| Morrissey – Irish Blood, English Heart Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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What unmitigated twaddle...and obvious racism. 'Chicana', you gradually slide towards race hate and your argument loses all credibility accordingly...and it sets you apart from Marrissey's clear intent in these lyrics. American imperialism is not an extension of English imperialism....it is a cultural, convenient byte-sized cancer that utilises all forms of media that simply did not exist during the time of English imperialism. This is not to excuse what happened under English expansionism (as Morrissey does not). Morrissey loves his Englishness but feels this sentiment is at odds with his Irish (Catholic) ancestry. As I have said below, one cannot be morally relativistic about this: As a protestant Briton (not English, but Welsh) I revere Cromwell for overthrowing monarchistic authoritarianism, inventing (a form of) democracy, defeating Catholic imperialism and mysticism and preserving the British mainland as an independent country. Ultimately, it was either Morrissey's ancestors who were burnt at the stake for their religion, or mine: Cromwell (clearly) ensured it was the Catholics. To turn this into an English-bashing thread is amusing only in the sense that it exposes your own stupidity... |
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| Morrissey – Irish Blood, English Heart Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| ...I meant Elizabeth Tudor (not Windsor) obviously.... | |
| Morrissey – Irish Blood, English Heart Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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vasnmoGo - No...that sounds like sub-undergraduate interpretations of history. Cromwell did indeed kill an awful lot of people....so did Mary Tudor, the Conquistadors, the Inquisition...and yet you don't find protestant songwriters invoking their memory. Cromwell anticipated the Westphalian era and ensured that England retained the autonomy Elizabeth Windsor had fought the combined forces of (Catholic) Europe to establish....enabling the Enlightenment some 200 years later and preparing the foundations for parliamentary democracy. Ethnic cleansing bad. Ethnic cleansing a term used to explain actions in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Get your historiography sorted. Morrissey good. Morrissey representative of myriad of tensions in the British national psyche. He is not an absolute, he is un (but not anti) American. You do not get 'closure' from Morrissey...it misses the very point of him to expect that! |
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| Morrissey – Irish Blood, English Heart Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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...A lot of revisionist historians here. But then Morrissey's personal politics are representative of the private tensions that exist in all Britons today. Ultimately, as an ancient people we are a pleasantly mongrel-mixed collection of races and to claim outrage uniquely on behalf of the Irish, Welsh, Scots, English, Cornish...whatever, is puerile...and this before we start adding the ethnicities resident in the UK in the last 100 years. The slight contradiction in Morrissey's politics is that he claims the concept of Englishness as a unifying principle, but in turn cannot separate this from his own ethnic loyalty to Catholic Ireland. Understandble, but then his treatment of Cromwell is unwarranted, if, to use an americanism, 'bygones' truly are 'bygones'. Accordingly, to compare Cromwell to Hitler (as someone has done in this thread) is either ignorance or just juvenile. It's also moral relevatism, imposing current ethics on 400 yr old history....and rather like expecting Abraham Lincoln to apologise for killing Confederates at Gettysburg. Cromwell was no saint, but he invented parliamentary democracy, ended absolute monachies, restored these islands' autonomy from Catholic mainland Europe etc.....Anyone for the Inquisition? Not to be side-tracked...this is a fantasitic song that captures all these tensions and goes some way to portraying the Britain of the people, and not the politicians, to the outside world. |
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| Manic Street Preachers – Die In The Summertime Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| "Ruining lines" clearly can mean either wrinkles or scars...this song is pretty much a depressant's reiteration of The Who's "My Generation"...the 'summertime' being the youthful prime of life; ie reversing the 'winter of my years' analogy. The album cover developed the themes of this (and other) song by including 4 pictures of the band members as kids. The clear sentiment being to seek a return to a suspended childhood, where life was simple, pleasures uncorrupted, and good and bad opposing principles rather than merging shades of grey (echoing Primo Levi's 'The Drowned and the Saved'). Whilst this song did mean a massive amount to me when I was a melodramatic teenager....you soon learn that you can either throw yourself off the Severn Bridge, or you get a job, get married, get kids and a dog, and get over it..... | |
| U2 – Red Hill Mining Town Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| To further clarify, it is worth situating this song alongside "Van Dieman's Land" on the Rattle n' Hum album. It is now very evident that the principle memebers of U2 (Bono and Edge) had begun their rootsy/folk phases around the mid 1980s, and this song was clearly the first product of that phase. Specifically restoring Edge's family's links to South Wales (where he was born), in addressing the Miner's Strike of 1984 Bono employes historical metephor such as the 'hunter child': A speculative link here being the folk hero The Hunter (Lewsyn yr heliwr or 'Lewis the Huntsman'), a South Walian man deported to Van Dieman's Land during the industrial unrest in South Wales in the 19th Century. | |
| U2 – Dirty Day Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I think it's a real strength of the song that it generates such ambiguity and discussion about the meaning. I can only imagine that this was the point. Munyeca I think that the point you make about the religious imagery is fair but way too overstated. I remember reading an interview with Bono and Edge at the time of Zooropa's release in 1993 in which they said that unlike Elvis and other artists, they had begun their career by singing about God and had latterly moved onto sex and love (rather that the other way around). Although I'm inclined to agree that the song is principally about a disfunctional father/son relationship (his Dad died in 2001 which we can only speculate motivated some more recent songs) there is also a latent, sour and embittered sexiness to the song which lends itself to be interpreted as a 'break-up' song (a final take on Edge's divorce that was more comprehensively exorcised in Achtung Baby perhaps?) Whilst less accessible and explicit, it seems to pick up where 'Until the End of the World' left off. Musically it's a fantasitic synergy of brooding riff and lyrical content...a real walking tune for sucking reflectively on a cigarette and wondering where it all went wrong. Because of the rushed release of the album the ending was pretty poor though...Flood's production must take some of the blame here because by the time of the Summer tour of 1993, they had a much better climax to the song than the '...horses over the hills'. Nevertheless, a brilliant song which has a lot of personal meaning for me. |
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