| Leonard Cohen – Take This Waltz Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Incidentally, the lines there's a bar where the boys have stopped talking they've been sentenced to death by the blues is a brilliant addition of Cohens, and relates to an anecdote about the night Lorca was introduced to fellow (doomed) gay poet Hart Crane by a mutual bilingual friend. Crane suggested they go out to this gay speakeasy he liked, and their friend walked along with them, translating as they chatted about their mutual love of Walt Whitman. When they got to the bar, their translating friend, who was straight, felt really uncomfortable so said he'd come back later to pick up Lorca. Unfortunately, Crane spoke no Spanish, and Lorca spoke no English, so they split up, and when their friend returned a few hours later, he found the crowd of sailors in the bar split fairly evenly with half surrounding Crane as he told dirty jokes, and half trying to follow Lorca as he played old flamenco songs on the piano and led (something of a) drunken sing-along. Within a couple of years, both of them would be dead, indirectly "sentenced to death by the blues." Hart found the closet incredibly stressful and spiraled down into alcoholism and depression, eventually jumping overboard to his death following a brutal gay-bashing onboard a ship in the Caribbean, whereas Lorca's post-Dali depression led to a sense of drive and purpose in stretching the boundaries of theatre as a means of activism to better the lot of women and gays in profoundly misogynistic/homophobic Spain, which ultimately led to his assassination by the fascists (who it so happened wore blue uniforms). |
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| Leonard Cohen – Take This Waltz Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The poem is about Lorca's doomed relationship with Salvador Dalà and was written in his period of deep depression followed by creative/spiritual rebirth during a year long trip to NYC and Cuba. Dalà had a ton of sexual hang-ups and though their relationship was intensely emotional, as soon as things turned physical he freaked out and rejected Lorca, living out a weird, closeted half-life with his nymphomaniac wife Gala, with whom he claims to have only slept once with no interest in ever repeating the experience. Tons of imagery in here is drawn straight from their letters one to the other, but all in all, this is a song of frustrated, closeted love that ends in a prophecy of martyrdom (re: the myth of Hyacinth, and Lorca's obsession with the archetype of queer martyrdom in St. Sebastian and his frequent predictions that he would end up so martyred, as he did when he was shot by one of Franco's "black squads" at the outset of the Spanish Civil War). |
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| David Bowie – The Man Who Sold the World Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I really never thought it was all that cryptic -- "selling the world" = the opposite of "selling your soul." This, I assumed, is why the narrator thought the man he met had "died alone a long long time ago" -- this man had been rich/famous/powerful, then had thrown it all away to gain his soul, as it were. So, he effectively disappeared. And although "I wasn't there" (meaning, didn't actually know him back then), the guy recognizes him as a kindred soul, so says he was his "friend." In the same way we have so many kindred soul friends we've never actually met before. So, the narrator goes back home, and from there goes on a search for meaning in life, over the whole world for years and years, and looking at all the normal people living stuck-in-a-box, cookie-cutter lives, he thinks back on this man and realizes how empty this type of life is, and how much richer the man who threw it all away was for having done so. And the last iteration of the chorus implies that the narrator goes on to sell the world, himself, thus becoming free. Always makes me think of Ronnie Lane quitting the Faces to join the circus. Granted, that was several years after this song was released, that's the general feel it gives to me -- taking the Sacred Fool's path in contrast with the ways of the world. |
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| Patti Smith – Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer(de) Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| I think Johnny was either raped or just had sex with another boy and remembers it as a rape because he can't cope with it. Hence all the concern with "do you like it like that", etc. The horses surrounding him remind me of the play Equus where a disturbed young man blinds a herd of horses after they "witnessed" him masturbating, out of his shame. Horses are symbols of masculine sexuality. I think after the rape Johnny is so shamed he commits suicide (either literally by cutting his throat, or possibly using heroin, which also notoriously undermines the sex-drive, a kind of chemical castration). I imagine the dances and angels are what he's hallucinating about as he dies. | |
| R.E.M. – Belong. Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| What, am I the only one thinking the "creatures" who "belong" and "have headed for the sea" are lemmings? Which makes the mother's "thought of such freedom" ironic at best, and her admonition to her child to "belong" downright creepy. At least, that's how I've always taken it. | |
| R.E.M. – Falls To Climb Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| I believe this song is narrated by Federico Garcia Lorca and directed towards his current crop of biographers, who indeed do work by committee, and who would like to make his seemingly chosen martyrdom the result of depression over breaking up with Dali seven years and several boyfriends earlier, rather than about his oft-stated desire to become the "new St. Sebastian", which he saw as the ultimate symbol of victory through ultimate surrender, and a means to transcend the flesh, which he'd always seen as problematic. | |
| R.E.M. – Horse to Water Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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It's a song about addiction. The "reptilian brain" (also shared by birds) is the level of the human mind which is the seat of all compulsive and addictive behaviors, habits. There's nothing a snake loves more than crawling in a circle -- patterns are predictable, safe. Hence the addiction cycle, and other self-destructive cycles such as are seen with battered women. "Holding the breath" is a way one might train to battle the inner beast, since the reptilian brain is also responsible for making sure we keep breathing, etc. But, even a small child can hold their breath until they pass out, provided their will to do so is strong enough to fight the snake-within. This kind of thing is not entertainment, because this unchecked consumption of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual poisons, fueled by an epidemic lack of personal responsibility and self-discipline, are in danger of destroying the planet at the moment. |
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| R.E.M. – Sing For The Submarine Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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This song obviously owes a great deal to William Butler Yeats' "Byzantium": That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations - at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. The reference to the Tyrell's mechanical owl ([i]Bladerunner[/i]) tipped me off. It is also a cut-up of lines from previous R.E.M. songs, obviously. I think the overall point here is a call to the creation of (subversive?) art as a means of beating mortality. Hence, lines like "Give into the machine" I take as being the opposite of a "deus ex machina" -- you're letting go of your own ego as little-god artist and letting your work take on a life all its own without you getting in the way. After all, in a best case scenario, it will far outlive you. Maybe far outlive us all! I also suspect, then, that the "submarine" might well be the subconscious mind as a creative source to draw from. In any case, the allusions to the Yeats are very strong, and I suspect the sense of that poem has a lot to do with the sense of this song. Sing, sing, against the dying of the light! |
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| R.E.M. – King Of Birds Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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As others have said, this strikes me as a song about the difficulty if not impossibility of finding your own "voice" as an artist, because we're all "standing on the shoulders of giants," which is to say, our perspectives are formed by the fact that we're lifted up by these monuments to the past, these influences of ours, and so what is truly "ours"? I strongly suspect it pays homage to Federico García Lorca's "El Niño Mudo," El niño busca su voz. (La tenía el rey de los grillos.) En una gota de agua buscaba su voz el niño. No la quiero para hablar; me haré con ella un anillo que llevará mi silencio en su dedo pequeñito. En una gota de agua buscaba su voz el niño. (La voz cautiva, a lo lejos, se ponía un traje de grillo.) The child was seeks his voice. (The king of the crickets had it.) In a droplet of water the child sought his voice. I do not want it for speaking; I will make a ring of it so that my silence can wear it on its little finger In a droplet of water the child sought his voice. (The captive voice, far away, put on a cricket's clothes.) What use has a cricket, much less a bird, for a human voice? He already has one of his own. So, this King of Birds, this pigeon sitting mute on the shoulder of a human statue in a park, is frustrated. |
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| R.E.M. – Living Well Is The Best Revenge Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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I think the criticism in this song is being leveled against the sexual hypocrisy of the religious right, hence the strong innuendo of All you sad and lost apostles Hum my name and flare their nostrils Choking on the bones you toss around With the "bone" being "tossed around" alluding to the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as to a "boner" (flash back "HUM my name"). In general, it paints the religious right as atavistic, and deftly employs images of the evolution of the species against them, implying their antipathy towards that theory is largely due to the fact that they're getting left behind. And, as we've seen so often, they keep getting caught with their pants down, doing things they would condemn others for and would legislate against. Not seeing much in this song specifically aimed at the Bush administration, but of course, they pander to these sorts |
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