submissions
| Jane Siberry – Mimi On The Beach Lyrics
| 13 years ago
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Mimi speaks does not explain the original, it replies to it. You were partly right at the outset. Jane plays with same sex desires in her early music, and a little in her life according to someone who would know. I'm not saying she "did things" -- I'm saying she dabbled in the idea of same sex eros -- not as dull and blatant as those two Russian girls in school outfits on a national tongue sicking tour to sell a one hit wonder, nor the Britney Madonna thing --something a little more subtle and a lot earlier. Look, she is a very good writer and smart. THE SPECKLESS SKY album is very very good -- I sent a copy of it to William Irwin Thompson who was interested in studying it, and I, myself looked at it as well. As for Mimi, which is a great song and early, it's in part an outsider song and it captures the ambiguity if being an outsider -- all the dumb jocks and jockettes on the beach caught in their rituals as one community, the intellectual poet standing nearby able to disrupt their slumber with a meaningful sentence, and then also, somewhat in the distance, the sublime object of contemplation and desire: the girl on the pink surfboard. The poet is struggling to make sense of her relationship to the sublime Mimi -- why does Mimi captivate her (that way that women are captivated by Cosmo cover model images) and how can the poet be true to herself when an image like this has the ability to overwhelm her just as easily as it does these morons hooting on the shoreline. She resolves it with the "great leveler" a play on a giant wave, but it's really time or death -- what will take that body of Mimi's (does she call it a container) and make it no more interesting than anyone else's. So it's a contemplation of the way we obsess with beauty and project meaning on it. The Mimi speaks song is when Jane comes back as a grown up and realizes that her very comments about Mimi, suggesting she was spiritually empty because she was not a beach poet and such. In that song Mimi basically says, Bitch you don't know me. So it's one iteration away from the original contemplation critique. Of course, the original is the better tune because the issue is not the philosophy of desire which will not be resolved in a 26 line song, it's about the juxtaposition of contemplative forms and the subject position of the poet -- in other words, the singer does not have to be profound if she is commenting on her own subject position as a confounded adolescent. That and the tune is great of course. |
submissions
| The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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The best way to relate to this song is to think of it as an operatic work. In MOzart's operas, for example, he insisted that the words were always secondary to the song -- so the librettist had to write the words in a way that would best realize the voice (for example more vowells). When you think about that, you realize that a good song, like this one, should never be broken apart into words and lyrics. Instead we should be thinking about the combination. On the music side, there is a continuous and regular declension of both the background music and the melody (the notes Let me take you down, literally travel down on the scale). This creates a feeling of settling, indeed a rapid feeling of submersion, emotionally. A second thing to notice in the music is the way the stringed isntruments break in upon the song in fragments, drums too, all ending in a sound very similar to an orchestra tuning up before a performance. The overall effect gives the listener a sense of the uncanny, the unfamiliar, and yet the settled. Musically we have been drawn down into an underworld of settled strageness, where we could imagine carnival acrobats upside down. The lyrics compliment this musical sense of the unfamiliar and awkward. They, like the music, appear as chunks of order. Nevertheless, the overall meaning of the lyrics escapes us. Through the use of uncanny musical form which nevertheless HAS structure, Lennon manages to get his audience to imagine that his uncanny words also have meaning. It is feeling, not meaning, that Lennon intends to evoke in his audience, however, the feeling of uncanniness. That is the genious of the song. How many rock songs were doing that in the 1960's? |
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