| The Clash – Spanish Bombs Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Maybe my favorite song in the world, ever. The trickiest part for people seems to be the time thing. Joe's singing about the Spanish Civil War, then a DC-10 airplane, then his girlfriend and bombs, then Irish tombs....what is going on here? Is this about ETA, the Civil War, Ireland? Maybe, definitely, and yes. On a trip visiting his girlfriend in Spain ("Spanish songs in Andulasia", "I'm flying in on a DC-10 tonight"), Joe sees the places where battles were fought in the Spanish Civil War ("The shooting sites in the days of '39"). As a leftist and an artist, that conflict resonates with him because so many artists, poets, and thinkers fought against Franco and fascism ("Frederico Lorca is dead and gone", "With trenches full of poets"). Meanwhile, back home, the Troubles in Northern Ireland are heating up, with bombs going off in both Ireland and England ("Back home the buses/went up in flashes"). Joe Strummer once received a death threat from the Unionist terrorist group The Red Hand Commandoes for supporting Bobby Sand's hunger strike. "In Grenada" the alleged dictator Gairy is overthrown by the leftist opposition. Joe connects these struggles with the Spanish Civil War ("The hillsides ring with 'Free the people'"), but wonders if he's influenced by the landmarks around him ("or can I hear the echo from the days of '39"). The chorus is terrible Spanish, but I contend that it is, in the English world, brilliantly bad Spanish. First, the Spanish line as written is addressed not to the bombs, but to the senorita (Joe's Spanish girlfriend). So "I love you forever" makes perfect sense. Sung, the garbled Spanish line DOES refer to the bombs, but only in pidgin Clash SpanItalian. Most English speakers seem to hear the line as "Yo quiera é finito" which literally means [Spanish] "I want" [Italian] "is finished". So us non-Spanish speakers hear "Spanish Bombs, I want it to end". Am I reading too much into it? Maybe. But I find this kind of play on words common in Clash songs. The discomfort with bombing, violence and revolution also comes in later in the song, where the ETA may or may not be involved in a bomb that kills Joe's senorita. "Spanish bombs shatter the hotel/my senoriata's rose was nipped in the bud." A fictional ETA bomb kills Joe's girlfriend in the poem? They had bombed a Madrid cafe a few years earlier, killing a dozen civilians. This fits in with the theme of the song, which questions how we (and Joe) imbue conflict with glory and meaning. No matter who is right or virtuous, people die, usually innocents. Must have made his girl a bit uncomfortable. Joe wrote a song about me.....wait, I die?!! |
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| The Mountain Goats – Dance Music Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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With lyrics in general, and artists like John Darnielle in particular, I think it's a mistake to force literal translations for every line. When he talks about the "special secret sickness" in this song, the vagueness of it is intentional. Whether there was a real life parallel to this story or not, Darnielle's trying to evoke teenage feelings of confusion and helplessness in a way that "you have cancer," or "you have AIDS" can't. Not knowing what's wrong is part of the terror, and it comes through brilliantly. On the other hand, I think the narrative vagueness of the last lines is not entirely intentional. Rather he is sacrificing literal "clarity" to imagery. Cul-de-sacs are connected to death as dead-ends, but also work to maintain the suburban setting of the song. Alleyways are connected in our culture to danger, crime, filth. The police are coming to get him. Why? Is he suicidal? Is he on drugs, committing crimes, violent? We don't know, and any attempt to specify requires more information than exists in the song. What we do know is things are going so poorly that his only response is the same as in his childhood, "listening to dance music." "...so this is what the volume knob's for..." What an amazing line. |
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