| The Killers – Human Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Yes, I have to disagree with a lot of the analysis here, if only because, if the singer wanted to to emphasize that we were "free" humans instead of "puppet" dancers, he would have phrased it to put the accent on "human" (i.e., "are we dancer, or are we human?). When you make a rhetorical point, you always put the emphasis on the last word / phrase, not the first (like, "are we mice or men?" or "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"). I can't imagine the singer would have used "dancer" in a disparaging or scornful way, as if to say that dancers have no freewill but humans do. To be a dancer is to be more than human, or it's another way of saying that being human is always about being more than "simply" human (i.e. vital signs and cold hands). So, virtue, grace, devotion, all those values prepare us to be human, but in the end, life is a toss-up and you just have to call the shots as you see them, you have to learn to dance through (or maybe with) life's adversity. | |
| Arctic Monkeys – Fake Tales of San Francisco Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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It's funny that the character in the song is bragging about things he did in San Francisco, b/c San Francisco is one of the most pretentious places in the US! (I lived there for 8 years). I was really interested in the long debate about US / British rock, because I grew up in Michigan (US) listening to Weller and the Jam, and later on the Smiths, and you can see their influence on the Libertines, Arctic Monkeys, the Enemy, and other Brit bands today. I think the more music one listens to, the more you realize that there's no such thing as "American" music -- rock or otherwise (country, hip-hop, blues), because music is always from somewhere else. US country is descended from British settlers in the Appalachians; bluegrass and creole music from French exiles; gospel and blues from African spirituals; hip-hop from Indians settling in Jamaica and going to New York; disco from Donna Summer marrying a German producer of electronica; salsa from Cuban son mixed with disco by Puerto Ricans on the mean streets of east Harlem. Tom Waits is quintessentially "American" precisely because his music takes from tango, rumba, country, and yes, rock and roll, whatever that is. You could say the same thing about Jay-Z's selective sampling in hip-hop. Anyway, I went to see Weller in concert in LA the other day and fulfilled a 25 year old dream. Would you call him a Brit trying to sound American? That would be imbecilic. |
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