| Stars – Celebration Guns Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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This song makes me think of the weddings that have been bombed in Afghanistan and Iraq in response to celebratory rife fire. "So tomorrow there will be another number / For the one who had a name" would be changing living people into civilian casualty counts. "Desert wind and a perverse desire to win / History buried in shame" Imagery, place setting, and commentary on the war. "Are the beating drums / Celebration guns / The thunder and the laughter / The last thing they remember?" The chorus I see as talking about the wedding guests who were killed in these attacks. Did the victims even know what happened? Or were they just listening to the music, hearing other guests firing guns in celebration, listening to the others at the party laughing, when out of nowhere--boom? Did they know the thunder was planes dropping bombs, or did they just think it was the noise of the party? "Then the next day / How will you know your enemy / By their colour or your fear?" Addressing the soldiers now. As episodeiv said, racial profiling in general, but also calling back to viewing all the people in Afghanistan and Iraq, or all Muslims, or all brown people or whatever, as the enemy. Even if all they're doing is celebrating a wedding. "One by one / We can cage them in your freedom /Make them all disappear / Six hundred sixty six / Hundred sixty days / Two guards one uncharged" Guantanamo, of course, plus the biblical reference. I also think of the 'two guards one uncharged' as referring to Abu Ghraib. "This morning's paper / Ink stains my fingers / My hands grow darker everyday" The ink/blood metaphor here is really nice. I think of it as the ink revealing the blood on our hands, but it also works well the way episodeiv says it, with us gaining culpability by reading about these things in the paper but doing nothing. "Goodnight, sleep light, stranger." Yeah. |
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