| Fight Like Apes – Can Head Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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At a gig I was at they said this was written about a true incident. Tom, the bassist, saw a can of beer on the stage and in a moment of wanton badassery, kicked it into the audience. It just so happened to hit one of their friends in the head, so they wrote this song to make it up to her. Also, I could have sworn that the fish and chips verse was taken from another one of their songs, which ended up as an instrumental B-side to something Global, but I might be wrong. When they first started out that had loads of weird little short unfinished songs. |
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| Fight Like Apes – Tie Me Up With Jackets Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Huh, I always though the end line was "Just don't like Bats", as in they agree on all these things and she's so enamored with him that liking bats would be the only thing he could do wrong. Which is especially amusing as there's a band from Dublin called Bats who were the other big hyped Irish band when they started out. But on listening back to it, it's quite obviously chimps don't like bats :( |
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| Sufjan Stevens – John Wayne Gacy, Jr. Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Oh, and also: What I really, really love about this song, what very nearly had me in tears the first time I heard it, is the second verse. Despite what he's actually singing, he manages to make the acts sound almost romantic. In any other context "He took off all their clothes for them, He put a cloth on their lips, Quiet hands, quiet kiss on the mouth" would be a very tender gesture. It sort of sums up perfectly the whole headfuck element of Gacys story. That even though he was about to kill these people in brutal, horrific ways, he was tender and loving about it, in his own weird little way. |
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| Sufjan Stevens – John Wayne Gacy, Jr. Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I always read this as quite a simple song about the fall out of the whole Gacy case from the perspective of someone in his community. The whole shock about Gacy was that he was, as the song says, loved by his neighbours. He was a normal guy. He often had people over for barbeques and was an active member in his local community. In much the same way as every year the same guy dresses up as Santa, John Wayne Gacy Jr. always dressed up as a clown and did magic tricks to entertain the kids. He didn't dress up as a clown for the sole purpose of killing people. He sent his psychologist, who interestingly was the real life basis for Clarice Starling, Christmas cards from prison. The whole song feels really numb. I get the feeling that whilst the narrator never knew Gacy, they certainly knew of him, maybe saw him around now and then. The same with his victims. Especially in the line "oh my God, are you one of them?", the way it dawns on him that maybe he knew some of these people. Though the last line kinda makes sense from a Christian perspective, Sufjans lyrics rarely deal directly with religion. It's far more likely to be a case of simply "man, if Gacy can be that nice but do all those things, who the hell else in this town is fucked up?". |
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