submissions
| Arcade Fire – Rebellion (Lies) Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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It's a song in favor of honesty regarding passion. We hide our passions and placate them with sleep, but the "lies" chorus rings out for both the moon and the sun-- both are only symbols which we take as controlling forces, whether we decide that sleep is necessary or unnecessary, that night is good or bad or day is good or bad, we are making an unnecessary and harmful choice. Passions should not be treated or felt or shared quietly because of their supreme importance in human life, but we are subsuming them constantly underneath obligations. It's actually a very practical take on rebellion--that action lies in reality and not in ideals. For an interesting juxtaposing point, cf. James Joyce's "Ulysses," a passage from the second-to-last chapter:
"As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human life at least 2/7, viz. 20 years are passed in sleep. As a philosopher he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an infinitesimal part of any person's desires has been realised. As a physiologist he believed in the artificial placation of malignant agencies chiefly operative during somnolence." |
submissions
| The Smiths – Cemetry Gates Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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A crucial distinction no one has made so far is that Yeats and Keats were unabashedly emotional in their poetry, never satirical, whereas Oscar Wilde is almost the definition of satire. This plays a very important role in the song.
Wilde is a man whose whole life was satire, purposefully. This gave him a constant ironic advantage. From when he moved to England and intended on inhabiting fully the role of "English gentleman," though he was Irish, homosexual and not born into the gentleman life, his life was an entirely tongue-in-cheek decision to be someone with a "big nose who knows", the whole time writing stuff which showed you could never know everything nor be correct indisputably. This song seems at least partly, to me, to be about the very American, but more generally just plain modern, misconception that "cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive," that simply because you are ironic and humorous and therefore will usually come out looking like the smarter one who wins, you do not necessarily win, and you certainly don't necessarily know more. |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Ocean of Noise Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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The noises we hear and how they necessarily trigger certain reactions, forcing us to make our response work for ourselves. That is; the chain of events caused by his hearing her voice was unstoppable. A laydown-to-deterministic-love song, hah. |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Windowsill Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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This is a song; "the tide" does not mean any one thing, and it would be naive to say it doesn't include global warming. It does. It also includes all the other imagistic things they mention in the song: media, a narrative of alleged solutions and then follow-up solutions such as we are given by each episode of television we watch, suffering caused by injustice, etc. |
submissions
| Arcade Fire – Windowsill Lyrics
| 15 years ago
|
Injustice is part and parcel of human history. While radically liberal people like Thomas Pynchon are necessary, we also need those like James Joyce whose aim is to define progress, solution, improvement, true and actual happiness. Thomas Pynchon is good at defining suffering and defining a hope for something more.
The solution to injustice is not crooning about disenfranchisement. That's why at best this album will appeal to we people who empathize, but it cannot feed the poor or stop global warming. In other words, it's art, and even art which whines about unjust things can work to do more than just whine.
Not that I don't love Arcade Fire, and this song... I do. They're fantastic. |
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