| Talking Heads – Listening Wind Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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Peter Gabriel showing his lack of sympathy for the victims of political terror. I wish our country had the guts to deny him entry as an undesirable alien, but it won't happen. Perhaps he'll be less welcome in France, which has had more than its share of political terror. Peter Gabriel is a smug, heartless bastard. |
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| Talking Heads – Listening Wind Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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@[foreverdrone:15032] You're just going through contortions to legitimize Peter Gabrel's legitimization of political murder and terrorism. I lost a son to an IED ambush in Iraq. I wish I could say that I hope Peter Gabriel never has to deal with that hell, but perhaps losing a son to a political murderer would raise his consciousness to what he's romanticizing in this song. As for me, I used to think nothing would justify the use of a nuclear device. My mind has changed. Asymmetric warfare works both ways. |
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| Foster the People – Pumped Up Kicks Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| Actually, it's good characterization on the song writer's part that the protagonist blames his victims - the sort of psychotic anger driving his actions is ALWAYS outward-directed. | |
| Foster the People – Pumped Up Kicks Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| You left out Robert Starkweather, the spree killer from Kansas | |
| Brian Eno – The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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This is a prototypical Eno song, upbeat tune, very sinister lyrics. Though the "Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch" refers to an actual person (an African-American from Paw Paw, Michigan with alleged pyrokinetic abilities), the "Paw Paw" is also Dadaistic and allows Eno to make his narrator seem very angry, on the edge of unreason. The third stanza can be taken either as a description of the narrator setting his lost love and her paramour ("the paw paw negro blowtorch") afire in their love bed, or of the paramour's intense but inept love-making ("He's breathing like a furnace so I'll See you later, alligator He'll set the sheets on fire Mmm, quite a burning lover Now he'll barbecue your kitten Just another learner lover") The "Now he'll barbecue your kitten" is almost certainly meant to be an ambiguous reference to his love's pudendum ("kitty" being a cognate in English with "pussy"). "Just another learner lover" is a parting shot at the girl he's talking to... that the man she's seeing instead of him is inexperienced, all physical passion, no substance. An early case of Eno taking a meme (like "the paw paw negro blowtorch") and using it for his own ends to make a song euphonious while adding emotional depth unrelated to the original meaning of the meme. ` |
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| Brian Eno – The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| "Dissolute" rhymes with "prostitute," the "substitute" for his lost love Eno refers to. | |
| Foster the People – Pumped Up Kicks Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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A "six-shooter" can be any revolver with six rounds in the cylinder. They're all over the place, it doesn't have to be a replica of a Navy Colt .45, or whatever other Western-style pistol you're thinking of - it could be any of a hundred models of revolver you can buy in any pawn shop. A "box full of fun stuff" could be anything. The lazy delivery of the lines in the song, the girl just drawling them out, sort of implies to me that Robert found his dad's stash of porn, drugs, "I don't know what.. " next to his pistol. |
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| Linkin Park – Breaking The Habit Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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This may be Linkin Park's tightest and most evocative song. I'm totally into it. It conveys how I feel sometimes I saw it on a Sunday morning TV video program and it got into me so badly that I searched Linkin Park's lyrics sites on the net to find the title and play the song. This song made me a Linkin Park fan. |
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| Linkin Park – A Thousand Suns: The Full Experience Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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This is undoubtedly a song about the overwhelming and omnipresent danger of nuclear war. "The Radiance" refers directly to the passage from the Bhagavad-Gita which the Manhattan Project's scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted just after the detonation of the world's first nuclear device in the New Mexico desert in 1945 - "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." The whole rest of the song turns on that axis of meaning. Never before have men been able to devastate the entire Earth by the actions of a few thousand men (the combined nuclear forces of the world's nuclear powers). The song's refrain "God bless us everyone We're a broken people living under a loaded gun And it can't be outfought It can't be outdone It can't be outmatched It can't be outrun" is a mature assessment of today's predicament - the genie of nuclear fission can't be pressed back inside its bottle because the principles of its operation are comparatively easy for even nonmathematicians to grasp - if you squeeze enough fissionable metal in just such a way, you can burn out a hundred thousand lives (at least). If the North Koreans can do it, anyone can. I agree with corerulez above - "The Messenger" contains the only solution to the nuclear conundrum - the power of the human heart to choose love: "When you've suffered enough And your spirit is breaking Your growing desperate from the fight Remember your love And you always will be This melody will bring you right back home When life leaves us blind Love keeps us kind When life leaves us blind Love keeps us kind " For if it wasn't nuclear physics, black biology would have given Man the power to destroy himself with a relative flick of the finger this century, anyway. Stephen King's "The Stand" describes that process in all too graphic a way. And if we had not developed nuclear or biological warfare, nanotechnolgy would have given Man still another way to foul his nest. We need to all learn the power of love and teach it to our children. |
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| Steely Dan – Godwhacker Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Nice try associating "God" in this song with Saddam Hussein, but Reagan and the Bushes didn't create Saddam; you've got him mixed up with Manuel Noriega. Saddam was created by European bankers and his buddy/fellow Baathist Hafez al-Assad in Syria; he was just the least slimy of two alternatives when the Iraq-Iran War broke out (as horrible as Saddam was to HIS people, Khomeini and the Green Bands were even worse to the people of Iran; we backed what we thought was the least nasty of two nasty alternatives). No, this song isn't allegorical at all - it's Manichaean fantasy, the story of a pair of cosmic Super Flys who hunt down a god (lower case) guilty of "crimes beyond imagining," and then treat him like the cook at Benihana treats a cut of wagyu steak. Although the tagline "at the start of the end of history" tempts the listener to believe he's listening to an allegory of post-Cold War politics, this is just Fagen and Becker doing riffs on Gnosticism. Again. |
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| Steely Dan – Haitian Divorce Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I think that this is probably one of the least obscure songs Steely Dan ever recorded. It's all out there. Haiti, like the Dominican Republic, offers quickie no-fault, single-party divorces to all comers. Babs and Clean Willie got married, got disenchanted with each other pretty rapidly, and so Babs's dad pays for a trip to Port au Prince so she can disentangle from a hasty mistake. Once she's out of City Hall with her Haitian Divorce, she decides she's earned a night out on the town. She drinks a Zombie (one of the most stealthily intoxicating cocktails known to man, with TWO different kinds of rum, as well as other liquors), goes dancing, finds a gigolo who spins her around the dance floor to the Merengue (one of those dances which resembles a pelvic exam in its various motions), then into bed. She comes back to a tearful reunion with her family (no mention at ALL of going back to Clean Willie) with a bun in the oven; as the baby grows, it's obvious that the child is "semi-mojo," or half-black. The refrain (sung by Babs's Dad) becomes mocking at the end, as her dance through life culminates in a little bittersweet humiliation. Folks, sometimes a banana is just a banana. | |
| Steely Dan – Rikki Don't Lose That Number Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The Wikipedia article didn't really quote the article in Entertainment Weekly, but paraphrased it. For those of you interested in the actual quote from the actual article: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1174152_3,00.html "Tucked in the woods behind Stone Row, down a narrow path many students never notice, sits a one-room, octagonal stone structure known as the Observatory. It is there that Fagen most wants to visit. ''I used to practice here,'' he explains, gazing around the room, which, it turns out, was converted into an office in the early '70s. This isolated space was one of Fagen's most cherished escapes. ''There was nothing in there but a grand piano,'' he says. ''I had wonderful hours in here practicing scales, things that no one else should hear, you know? I'd write tunes in here, too. And if you were rejected by someone you were in love with, you could scream. I was always in love with someone [who] ignored me completely. That was my Bard experience. There was a Sorrows of Young Werther vibe about it.'' One such unrequited crush might have been a professor's young wife named Rikki Ducornet, whose first name will be familiar to Steely Dan fans. Fagen won't admit it – he's always been extremely reluctant to explain his songs – but it's easy to imagine that Ducornet was the inspiration for one of his band's most famous tunes, ''Rikki Don't Lose That Number.'' ''I remember we had a great conversation and he did suggest I call him, which never happened,'' says Ducornet, now a well-regarded novelist and artist. ''But I know he thought I was cute. And I was cute,'' she laughs. ''I was very tempted to call him, but I thought it might be a bit risky. I was very enchanted with him and with the music. It was so evident from the get-go that he was wildly talented. Being a young faculty wife and, I believe, pregnant at the time, I behaved myself, let's say. Years later, I walked into a record store and heard his voice and thought, 'That's Fagen. And that's my name!''' Fagen would have better luck with a former Bard student named Libby Titus, whom he encountered on campus in 1966 and married 27 years later. And that's hardly his only happy memory of the school. ''I was coming straight from a housing development in New Jersey, so it was great,'' he says. ''I loved the teachers and the girls, you know. I had friends here. Probably the only time in my life,'' he says with a laugh, ''that I actually had friends.'' " |
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| Steely Dan – Rikki Don't Lose That Number Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The story I read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikki_Don%27t_Lose_That_Number was that "Rikki" was Rikki Ducornet, the wife of an instructor at Bard, where Don Fagen had both gone to school. From the Wikipedia article, "In the March 24, 2006 (2006-03-24) issue of Entertainment Weekly, in an article titled "Back to Annandale", it was revealed that Rikki Ducornet was the apparent inspiration for the song due to a friendship songwriter Donald Fagen had with Ducornet while he attended Bard College. Ducornet was pregnant and married at the time, but recalls Fagen did give her his phone number at a college party while attending Bard and said that she believed she was the subject of the song. Fagen would not confirm the story.[2]" citation 2 for this article is the Entertainment Weekly article, available on their Web site: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1174152,00.html if anyone's interested. I would assume that Entertainment Weekly's lawyers wouldn't let them print this if it were substantially untrue. |
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| Steely Dan – Dr Wu Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| The piaster is still used in some places around the world; in Cajun French, the term is interchangeable with "dollars." I always took it to be a reference to South Vietnam, which also used piasters as a monetary unit... alluding back to some shared experiences the protagonist and Dr. Wu may have had in Indochina. | |
| Steely Dan – King of the World Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Interesting that the protagonist is somewhere in New Mexico (from "the ruins of Santa Fe" and "any man left on the Rio Grande... " lyrics). Between Kirtland Air Force Base (where most of the country's 'war reserve' nuclear weapons are stored), Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratories, northern New Mexico has had it in the event of a full-on nuclear exchange. And yet, it's spacious enough that way (the wife and I drove down from Colorado through Los Alamos, Santa Fe and Taos a couple of years back) that this guy talking on his ham radio to other survivors, waiting out the latency phase of his radiation sickness until he gives up the ghost, is very plausible. I missed the air-raid siren-like quality of the synth solo, but that passage sounded to me to be satirical... the up-beat sounds of mid-1970s pop music dissonant with the possibility that at any time the nuclear powers would choose to wipe the slate clean. |
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| Steely Dan – Godwhacker Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I don't think it was about Saddam. It IS about Osama bin Laden, who we used as a subcontractor to help get the Russians out of Afghanistan, and who we're even now chasing all over southwestern Asia. Bin Laden took the opportunity to set himself up as a minor God, marrying into half the major clans of the Taliban, showed stank attitude by setting up a nasty little killing field in the Pukthunwali, planned 9/11, and will eventually trip into the Cuisinart of American justice, to be ripped and chopped and sliced. I mean, just look at the album it's from, Everything Must Go - almost every song is about the closing-up shop days of Western Civilization from one angle to another. "Be very very quiet Clock everything you see Little things might matter later At the start of the end of history" "The end of history" was the self-satisified idiot's shorthand for the end of the first Cold War, before it became obvious that Vladimir Putin and his backers wanted to ramp it all back up again. |
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| Steely Dan – Your Gold Teeth Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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rainwalk: " He advises her to get real : "use your knack, take one step back". She's outclassed in a town like Chicago and should either go somewhere else or get a job." I'm not sure if she's outclassed in a town like Chicago, or if there simply aren't the right kind of marks for her special skills, with the right kind of money. |
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| Steely Dan – Your Gold Teeth Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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"There ain't nothing in Chicago For a monkey woman to do" I could be wrong, but is this a reference to "The Monkey" in Portnoy's Complaint? The meme seems to be the same - a woman who uses sex and head games to lock down her man.... |
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