| Regina Spektor – Flyin Lyrics | 16 years ago |
|
I think this song, on the surface, tells a very uncomplicated tale. A girl is a total spaceshot in class, stares out the window and gets caught, perhaps gets in trouble, eventually gets sexually abused by her teacher, and when she attempts to stop him, he loses his temper and throws her out the window. However, I personally think this little tale is symbolic for the bullshit educational system in place (depending, of course, on which state you're living in). "Went to school with boring teachers who thought they was all my preachers," the character has higher expectations of her teachers than they are delivering: Not only are they boring her, they are feeding her a load of preach-y crap, and she sees right through them. She finds her time better spent staring out the window, which, of course, no teacher likes in a student. The window is a symbol for the possible ejection from societal norms as built by the educational system i.e. the need to sit in rows and fill in the correct little bubble, instead of fueling creativity freethought the way schools ought to, making everyone settle for uninteresting lives because that is all they have ever known. Out the window is the opportunity for something more exciting, more beautiful, but it's a reversal what the society expects of you, so if you get caught staring at it you get in trouble. Make sense? That's the point of the first couple of verses: "I went flyin' out of my window / I went flyin' out of my window / been caught doin' it once or twice / but it feels so real nice / oh it feels so real nice / saw the earth and I saw the sky / saw the earth and I saw the sky / been caught doin' it once or twigh / but it feels so real nigh / oh it feels so real nigh / oh it feels so real nigh." Why would she go flying out of her own window? Well, she isn't literally, but she is in a metaphoric sense. She's rejecting the lifestyle enforced upon her, is what it really means. And by rejecting it, she comes to a stronger understanding of the world that others miss out on by simply accepting the status quo. Hence, "I saw the earth and I saw the sky." As for the sexually abusive teacher, Regina is taking the metaphor to a new level of intensity: now, not only are her educators boring her and preaching, they are behaving in a DESTRUCTIVE manner towards her. In a sense, what is truly being abused is her approach to her life, her desire to break free from the society as described above. Well, the society can only try to shape you into what it wants so much before it finally gives up and rejects you altogether; that would be the narrator of the song being thrown out the window by her teacher. Regina sees the rigid societal expectations of its students as a great atrocity (and accordingly uses an atrocity as a metaphor), and wishes that the perpetrators of perpetuating this style of schooling could be held accountable. But alas! They cannot, and continue to "abuse" the minds of students with a poor or even falsely-based education-- "not caught once, not caught twice." The remainder of the song is a cheerful, "And I've been flying ever since, I've been flying in the skies." Now liberated at last from the invisible chains of the school system, the narrator is able to figuratively spread her wings and fly, having the space and freedom to fulfill her true potential, becoming a part of the skies she mentioned earlier in the song that was symbolic for understanding the truth and beauty of life. One can cut the meaning short from here if they choose, because that is certainly on very complete interpretation. OR you can take it a step further and reveal the potential dark side to be found here. At the very end of the song, there is a THUD, possibly showing that the narrator was in fact falling the entire time, probably to her death. Now, on a symbolic level, that can mean that she failed once she was ejected from the society, but I personally have a slightly more optimistic view: She knew she was falling to her death but joyously reveled the sensation of flying, deciding that this death was more exciting and potent than an entire lifetime in the stiff and bland world she has finally just escaped. Well, that's all a bit of a stretch. But that's how I like to think of it anyway, especially since Regina Spektor is very big on symbolism in her songs. PS- I TOTALLY agree with ChristyPan and ChristyPan's sister. |
|
| Regina Spektor – Ghost of Corporate Future Lyrics | 16 years ago |
|
This is a paper I wrote this year about the song for my mass media class: Regina Spektor was born in Moscow when Russia was still the U.S.S.R. to a Jewish family that loved music of all types, especially The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues. As soon as the power in the country changed hands and reforms allowed for it–when Spektor was nine years old–the family moved to Austria, then Italy, and finally settled in New York City. There, her natural talent for songwriting gave her popularity in the anti-folk* scene. Her musical career didn’t really take off until the release of her popular music video “Fidelity,” in which she sings about her struggle to open her heart in her relationships to an invisible man in an all black and white environment, the video’s conclusion showing the man taking visible form and the two gleefully play in a childlike manner with brightly colored powders. From there, her songs “Us,” “Better,” and “On the Radio” gained popularity through frequent use on television shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy” and the like. Her songs commonly make literary references, such as the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah in her song “Samson” and poet Boris Pasternak’s work in “Après Moi.” A commonly recurring theme in her songs–at least, more recurring than most artists, whose works tend to focus most on romance and politics–is the nature of the human life, and the importance of living it to the fullest. Her song “On the Radio” uses seemingly random imagery such as laughter, prayer, disease, love, tears, and self-image, and quickly bounces back and forth between language related to vibrant life and language related to inevitable death in order to gain a profound perspective on our lives and all that occurs within them. The tone of the song remains cheerful, as a reminder that all of life’s experiences, the good and the bad, are a glorious part of the human life that should be cherished. Other songs, such as “Music Box,” “Us,” and “That Time” have similar themes–and “Ghost of Corporate Future” is no exception. The very title of the song is an indicator of the song’s nature–it references a Charles Dickens character, the Ghost of Christmas Future, who served as a warning to A Christmas Carol’s protagonist (and thereby also the reader) that his greed would destroy him. In this sense, Spektor is getting our attention with the title, as if to tell us, “This is a warning. Take heed, lest the remainder of your days become worthless. It’s never too late to change.” The song opens by describing a man running through the rain who takes off his shoes and disgusts everyone around him by accidentally stepping into “somebody’s fat loogie.” This point of the song is especially symbolic, made clear once the song has been listened to multiple times. The shoes represent the way we, as a society, hide behind our culture of offices and cubicles, and as a result we miss out on many of the interesting experiences the world has to offer. The man takes off his shoes to feel the ground beneath his feet, which represents the way he is dropping all of the cultural expectations of him to continue going about his sheltered lifestyle, so that he may get an experience of the Earth, of the world on which he walks, in its rawest and most direct form. It is very important that the line describing the reactions of the people says that they are reacting to “him” and not “it” (“it” referring to the event of his stepping into a loogie), symbolic of how what they are really saying “ew” to is his decision to break free from what they consider to be socially acceptable. In the next stanza, it is revealed that the man was told to do this by the Ghost of Corporate Future. The ghost visited him, apparently, to warn him that his current lifestyle would someday alienate him from the people he loved more than anything (“And when you come back home, your children have grown and you never made your wife moan.”). In further stanzas, the ghost points out all the other ways that his corporate lifestyle would make him unhappy, in particular describing the details of two major problems: that he would become distanced from his fellow human beings, and that the more inanimate world surrounding him would come to feel artificial. Examples of the first of these two include parts like, “and people make you nervous,” “and everybody’s features have somehow started blending,” and “and everyone’s sarcastic.” The latter of the two points is described with “and everything is plastic” and “and all your food is frozen, it needs to be defrosted,” showing he won’t even be able to get a real meal anymore. The tone of this stanza is set with the series of “and”s, giving the impression that all these feelings are piling on all at once, driving the character mad–an impression that is driven home with the bombardment of the listener with the repetition of the line, “you’d think the world was ending (right now).” This is the song’s first of two climaxes, and the halfway point of the song. After the chaos of the first half, the song calms down again as the ghost goes on to make suggestions about how the man can prevent the deterioration of his own happiness. These suggestions are surprisingly miniscule in comparison with the burdensome descriptions in the first half; things like “drink a lot less coffee and never ever watch the ten o’clock news.” It’s not that Regina Spektor actually has a problem with coffee or the news, but she is pointing out that these things are very addictive and can contribute to all the negative vibes the song’s protagonist is surrounding himself with. She is saying he ought to be aware of the things that he becomes dependent on, and besides caffeine this can include the same obsession that many people have with the very dangerous world that the news can portray. She’s telling the listeners, just as the ghost is telling the man, that it is important to do whatever it takes to relax and be comfortable and happy with the world in which we live. The next few lines take this concept even further–not only should we try to relax, we should take advantage of this comfort with our world and take risks. She says, “Maybe you should kiss someone nice, or lick a rock, or both.” These things represent the different results we can get from the risks we take–the decisions that we will or won’t regret (licking a rock, which is probably a bad call, and kissing someone nice, which is a positive experience, respectively). The ghost recommends doing both, showing that we can learn from both good and bad decisions, but in order to do so we have to be willing to take the risk either way. He (the ghost) furthers this point by saying, “maybe you should cut your own hair, ‘cause that can be so funny. It doesn’t cost any money, and it always grows back, hair grows even after you’re dead.” This part brings up a couple of points the ghost is trying to get across, the first of which is a reiteration of the previous point about taking risks. He is saying that even though the man can make mistakes, it is important that he always approach them with a positive outlook and keep them in perspective–after all, it’s only hair, and as she sings, “it doesn’t cost any money.” It’s nothing to freak out over, especially because hair grows back, much like the way we will not feel the effects of our mistakes forever; sooner or later, they will lose prominence in our lives, so why not laugh at them while they’re still occurring? The mention of death is here, although why is a little unclear. The most likely purpose for it is that the ghost is warning the man again, saying, “cut your hair now, make these mistakes and have these experiences now, while you still have the chance, because after you’re dead it’ll be too late.” The fact that hair continues growing after death could also mean that after people die, everyone else goes on living and the world keeps spinning, and time will slowly eradicate our mistakes (so, once again, we must live our lives to the fullest while we still can). At the end of the song the ghost comes back to all the burdens from earlier, and everything that those burdens could be if the man would just open his eyes to them. Lines like, “If you don’t toss your plastic, the streets won’t be so plastic,” explain how it’s up to the man to prevent his own personal inner apocalypse, and others like, “and if you kiss somebody then both of you’ll get practice,” remind us of the previous verse. The two recurring images for the rest of the song are, “people are just people (like you),” which is the ghost telling the man that he cannot allow himself to be alienated from the rest of humankind, because he will lose the opportunity for companionship with others, because we are all more alike than we realize. The other repeated line is, “The world is everlasting, it’s coming and it’s going.” This line is the reassurance that the world is not ending, no matter how bad things get, and it is constantly in cycles, giving time the ability to always be changing things. It’s a reassurance that no matter what, there is still a chance that everything will be okay in the end. *“The music sub-genre known as anti-folk (or antifolk) takes the earnestness of politically charged 1960s music and subverts it into something else. It is still highly debated what exactly the defining characteristics of this sub-genre are, as they vary from one artist to the next. Nonetheless, it is fairly accepted that the music tends to sound raw or experimental; it also generally mocks the seriousness and pretension of the established mainstream music scene in addition to mocking itself.” - This definition of anti-folk provided by www.reference.com. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.