| Arcade Fire – Afterlife Lyrics | 12 years ago |
|
I don't know if the changes I made to the lyrics will be accepted, but per Arcade Fire's own lyric video for the song, the last 4 lines of the last chorus should read "Oh, we know it's gone / But where did it go?" x2. This further cements the idea that the song really is about the dissolution of a relationship, and not a casual one at that; it's about the death of a life together, shared by two people who were very much in love but can't make it work anymore. They've followed bad advice (that had "nothing at all to do with life") and faced hardship ("after all the ambulances are gone", "the breath and the dirt and fires are burnt", etc.), which tore at the fabric of what they had. The girl (Régine) realizes that their passion for one another has disappeared and can't wrap her mind around it ("when love is gone / where does it go?"), even as her lover (Win) tries to find one last way to salvage what they had ("Can't we just work it out?"). The variation in the last chorus is especially important, because it shows the male protagonist finally resigning to his fate, which comes with the same consternation that his lover expressed previously: "Oh, we know it's gone / but where did it go?" They're stuck in a kind of afterlife - the muted, confusing present that comes after realizing the future you envisioned with the one you love won't come to pass after all. |
|
| Neil Young – Powderfinger Lyrics | 15 years ago |
|
The way I see it, this is a song about rum-runners during prohibition. The "white boat comin' up the river" is most assuredly the U.S. Coast Guard coming to shut them down. The boat in question is probably something like this one, used at the time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:75ft_Coast_Guard_Patrol_Boat.jpg - "it's got numbers on the side and a gun" and a powerful motor that would indeed make "big waves." Such official boats would have some sort of flashing light or "beacon". Now, I don't know if USCG boats were white as early as the Prohibition Era, but it would make a heck of a lot of sense, and the oversight is quite possible on Young's part since he apparently made the whole story up and I would doubt he would check for such minutia after the fact. Also, the line "it don't look like they're here to deliver the mail" seems to reinforce the fact that this is indeed, on some level, a government-operated craft, just not a U.S. Postal Service one. So, that's the basic level of the song. Onto the lyrics. This is a song about not knowing when to back down. The protagonist is young, but he seems to be the head of the household since his father died; he's holding the fort while his "brother is out hunting in the mountains" and "Big John [is] drinking." He sees the boat and warns his ma, but he's fully conscious that "the Powers That Be left [him] here to do the thinkin'" - he's the one who has to decide whether to fight or flee. His father told him that "Red means run, son, numbers add up to nothin'" - that should he see the Coast Guard coming, he should get the hell out and forget about everything else - yes, the numbers on the boat, on a basic level, but more importantly, the *figures* or rather, in the larger sense, their moneymaking operation. But as the song made clear, the protagonist has very little left: no father figure, an absent brother and a friend who's drinking from the loss of his love. And so, "without thinking why" - because he knows, at this point, there is a "why" - he raises his gun in a desperate attempt to save the situation and gets shot down. Had he done as his more experienced father had advised and packed up as soon as he went to warn his mother, or dropped his weapon, he might have been able to avoid his predicament. There also might be the fact that, since "Daddy's rifle in [his] hand felt reassurin'", he somehow feels that his own father would have stood his ground with it and that he was advising him to run because he was trying to protect him. In a way, he might be trying to step up or "be a man" by "raising [the] rifle to [his] eye." In any case, the story being told is from the young man's perspective after the events have transpired. And as he lays there, he realizes how stupid he was; how, had he known, he would have wanted to be "shelter[ed] from the powder and the finger", or never have been forced to make this kind of life-or-death decision. This is a cautionary tale told by the protagonist himself with his last dying breath: "Think of me as one you'd never figured/Would fade away so young/With so much left undone" - or, "you'd think someone with so much still ahead of him would have found a way to stay alive, but this is what happens when desperation drives you to put your life on the line for nothing," as it were. Put more bluntly: "learn to let go, or you stand to die for nothing." I think the fact that he wants to be "cover[ed] [...] with the tought that pulled the trigger" implies his shame, that he somehow wants to hide or that this was such a collossal mistake that he feels that this is all he is now - the idiot who thought it was smart to try to shoot at a USCG patrol boat. Now that he's alone with his dying thoughts, he understands that he'll never get to say goodbye to his love, that he needs to listener to do it for him - "remember me to my love" - and that "[he]'ll miss her", perhaps implying that, had he remembered earlier what he still stood to lose, he would have chosen otherwise. That's my two cents, but I think it makes more sense than yet *another* Vietnam metaphor. Also, the numbered boat and its description makes the song seem more modern than anything prior to the 20th century, as much as I like the Revolutionary and Civil War explanations. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.