| Dan Fogelberg – Bones in the Sky Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| @[jimbo19355:6602] I put in the correct lyrics and then some automated process from a record company replaced them completely with the wrong song. I wish I had control over that. | |
| Vagabond Opera – Penny Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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This song is generally a "right here waiting for you" number. There's a lot of abstract imagery I'd like to hear other people's takes on. Let's just get the literary reference nailed down, though: "I will wait like Rosencrantz / for Godot" Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is another absurdist play written in pretty direct response to it. Spoilers: Godot never appears. R&G die. Both plays are about our inability to comprehend or foresee our lives, and both involve a lot of waiting. So one cool perspective on this song is that the singer knows this is utterly pointless. She's not coming back. She left, and generally in real life that is a one-way thing. If you sit and pine forever, that is your business. The singer is pining anyway. Is he like the men waiting for Godot who seem to have some choice in the matter but keep stubbornly waiting anyway, or like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who would like to get out of their situation but have been railroaded by fate? Does he have a choice about pining? |
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| Vagabond Opera – Penny Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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Working from the recording, several lines are *very* unclear. If anyone has heard it live, please help with the bits I couldn't confirm even with six listenings, such as "and left on bleak and summer's day Oh dog strikes eagles fireflies" which is just really improbable. |
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| Gill Landry – Mexico Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I just stumbled across this song on Pandora by feeding in Jason Webley and Tom Waits. On the slim chance that you like Gill Landry but haven't listened to the others, I'm just connecting the dots here and leaving a comment so my activity log will bookmark this song. And the punchline to this film noir portrait... "My baby loves my money and Mexico, but my baby she don't love me no more." |
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| Amanda Palmer – Doctor Oz Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Thanks! That was very helpful. | |
| Amanda Palmer – Doctor Oz Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Any Australians care to take a stab at the references here? This is on the Australian album, and the references to travel and weather are presumably about her experience, but I don't have any more background or other cultural specifics. | |
| Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – The Ship Song Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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By the way, this song makes me all schmoopy about the Doctor and River Song, who are a passionate disaster in the making no matter which direction you walk from. "We make a little history, baby, every time you come around." |
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| Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – The Ship Song Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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A good half of the lines in this song are specific literary or historical references to war. Usually stuff like "Love is a Battlefield" presumes that's a bad thing, that either it's a necessary evil or it's a relationship that's toxic. This doesn't do either. It welcomes, invites, embraces the engagement, even as it acknowledges the upcoming carnage. It's an interesting theme. It also lets you imagine the song as correspondence between the rulers of nations, if you like your romance *really really epic.* Line by line: Come sail your ships around me >>> Siege, notably Troy's "face that launched a thousand ships" And burn your bridges down >>> Preventing your own retreat by burning bridges or boats is a terrifying morale tactic, used all over the place. It says there can be no compromise. We make a little history, baby >>> What are history books punctuated by? Every time you come around Come loose your dogs upon me >>> "Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!" Translation: "Oh, it's on now." And let your hair hang down >>> And a swerve into Song of Solomon-style intimacy for the rest of the chorus. You are a little mystery to me Every time you come around We talk about it all night long We define our moral ground >>> Most wars start with a lot of diplomacy in which people try to both get what they want and look like the good guy. But when I crawl into your arms Everything comes tumbling down >>> Which all goes out the window when the cannons start. Your face has fallen sad now For you know the time is nigh When I must remove your wings And you, you must try to fly >>> No direct references to war in this verse, but the part about flight lends itself to siege interpretations; both sides can't win in this situation, and one side's freedom/integrity is in question. |
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| Leonard Cohen – Chelsea Hotel #2 Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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One note on the falling robin: From the Christian Bible, Matthew 10:29 "What is the price of two sparrows--one copper coin? But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it." So Leonard isn't God. He can't keep everyone in mind all the time. He doesn't presume a closeness of a long relationship, or the entitlement of a deep and lasting grief. This was the experience, it mattered as much as it mattered, no more, no less. (I have a shorthand for interpreting Leonard Cohen songs: Presume it's about sex, death, faith/religion, and the experience of being an imperfect human. I have yet to find one of his very popular songs that doesn't have at least a touch of all four.) |
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| Leonard Cohen – Chelsea Hotel #2 Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I love the duality of that. I didn't learn the heroin slang until years after I learned the slang, so I assumed she was shaking her fist in frustration, and then smoothing her hair and trying to calm down. Now I hear both and they both work all at once. | |
| Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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@honestfi: "nothing in here about being gay" For the record, I heard this song as being about gay history long before I self-identified as queer, and before I even had heard PSB was thought of as a gay band. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes when other people keep seeing something other than a cigar, you might be missing a reference. Obviously any song can and should have multiple meanings. I'm glad this song speaks to lots of people about growing up; the artists stated that as their intention. I want to see 80 different "It's about"s. I'd rather never see "It's not about" or "It's only about" again. I didn't find out about the Zelda Fitzgerald quote and its context until last year, which changed my impression of the first verse from the Roaring 20s to the late 60s. I still love my 20s version of the first verse, where the singer finds a cache of his grandparents' letters and discovers that sexual exploration is not just a modern craze, but the glitz and the glamour and the free love runs in cycles. That version doesn't go away just because I learn more about the song. Here's the text from the beginning of the music video: "I came from Newcastle in the North of England. We used to have lots of parties where everyone got dressed up and on one party invitation was the quote 'she was never bored because she was never boring'. The song is about growing up - the ideals that you have when you're young and how they turn out." Here are the specific parts that support a queer interpretation for me: "Dress in white" -- White Parties are a collection of AIDS benefits, heavily associated with GLBT people. They started in 1988, two years before this song was released, and had their roots in a long history of style-focused social events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Party "Find inspiration in anyone who's ever gone and opened up a closing door" -- Coming out of the closet is a powerful metaphor because it implies not only becoming visible, but going from a claustrophobic space to an open one. Many GLBT people, including Stephen Fry and Sir Ian McKellen, talk about young experiences of combing literature and history for queers and rebels, to know that someone else felt out of place and lived loudly. The second verse starts the 1970s with an ominous warning, but the narrator is young, has left home with a haversack, is dressed in fashionable shoes and has just "scored." (In either the sexual or drug sense, both were popular club pastimes and both have helped spread HIV.) Looking forward! All is hopeful! "Bolted through a closing door" -- especially with the haversack and the (train?) station, this suggests a coming-out to parents that wasn't pleasant. Again, lots of people's coming of age can match this, but getting kicked out of the house for being gay is a common story that, in context, comes quickly to mind. "All the people I was kissing / Some are here and some are missing in the 1990s"... This is the line that first made me go listen to the rest of the song as a possible gay history. I've heard the 1980s called 'the plague years' by gay men who survived the decade. In the gay club communities in big cities, sometimes it was multiple funerals a week. I cannot wrap my mind around losing that many friends and lovers, that young. This was not just one person's experience or the usual angst of college friends going their separate ways. This was the tragedy of a generation. "The creature I was always meant to be" -- Remember, the first two verses mentioned the door. This one doesn't. We're grownups, we're out of the closet in ways that were unimaginable in 1970, we're doing exciting stuff with our lives. It's amazing. "But I thought in spite of dreams / You'd be sitting somewhere here with me" -- Tragedy of a generation. In light of all that, this part of the chorus is full of joy and melancholy at the same time: "We were never holding back or worried that Time would come to an end We were always hoping that, looking back You could always rely on a friend" |
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| Pet Shop Boys – Rent Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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jayceeNL, the emotions in a paid relationship are no less complex than the emotions in any other relationship. Maybe in that moment it's not about the money. Maybe in that moment it's important that the john doesn't think it's about the money. Especially when a kept lover is being supported ("you buy me things, you pay my rent") instead of simply paid, it gets complicated. RedOctober, it could be about all kinds of relationships. On the other hand, it's not overfocusing on the sexuality of the singers to observe that "rent boy" is a specific term for a male prostitute with male clients, and the composer definitely knew that. |
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| The Dresden Dolls – Half Jack Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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As a note to other commenters, "hermaphrodite" is considered disrespectful and inaccurate, at least in the United States. Transgender describes someone who was assigned one gender at birth but identifies as a different gender. Intersex describes someone with mixed sexual characteristics. Because the first comment here used "hermaphrodite," it's used as the default term throughout most of the following discussion. I'm putting this reminder at the first use to let people know, so they don't walk away with a misunderstanding about which words are respectful. smashing_me, thanks for being the first to suggest the interpretation. |
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| The Dresden Dolls – Half Jack Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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To the best of my knowledge, Ms. Palmer was assigned female at birth. However, I really appreciate the way you've clearly called out all the lyrics that let me hear this as a song about a transgender experience. As a note to other commenters, "hermaphrodite" is considered disrespectful and inaccurate, at least in the United States. Transgendered describes someone who was assigned one gender at birth but identifies as a different gender. Intersex describes someone with mixed sexual characteristics. |
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| Dan Fogelberg – Bones in the Sky Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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The imagery of this song references the art of Georgia O'Keeffe, best known for images of the American Southwest and extreme close-ups of flowers. Her work was vivid, colorful, and often interpreted as sensual. O'Keeffe died in 1986 at the age of 98. This song was released in 1990. Dan Fogelberg, the composer and singer, also focused on the American West. This song makes it clear he considered her an influence. I speculate the lyrics line up to individual paintings, but I'm not familiar enough with O'Keeffe's work to lay it out. I hope an art fan will enlighten us in another comment. While O'Keeffe had bones as a major theme, one particularly famous work may have inspired the title: "Ram's Head, White Hollyhock and Little Hills," 1935, shows a bleached ram's head against a blue sky over the desert. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:O%27Keeffe_Georgia_Ram%27s_Head.jpg |
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| Paul Simon – Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Not that I object to surrealist interpretations, but the details of this song are so concrete that I'm looking for a real life interpretation as well. I can't find any evidence for Magritte having lived in New York, so "immigrant" is probably poetic license. However, he did several major exhibitions there and had good friends there, according to http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/rene-magritte.htm (one of several sources I skimmed looking for this). They are in a hotel, coming in from a giddy evening with the power elite, losing their clothes, and dancing to the popular music. They're stopping on Christopher Street and looking at the marvels of the New York fashion district. They're just living and being humans together. The time travel is the same trip all of us are making. When you're old and in a comfortable groove with your spouse, and you look back, what do you find? The music you danced to. The music you fell in love with together. "For now and ever after, as it was before." |
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| John Cale – Magritte Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I don't expect this is in any way the composer's intent, but the ominous tone and the way the lyrics hit my ears, I hear a heist in the making. After the first verse establishes tone and language, the second verse uses the same kind of language to describe the highly suspicious situation of an open window at a museum, with a car waiting outside. Artists are legendary and conspicuous, but so are art thieves. Which legend are we aspiring to here? The third verse reiterates danger, particularly danger to the art. Then there's the line that immediately twigged me as a double meaning, regarding the canvas upstairs: "Everybody knows Rene did that." The canvas is stretched for umbrellas and bowler hats, but it doesn't say the canvas contains those items yet. And if you forge them carefully enough, everybody knows Rene did that... whether he did that particular canvas or not. When I first heard this song, I was reading about Alexander the Great and thinking hard about how fame and glory interact with private realities, how sometimes the idea of a thing is more powerful than the thing itself. The subject of this song is an artist who drew a picture of a pipe with the caption "This is not a pipe," which is accurate, because it's really a picture. He also made a living as a forger for a while. I think it's fair to consider how knowing a painting was painted by someone famous affects our opinion of its quality. |
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| Genesis – I Can't Dance Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I was surprised to see that no one has yet mentioned the surface setting of the song, which is a man cruising a beach for scantily clad women, but having no luck since he has no substance past an initial swagger. I came looking for this song because I couldn't figure out where he was going with "selling" at all, since in the surface version, unless he's a street vendor or a prostitute (neither of which really fits), I'd call what he's doing "posing." Thanks, XyzzyMagicat, for giving some background on the satire of the music industry. |
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| Dada – Dizz Knee Land Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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jwill01, thanks for letting us know it was an actual ad campaign. I thought it was just some bizarre football tradition. (This is what I get for not following sports.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_going_to_Disney_World! has details; it's been an ad campaign featuring a Superbowl winner every Superbowl but one since 1987, and they've gotten other competition winners to do it as well. This song is not particularly subtle. The slogan had been aggressively associated with moments of triumph for six years when the song came out. These are all low-brow, self-destructive, or tragic situations. Suggesting that the appropriate way to celebrate these moments is going to Disneyland is a bitter contrast. |
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| Meat Loaf – Original Sin Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Ha! I was thinking "best Spike song ever," personally, but for approximately the same reasons. I was also appreciating the contrast between this and a lot of Meatloaf songs where he starts from a bad background but then his soul has been saved by power chords and sex. This seems like the hangover of that belief, edging him more toward the Tom Waits school of jaded experience. |
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| Pet Shop Boys – Indefinite Leave To Remain Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I need to clarify because I typoed are/were about the Iranian case. There was a lot of misinformation going around and the reporting was highly politicized. At the time, it was reasonable to presume from mainstream English-language coverage that the case was about consensual behavior. [The official charge was rape of a 13 year old, which may have been accurate. That doesn't change the symbolism intended by the dedication, which was based on the understanding at the time.] | |
| Pet Shop Boys – Indefinite Leave To Remain Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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"Indefinite Leave to Remain" is an immigration status in the UK. It's not citizenship, but there's no time limit on it, you have access to public services like health care, and if you stick with it long enough you can get full citizenship without other hurdles. A reasonable relationship metaphor would be getting engaged. This song sounds remarkably like a marriage proposal. I don't know about anyone else, but I'd get pretty swoony if someone was geeky enough to propose to me framed as a citizenship application. This is from a very political album, Fundamental, which was dedicated to two Iranian teenagers who are believed to have been executed for consensual homosexual behavior. The album also features "I'm with Stupid," which is about Tony Blair and George W. Bush. So they even managed to make the marriage proposal song political, which is topical since immigration was a big topic in the UK as of the time of the album, as was gay marriage in both the US and Ireland. (I'm not sure if the UK was dealing with gay marriage directly at the time, but it was definitely in the top international headlines.) [I'm a little boggled. I've never been the first comment on a song before, since I never hear new songs.] |
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| Tom Waits – Hoist That Rag Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Thanks to the people who dug up the specific name and phrase references in this song. Usually I have an idea about a song before I get here and I just want to confirm it. I came to this song surprisingly blank (I wasn't even thinking about soldiers, as I hadn't made out most of the words in the last verse) and appreciated the details. I just wanted to note that, completely separate from specific interpretation, "Well we stick our fingers in the ground, Heave and turn the world around" is a fabulous line of poetry. The sense of big changes starting in mud, in getting your hands dirty and putting your back into it, is both kinetic and symbolic. Pile on the rest of the soldier symbolism in the song and you get foxholes and trenches, mud and blood and a sense of impossible importance on tasks like digging a ditch and sitting down in it. |
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| Tom Waits – Little Drop of Poison Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I think you've just summed up 80% of Tom Waits songs ever, right there. He's like goth culture's unwashed drunk uncle. | |
| Talking Heads – Don't Worry About The Government Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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While this song is focusing on The Government, it sounds creepily predictive of what I've heard about working at Microsoft. They talk all day about work/life balance... and have laundry facilities in case you stay there 4 days straight trying to meet a deadline. It's just a short step to simply "inviting" employees to live there in bunkers. And then you get that one guy who buys into it and thinks this really is for our benefit instead of the organization's... |
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| Talking Heads – Don't Worry About The Government Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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"alone with my loved ones" = "along with my loved ones" "they own the buildings" = "they all need buildings" |
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| Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Up Jumped the Devil Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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"younder" should be "yonder" "villains" = "villain's" "Than the of a dead nun's heart" = "Than the chambers of a dead nun's heart" (missed word) "cathouse" should be plural: "cathouses" "And sampled their whares" = "And we sampled their wares" (missed word, and "wares") "One night I spat out / My lucky stars" = "That night I swallowed / My lucky star" (One=That, spat out=swallowed, stars=star) "got a proof" = "got proof" "I straight" = "Is straight" "eyes are hollow" = "eyes are puffed"? (Puffed or popped, but definitely not "hollow") |
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| Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Red Right Hand Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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This still holds up as the most elegant interpretation. There are many obvious ways it's representing Satan. There's some great lyrical support for the Holy Trinity and big corporations and media as well (described in many other comments). The binding thread is things which can be subverted into self-destructive bargains in which someone wins and it's not you. For a comparison (much less creepy and dramatic, but a similar theme), check out TMBG's 'Spiraling Shape' which has a surface reading of drugs instead of the Devil, but a similar deep reading that this kind of mistake could be prompted by anything. |
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| The Decemberists – On the Bus Mall Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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This song's been mostly scrubbed down, but one important lyrics correction left: We bit our tongues / Sucked our lips into our lungs / Because we were falling is actually We bit our tongues / Sucked our lips into our lungs / 'Til we were falling (It's definitely not "because," nor "and," no matter how I try to hear the syllable that way.) To be really direct here, performing oral sex on a man usually involves covering your lips with your teeth, and doing it in an enthusiastic fashion (as a professional must) can cut off your air long enough that you get dizzy. This lyric is both a poetic description and an accurate one. Biting one's tongue is not usually part of the process, but that seems more figurative to me, as in swallowing one's pride before doing something demeaning. [I do not consider either oral sex or even professional sex to be *necessarily* demeaning, but the people in this song are not in a good situation.] |
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| Emilie Autumn – Shalott Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Like a lot of Emilie Autumn lyrics, this reads to me as a feminist critique of old stories. Tennyson wrote a big old romantic ballad beloved by 13 year old goth girls everywhere (yes, I'm guilty). She was so alone, she gave up everything for her love of this amazing man even though the best she'd ever get from him was "She had a lovely face." While she was given a little agency, in that she looked rather than sitting and pining forever, she was put in a situation where even looking out her window would destroy her life and kill her. This song, while being a fair literal retelling, is flat-out railing against the idea that these are the only options. The Autumn singing of the character isn't sad or resigned when the curse destroys her life. She's furious. Punishing women's desires like this is a common theme in fairy tales and literature, and "some drama queen's gonna write a song for me" is poor consolation (to the point of insulting) for the person in the situation. There are a number more interpretations of both the original and the retelling: It's about disassociation (people who suffer from it often describe the sense of viewing the world only through screens), or the transition from being a 13 year old sappy goth girl to someone who's had real romantic and sexual experiences (you can't go back, and your former perspective 'dies'), or it's even an abusive relationship (seriously, Tennyson, you locked her in a room and told her you'd kill her if she went out and met anyone?) But in any of those cases, Autumn's adding more personal agency and legitimate protest to the situation. |
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| Vienna Teng – Harbor Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I'm chewing on the metaphor here. (Not denying what people have said above, but I'd like to dig deeper on this one.) This song talks a lot about blurry edges: Dawn, thinning fog, water on water, "the boundary you leave behind." That's not just aspirations, that's all the scary bits of personal growth and any movement outside of one's safe space, trusting that leaving the safety line won't kill you. It's hard to trust that "the answers are out there in the drowning deep." A harbor, on the other hand, is specifically both a boundary and a home. It's a much more freeing metaphor than an anchor. She's not tying anyone down, she's offering a space and a beacon so there's a point to call home when going out into the big unknown. My partner and I do this for each other, and it has nothing to do with sacrifice. We all have journeys, and all but a few of us need a beacon, a safe retreat available if the water gets too deep. |
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| Depeche Mode – In Your Room Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I've tried listening for the God and heroin interpretations, and the lyrics don't support either for me. (If they're personally meaningful to you, that's still great. I find tangential meanings in all kinds of songs.) The most common word in the song is "your," which could be targeted at anything. The second most common is "favorite." Drugs don't play favorites. Some people feel that they are more favored or chosen in God's eyes, and those people are often scary. That option's still on the table. "Here" is also prominent, and with the title it's a distinct place, from which the singer can be removed or in which he can be kept. There's no agency here. He might as well have said cage instead of room. Gods don't generally keep people in rooms. They don't generally have fleshy, breathing "feeling with your skin" relationships with people. I've been kept in my room by mental illness, and some people have very physical metaphors for that sort of thing, but even my depression doesn't control whether it's night or day. What controls night and day is a torturer. Consensual or creepy (or both, if you're into that), these lyrics are describing the kind of very physical, very intimate control a person can exert over a prisoner. From Dominance/submission to Stockholm Syndrome, this is the obsessive monologue of someone who has only one human contact to focus on and no control. "Favorite" captures the way a captor's focused attention is interpreted as love. In a D/s game, that interpretation's probably right, but humans seem wired to believe it no matter the circumstances. This is actually the kinkiest mainstream song I've ever heard. It's an intimate description of an erotic act (or fantasy or abuse) that's rarely talked about. |
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| Jacques Brel – Amsterdam Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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You can find full English lyrics for this elsewhere on the site, as the translated version has been covered by everyone from the Dresden Dolls to David Bowie to John Denver. (Seriously, John Denver?) Search for song title = Amsterdam and look for the first line "In the port of Amsterdam, there's a sailor who sings..." Amsterdam is what I think of as a portrait song. (That's not a technical term, and if there's a technical term for this, I'd love to know it.) It's a time and place and culture laid out in poetry. Tom's Diner (Suzanne Vega) is another song with a similar effect, though it's about a very different time and place. It's about the nihilism, self-destructive excess, and perhaps joy in living of being a sailor on leave in a foreign port. They're born, they die, they drink and fight and f*** in the few days they have off the ship. It's not glamorous, it's filthy... but it is exuberant. |
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| The Decemberists – The Perfect Crime #2 Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I personally think "Perfect" is being used ironically. As with Ocean's Eleven, I think *all their epic clockwork foolproof perfect schemes fail*. The tapwire is found, the bagman scampers... And we realize we won't be clear of the explosion in time, and mouth our silent goodbyes. I really love their songs that give a familiar plot or setting (in this case, The Heist Flick, in other cases Gangland Romeo and Juliet, Cold War Spy Romance, 19th Century Doomed Romance, etc.) in flashes and images and poetic moments instead of a long tedious ballad with all the steps spelled out. |
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| The Decemberists – The Bagman's Gambit Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I am also dubious about "There in Fours" and would like to know if someone has a more solid reference for what Fours would mean. I hear "there in force" and assumed the spy was "head held high in uniform," standing at attention in a military unit, which would make a formidable force. To those who ask "Why must you always make it a gay relationship?"... Life is not simple. Life is not clean. The spy can be anyone you want, and anyone I want, and that's very powerful. So can the singer, though the voice is male. Readers and viewers modify a story with their perceptions *every time they look at it.* Those of us who have an experience other than the cultural default are always looking for our own faces, to find stories about ourselves. This includes skin color, gender, relationship patterns, culture groups (how many shows can you name "the geek character"?) and a whole bunch of less obvious things. Sometimes if we can't find ourselves, we'll actually start making up versions where we are included; this leads to a lot of gay people humming love songs with reversed pronouns. This song saves us that trouble and makes it worth talking about. I appreciate that the picture in the liner notes was of a man and a woman. That was my first take on the story, and it's a beautiful, glamorous thing. I see Natasha in an open-top car in the last stanza. Bare shoulders, a chunky bracelet, big sunglasses, dazzling smile that you know never reaches her eyes. A woman who buys secrets with her body. It's a classic. But pretend we're in a lit crit class fifty years from now. We're not looking at the liner notes. All we have is the music itself, the lyrics as they were written, and the teacher says, "There are no gendered pronouns. When you think the spy is a woman, or when you think the spy is a man, how do you listen to it differently?" If the spy is male, the story in my mind is darker, more illicit (due to taboos), and... potentially more honest. The singer is the same, a mid-level, mild-looking clerk in Washington DC who's minding his own business except for this one big secret. The spy is a Russian version of James Bond from the books (Daniel Craig is pretty close), or Jack Harkness from Torchwood in one of his other lives as a military operative. A hard man, bleeding the charisma of competence. Maybe he snagged the clerk at a gay bar. Maybe he just spotted the desire and played it. Do they love each other? Probably not. Do they have any illusions about it? Probably not. Is James Bond even into that? Probably not as a matter of routine, but he has nerve endings and some information to buy. He's a practical man. Is the clerk helplessly, hopelessly smitten by the romance and drama of the whole thing? Oh yes. |
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