| Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Higgs Boson Blues Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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It seems he's making a parallel between the story of Robert Johnson (blues musician who purportedly "sold his soul to the devil" in exchange for guitar skills) and our discovery of the Higgs Boson particle. This "don't know who is gonna rip off who" part is the real issue -- did we compromise anything in order to make this discovery, and what impact will it have on our world? Will it help us as a society or will it lead us down a path of further environmental destruction? The "Higgs Boson Blues" seems to suggest that the future holds little direction or meaning. The discovery of the Higgs Boson completed the Standard Model of particle physics, so where do we go from here? The only thing we can be certain of is our impending mortality, and it can come with little warning to anyone, no matter their moral standing. He paints a picture of the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis as a jarring example of this. In the great uncertainty that follows death, material requests like "bury me in my favorite yellow patent leather shoes" seem trivial. Our society's superficial fixation on celebrities like Miley Cyrus seem especially banal in the wake of this. The line "look here comes the missionary with his smallpox and flu" describes a double edged sword. We are always searching for ways to better our society, but it comes at a cost. |
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| Tegan and Sara – I Was a Fool Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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"But stand still is all we did Love like ours is never fixed" My first thought was that fixed = mended, but it creates an interesting contrast if you think of "fixed" to mean "permanent." |
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| Songs: Ohia – Farewell Transmission Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| I listened to this song on the drive out to the Marfa Lights viewing center in Marfa, TX, and it's something that I'll never forget. It's the perfect song for driving down a dark highway in the middle of the desert. | |
| Why? – Against Me Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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"And I've seen dirt dry fires arise by pissing boy fountain statues" I think that line may be a reference to the Manneken Pis, a statue in Brussels of a boy who, according to one legend, put out a burning fuse with his urine and saved the city: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manneken_Pis Also, it's supposedly a hidden illusion on the Camel cigarette box: http://www.moillusions.com/2007/03/camel-cigarettes-illusion.html Ever since I read that excerpt from an interview with Yoni on here (it's posted under Gemini)- "An elephant eyelash is a hard-on. I like to make my own pantheon of slang."- I've wondered what other things he could be using his own personal slang for. |
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| Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Where Do We Go Now but Nowhere? Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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I first heard this song right after I had finished reading "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov, and the song really reminded me of the novel. The line "in a colonial hotel we fucked up the sun" especially seems to allude to it; in the novel, Humbert Humbert travels across the nation, staying in hotels with young Lolita, who is most fond of the Colonial ones. The song matches the feelings of hopelessness and sorrow in the novel very well. I thought it was all just a coincidence, and then I read that Cave named Lolita as one of the things that changed his life (http://www.bad-seed.org/cave/faq/influences.shtml... his father read it to him when he was twelve!). So I suppose it's possible that it could have been a slight influence on this song... neat! |
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