| Sufjan Stevens – The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us! Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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The controlling metaphor in this song is the wasp, right? The "predatory" wasp. Something that pursues you and hurts you.Growing older, moving on, and leaving behind friends you love is one of the most painful occurrences in childhood--particularly in an age prior to cell phones, internet and skype.And isn't that something we all carry with us? Isn't that what "nostalgia" is, really, when we look back longingly at childhood? Isn't that the sting of it? Those people we left behind, including our "selves" in the sense of who we were as children. This theme of the irony of love as something intense but painful is a common one in Stevens' song--just listen to "too much." I doubt anyone will ever read this, given the song's pretty old now. But I noticed this song had a lot of comments, and they mostly turned out to be of two varieties--people working hard to persuade people this song about pre-teens was homo-erotica (give me a break). or people working hard to persuade people that it's actually about heterosexual love (how bout another break)--either the story's told from the perspective of a girl (and by the way, they make leg warmers for guys, too--they're called long johns), or the other guy's his brother, or etc. I think the point is that's irrelevant in the song. As a songwriter myself, I can say that songwriting (the best kind of songwriting) is about evoking an emotional response. The songs I hate the most--the blatantly preachy ones like anything written by Lady GaGa--are unmistakable in their message, because that's their whole purpose. They require no thought or introspection. The important thing about this song is the emotion it elicits--the sting of the loss of childhood innocence. I think that's what's most ironic about the interpretations that want to make it about adult sexuality. To do so is to project adult emotional and adult sex drives onto something that's clearly not about that. I remember being a 10 year old boy and hating girls. And I remember how much I loved my best friends and how much I missed them when somebody moved away. But I never thought about having sex with them. I never really thought much about sex at all when I was that age. This song makes me remember what it felt like to be 10 years old. And I'm still afraid of wasps--that's something else that immediately takes me back to childhood. |
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| Iron & Wine – The Trapeze Swinger Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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What a perfect song--it speaks on so many levels. I think all the "heaven' stuff is just metaphors for the past as something that's dead and gone. I think it's about love and the way that's not always a rope that binds people together and about letting go. About being in love, and coming to a place where you're not bitter anymore and capable of seeing a relationship differently, and being grateful for what you've shared with someone else even after they've moved on. This is about someone the speaker's known since childhood and grew to love romantically--the song has to be interpreted through the verse where he has his hand between her knees. I think the "angry clown" may be the speaker--his reaction to her rejection and the chaos that could ensue in such a circumstance--you know, sex changes everything. His regret of that--so remember seldomly. I also absolutely love the part about the dogs who love the rain--great metaphor for people who love depression; the addiction of melancholy. The dogs chasing trains and birds they can never reach--like the way we make ourselves miserable by focusing on what we can't have instead of what we do. And maybe that's what the song's about--instead of treasuring the friendship, he was too focused on making it more than that, and that cost him the relationship in the end. Of course, all the heaven references can be interpreted in this context as well--we all tend to think of finding that perfect person as a kind of heaven on earth. It's not. But in the context of all that grandiosity, there's that perfect image of a boy and girl--an angel kissing the sinner--she's the angel, he's the sinner. The kiss isn't sexual. All this is the understanding he comes to when he sees this later, after his anger has passed--after he's lost her. That's a kind of death, and a kind of life after death. Anyway, that's my two cents. |
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| Bob Dylan – Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Please, enough with the 420 crap--that's well documented to be something that originated ten years after the fact. This song is only great because of the double entendre. The band's drunkenness is what makes everyone think the song is about pot--of course, that's deliberate. If you'd never heard Dylan's performance and just read the lyrics, it's not that obvious. Without the music, it's fairly straight forward--no matter what you do, "they" are going to take pot-shots at it (whoever "they" are). The refrain--"I would not feel so all alone; everybody must get stoned"--the human condition--it happens to everybody. Everybody. So, that probably means everybody. So to focus on that line as meaning pot, well, it's obviously not the "first" thing it means in the context. The "stoning" that takes place the other 20 times in the song isn't about getting high, it means "they'll criticise you when...." Also "Rainy Day Women" sounds a lot like "fair weather friends." Maybe that's what they become when the weather isn't so fair--critical, bitchy. And after you'd been whacked in the head with a few rocks, you might be a little ditzy--sorta like stoned? Of course, Dylan means for us to hear the pot reference in the song, but if that's all it's about, then so what--it's silly. A frat-boy song. The joke is--the thing he's laughing about--is how many people fall for the easy interpretation. |
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| Bob Dylan – Like a Rolling Stone Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Well, if this is the greatest rock song of all time, then it must be about something more than just a metaphorical description of Andy Warhol's dead girlfriend. Or a dig at rich girls for that matter--I think it's more universal than that. Those who say it's about "everybody" are closer to the truth. This song is about how shallow we are. Surely its about all the distractions of life--all those things we think are important that we build meaning around that are actually meaningless. I think it all comes together in the last verse. The religion of self-sufficiency. "Napoleon in rags"--that's not so mysterious--read Wallace Steven's "The Emperor of Ice Cream"--you know, Death. You can't take it with you. Ultimately, we're all homeless and penniless. We never have any true "wealth" until we recognise our true status. Now if that's what the song's about, then it IS great poetry. | |
| Iron & Wine – Sodom, South Georgia Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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I think this song's pretty straight forward--it's about the contrasts one faces in light of the death of a parent, particularly about spirituality and the mystery of existence. Contrast is a common tool Beam uses, and the one he builds in this song between the two extremes of the spiritual insights he confronts in the death of this person and the spiritual deadness of the living is central, I think, to interpreting it. I don’t think it’s so much about God, or specifically the Christian religion, as it is about the speaker in the song seeing something ineffable in the death of a parent and the birth of a child and contrasting that against the relative lack of spiritual insight people generally have. The first stanza is delivered without bitterness—beautiful images in a way. Having seen a parent die of cancer, it evokes the terrible sadness, relief and awe of that event. The peacefulness of this person's death—a smile heard for miles—that's a great metaphor, and it speaks to the potential influence of this person on his community (and the potential impact of his death on the oblivious community). The juxtaposition of death with Christmas and winter universalizes Beam's theme here. Sodom, of course, refers to one of the notorious “cities of the plain” from the book of Genesis, which were destroyed by two angels of God with fire and brimstone because of its denizens’ debauchery. In Genesis 18, God tells Abraham, “I have heard a great outcry from Sodom and Gomorrah, because their sin is so flagrant,” after which, Abraham bargains with God for the fate of the city, finally getting Him to agree not to destroy it if there are at least 10 good men residing there, which it turns out, there isn’t. The result is in Genesis 19: “The Lord rained down fire and burning sulfur from the sky on Sodom and Gomorrah. He utterly destroyed them, along with the other cities and villages of the plain, wiping out all the people and every bit of vegetation….. Abraham got up early that morning and hurried out to the place where he had stood in the Lord’s presence. He looked out across the plain toward Sodom and Gomorrah and watched as columns of smoke rose from the cities like smoke from a furnace.” So, Sodom, as a metaphor, represents a place that is godless in two states—first as a community that chooses this state, and then later as a literal hell, a desolate mass graveyard, when it experiences the fulfillment of that choice, or ultimate absence of God as an object of His wrath. I think the point of the title is to universalize the theme—perhaps the real event was in south Georgia, but as "Sodom," it could be any town—the point is not the “place” so much as the people who make up the town (a collective, like “a tree full of bees), and the dead, frozen terrain is a metaphor for their spiritual deadness. It is also an ironic image because it doesn’t snow in South Georgia, but this only serves to universalize the image even further and offers another contrast, this time against the firey fate of the historical Sodom. As such, the metaphor simply serves to contrast the reality of human disconnection with experience against the now “holy” status of the dead man, or the awe of death and the possibility of heaven; after all, he's "Gone all star white," which on the simplest level is a description of his age (white hair) and the pale complexion of the dead. But it also suggests this holiness—like an angelic being—and the common idea of the dead person moving toward a bright light, moving in the direction of heaven. Nonetheless, this is not necessarily because “Papa” was any better than anyone else when he lived. Perhaps he was, but that isn’t the point—it is his death that makes him this way because it is in his death that the speaker in the song is given spiritual insight. The dead man's status throws into relief the status of the living man's—all are fallen, so every place is a kind of Sodom. The fact that the town awakes like "a tree full of bees," busy about the business of preparing for the holiday, but oblivious to the loss of one of its members illuminates the sad reality that we live in community, but by its very nature, community separates and isolates us—in Sodom, there is no real “community,” only proximity. The most vivid example of the “sin” of the historical Sodom occurs when the Angels are staying as guests at Lot’s house and all of the men of Sodom come to his door demanding to have access to his guests so that they can gang-rape them. This is dehumanizing behavior; likewise, the indifference of the townspeople in the song is a sort of dehumanization as well. The contrast between the busy town scene and the death scene is the product of the speaker’s awe, who, like the speaker in Auden’s poem “Stop all the clocks…” sees the death as something that should inspire everyone to stop in recognition. Christmas provides another ironic contrast to the holiness issue—It's the high Christian “holy day, and yet spirituality has very little to do with it for most people. This informs the next stanza, which is an enormously ugly image in what most consider a "beautiful" lyric: Papa died Sunday and I understood All dead white boys say, "God is good" White tongues hang out, "God is good" There is a parallel here—the "dead white boy" is Papa, but is also the spiritually dead people in the town—Sodom, which is everytown. The "white tongues hang out" is an ugly metaphor that recalls the stark reality of death and further emphasizes the spiritual deadness of those townpeople, who may voice such religious rhetoric in the course of celebrating the holiday, but they are in reality spiritually “dead white boys” with dead “white tongues” that “hang out.” The second stanza sounds very personal, and I think it’s about the circular quality of life and death—a new life replacing the old, lost one. More significantly, Beam is aligning birth and death as relative emotive experiences that suggest this ineffable human quality. Interesting parallel between a head falling in death and the way a newborn cannot hold its head up… The next section, where the town… Slept on an acre of bones Slept through Christmas Slept like a bucket of snow Of course every place exists “on an acre of bones” in the sense the living creatures have died and fallen to the earth or been buried for millions of years; however, this is another contrasting metaphor—this time it focuses on the new life contrasted against eons of death and also recalls the mood/sentiment on the relative insignificance we lend to birth in the same sense as the passing of a life. As such, the song is an ironic celebration of perhaps the two most significant and defining events of human existence. Perhaps the biggest contrast of all is between the spiritual hope that is intrinsic to both the experience of the passing of a life and the beginning of a new one rarified against the vast history of death and the rational conviction of mortality as our final destination. |
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| Iron & Wine – Evening on the Ground (Lilith's Song) Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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The Lilith myth--all of that informs the song; however, the thing that universalizes it, and actually illuminates his key point is the striking line... We were born to fuck each other One way or another Beam likes double entendre and word play--and there are two ways to read this: "fuck" is obviously sex, but why use such a course term? On purely biological terms, it references the creative act of the the Garden of Eden--Adam and Eve and the logic of procreation. But there is another element too--Milton, in Paradise Lost infers that sex was originally for pleasure rather than reproduction, which doesn't happen until after the Fall. It was a way of bonding for Adam and Eve. They "make" love, in other words. Beam's choice of the word "fuck" denotes jealousy and bitterness on the part of the speaker; this is the second possible meaning of the phrase, which is betrayal as in "fuck over." It fits with Lilith's state of mind as the outcast; however, Beam's too smart to simply make the song about this myth--he's also saying something universal about male/female relationships. A female associate of mine frequently bemoans, "why can't men and women just be friends?" Here's her answer. |
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| Iron & Wine – Southern Anthem Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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I don't think this song has so much to do with the south as it does with religious disillusionment. Throughout the lyric, he uses religious terminology and allusions and mixes them to create new metaphors. The first two lines are an allusion to Christ's turning the water to wine and serve as a simile ("Just like...") for the next two lines which I read as the failure of religion to validate itself--Jesus was easy to believe in during better times, but in worse, he was undependable; hence the bible burns. So running "to wine" when the "new milk turned" must also be some sort of failure on the part of the person being addressed in the lyric. Milk is a maternal reference as is the mother's bible; this suggests that the faith of the person in question was more of a tradition--something he/she acquired by her heritage moreso than some personal spiritual resolution. Freedom also has religious overtones, in that it is a common part of christian rhetoric--Christ offers freedom from sin; however, the freedom is a fever here--an illness to be suffered through. The cup is the communion cup defiled by a dog. Baptism isn't possible--the word literally means "immerse"--so, this also sounds like a failure of commitment on the part of the subject. The horse in the last line... I read that as a metaphor for the vehicle, or the movement of this in the life of the individual in question. In the chorus, I don't think the word "southern" is as important as "anthem," which is a hymn of praise to God. What happens when the subject hears this anthem is a religious experience--"buckles" indicates submission; laying one's burden's down is also a religious cliche a reference to submission to Christ. Whatever it is that this "anthem" represents is the thing that fulfills the role of religion or spiritualism in the life of the subject. The second stanza uses the same convention as the first--first two lines are similes for the second two; hence the "guns" and "clotheslines" represent a loss of power and probably home (since "clothesline" is such a domestic word, but probably more in the sense of angst or universal "homelessness"). But the second two lines minimize this loss--and also define it--all they lost was religion, which is aligned with weakness--so the power in question was no real power at all. The promised "freedom" died before it could grow (also a biblical reference to the parable of the sower as is the following line). However, the good soil (meaning the subject) does produce a spirituality that is alluded to in the metaphor of the "guitar rose again"--obviously not Christ; of course the line is a double entendre and refers to the "rising" of the music, which refers to the anthem in the chorus. I think it's about letting go of religion and finding a viable spirituality to replace it--a very hopeful idea. |
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