about the older men that seduced him into a world of drugs and cross-dressing and what not. He talks about "dust in the veins" and "shooting up," and the whole thing is in the past tense and has a nostalgic ring to it. He says "we were so turned on by..." and "you thought we were fakers." He must be talking about older friends or just more experienced friends who showed them the morbid yet apparently somewhat beautiful underworld of heavy drugs and perverted sex that he was apparently a part of. One thing's for sure: this ain't the New Kids on the Block. |
submissions
| David Bowie – The Supermen Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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This song is great because of the power of the imagery. What it does is it makes me imagine what it must have been like to actually believe with all your heart the tales of the mythical greek gods. Wow, what a trip! To actually believe that teh world was created by superpowerful gods with human-like qualities...it's a thought that has an intrinsic attractiveness though, especially when the gods are masculine. Plenty of women still act on a sort of belief in polytheism, but their gods are faeries or angels with only good intentions, e.g. to make your pregnancy go well. These gods are badasses with good and bad intentions. It would be pretty interesting if this kind of polytheism came back into style.
The second to last stanza is especially epic. What imagery!!! "minds in uni-thought?" FREAKY "Nigtmare dreams no mortal mind could hold?" WOAH This is some heavy shit, and fascinating! Way to go Bowie. This is Bowie's masculine side coming through. |
submissions
| David Bowie – Fill Your Heart Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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I must kindly disagree with you. Bowie is most definitely being ironic in this song, but not sarcastic as your brother seems to think. Rather, Bowie is describing a thought that young people often have and is ascribing worth to it, but while also knowing that it doesn't last. Perhaps if you think this article of faith he describes can last, then it won't sound ironic, but I think he plays it a little too fast and the tones are painfully joyful.
I remember when my girlfriend and I were in college: we actually believed the words in this song as an article of faith. We believed that if human beings could simply "conquer fear" then thy could find ultimate happiness on earth. This is at once both a beautiful wish and a state of being that can never be attained. Both of these truths are conveyed at once in this song, making it an all-time classic in my book. |
submissions
| David Bowie – Oh! You Pretty Things Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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I firmly believe that to know what this song means you must be familiar with the philosophy of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and Nietzsche's superman. The "homo superior" is a euphemism for this superman, the most conspicuous quality of whom, according to "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," was his contempt of the common man's morality. A superman is somebody who doesn't take in society's morals as his own, but rather somebody who creates his own morality through his own inner strength and clarity of vision. An example of this clarity of vision? In Zarathustra, the seer proclaims that, though he loves peace, he is happy when he sees war. Why? Because the idiots who fight are killing themselves, which will ideally eventually result in a purified world where those who are left are peaceful and lack the destructive urge to dominate their fellow man. Now, compare this attitude to the attitude of the anti-war masses during Vietnam. Their position that all war is inexcusable was and is dreadfully simple-minded and untenable.
Now, for Bowie this "advancement" to being supermen might just mean sexual liberation, since this was his coming out/flaming homosexual debut. Regardless, at least he knows his philosophy. Btw, the Nieitzschean imagery is ALL OVER this album, and this is why it's one of my all time favorites, even though his fervent homosexuality consistenly creeps me out. |
submissions
| The Beatles – Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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I'm not up on my Beatles history, but I do feel a personal kinship with all of the songs that John Lennon writes, and this was obviously a Lennon tune. When I hear the words to this song, I simply imagine the simple but powerful feelings that correspond to each image that's put forth. The entire song is sung in a kind of flippant and melancholy tone. This lends emotion to the events taking place and transports me every time to being in the shoes of the man who is doing the narrating. The emotions that I get are mostly are excitement at getting some tail, but at the same time a feeling of disgust and emptiness that they really don't mean anything to each other at all. Also, I have the distinct feeling that I'm being used by the chic in the song, and that kind of pisses me off. It's very significant that once he fucks her he crawls out of the bed and goes to sleep in the bathtub. He wants to separate himself from the event after it's over, because he's not comfortable with it and really can't stand the chic because she's annoying and presumptious. "If anybody's going to be doing the using, it's me," he thinks. I mean, accurately creating this feeling through song is a tremendous accomplishment, regardless of the trivia about who he was banging or which words he was allowed to use or not in conveying it. Who cares about that tabloid garbage? Certainly not me or any other intelligent person. |
submissions
| Bob Dylan – Visions of Johanna Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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I don't believe I am capable of understanding this song. One thing I would add is that I think the tone of the music suggests that the song does not have a hard and fast meaning. The tone of the music is one of melancholic confusion while sumultaneously accepting that that is what life is made of.
What I am sure of is that the guy who made this song out to be a WWII allegory needs to have his head examined. |
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| Bob Dylan – Maggie's Farm Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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I get really tired of people that, after everything that Dylan has said, through his music and even publically, still maintain that Dylan had some kind of coherent political philosophy. Let's get this straight, OK: Dylan is not a liberal; he is not a communist; he is not a vegetarian; he is not an environementalist; he is not anything that normal people could relate to, and this is mostly by choice. He is a narcissistic artist who craves nothing but to feed his ego by doing things that convince himself and/or others that he is wiser and more advanced than anyone else. I relate because I have a similar desire. Only meaningless drones feel the need to conform to a particular political philosophy at all times. Artists understand that life first and foremost is about change. He struggled his entire life to free his art from the constraints placed on it by mindless third parties and, by the looks of it, that project will never be completed. If you want to know the meaning of this song, first thing about what you want it to mean, then realize that's not it and go from there. Like most truly great art, his later poetry speaks of feelings too complex to be conveyed by formal written language. I really believe that he sang protest songs first because he was young and dumb. He matured quickly because he was a genius and quickly realized that nothing in life is simple, and that while the "protest songs" seemed to him and his followers at the time to have an eternal message, that in fact they just represented the transient emotion of an unthinking collective unconscious, whereas the only emotions that matter are those felt by the individual struggling with life on his own terms. Dylan and those like him are Nietzschean supermen: inexorably independent and self-sufficient: creating their own world-view entirely by their own vision and introspection. This is the ultimate in power, and if you achieve it you will scoff at those who insist on viewing the world based on something as petty as liberal or conservative, capitalist or socialist, democrat or republican. |
submissions
| Bob Dylan – All Along the Watchtower Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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The words to this song are too simple to support the complex allegories I've read in this thread. These words simply describe a world in which there are two types of people, those who are aware and awake and critical and those who are not. The first part of the song is a conversation between two people who are awake and comes to the conclusion that there will always be ignorant people wrecking the world for the thinking people so it is not worth it to try to change the world. This goes to a fundamental political dispute between those who believe that ignorant can be enlightened through instruction and those who believe that there is a class of people who are born to be manipulated by those in power. Dylan apparently believes the latter. The second part says two things: 1) whether you are awake or not has nothing to do with how rich you are; and 2) being rich or powerful doesn't matter because we are all going to die; the riders can represent either eventual total destruction or the eventual individual destruction of all of us through death. The watchtower could represent someone who, like Prince Prospero in the famous Poe story, sits in his Ivory tower reveling, thinking they are safe from death. But death always creeps in in the end. The watchtower keepers might report the riders coming, but they cannot stop them. |
submissions
| Sex Pistols – Bodies Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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Look, people: the song speaks for itself. Of course Rotten would say that the song's not anti-abortion, because 90% of his fan base are pro-abortion liberals, but notice he didn't say it's pro-abortion either. Neither the writer of that song nor the singer of that song were on the fence regarding the abortion. Maybe some of you should just accept the fact that a "punk" band might not be towing the liberal line. Frankly, I think this song is what makes the Sex Pistols special. Real punk is about saying fuck the establishment b/c it's arbitrary and fucks people. Well, the establishment in Europe says abortion is just fine. Maybe that's not OK. |
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