| The Fray – You Found Me Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I think this board is incredible, because of the ways that religious people will bend their thinking to force God into it. The song is very clearly about someone that felt abandoned in a hard time, presumably by the Christian God, and the song is about the frustration associated with unanswered prayers. Yet, like a bird flying into a windowpane again and again, people post to this board that God works in mysterious ways, he has a plan, he blesses people in other ways, as if by chanting these mantras they will somehow become relevant or reasonable. Faith is the most dangerous idea going around, and this board is a microcosm of why--because people can be convinced to believe things that aren't real, they can be made to act in ways that are unreasonable. No less than half of the religious posters I read in this board came away with some kind of redemption, where the singer and God make up. This part of the song does not exist. The phrase "You found me," in no way implies that God was there for the singer, and in fact, the last verse says "never left me no messages/ You never sent me no letters/ You've got some kind of nerve, taking all I want". Does this sound like "You came around after a while, and now we're cool" to anyone? I suspect that religious people that read this interpretation in the future will feel compelled to refute it, and scuttle around to mount some kind of counter-interpretation. Yet, you'll have to dig deep into the song, providing me with secondary, even tertiary gradients of meaning for certain words and phrases, 'reading between lines' and the like. That level of sophistication is a reflection of the fact that the religious-happy-ending interpretation is very hard to defend. |
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| Natalie Merchant – Carnival Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I think Kei's is a defensible interpretation, but I come away with less of a sense that the 'world is a stage' where all is superficial when I hear this song. I think as opposed to emphasizing the world's 'facade', she is trying to emphasize the tendency of each individual person to be ego-centric in their personal interpretations of the world. I grant that the lyric "Hypnotized, mesmerized by what my eyes have seen?" seems to imply the 'superficial' interpretations, but lyrics like "Have I been lost inside my self and my own mind?", along with "scarlet welcome carpet/they just rolled out for me" and "actors took their/ places next to me" could be interpreted not as relating to a facade, but a preoccupation with oneself as opposed to others or the world without one's own mind. Hence other people being referred to as actors instead of people, etc. |
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