| John Lennon – Imagine Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| It has been sung to and by enormous crowds, caught up in the euphoria and sense of intellectual freedom it invokes. Yet how many of those people would seriously consider subscribing to some of the ideas in the lyrics. | |
| Miles Davis – So What Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Someone wrote lyrics and sang them. Eddie Jefferson? They mentioned people criticizing Miles and Trane for leaving the stage when their solos were over. So, comes the response, "So what?" Exactly my reaction when I saw Miles turn his back to the audience. If not seeing what they expect bothers the critics so much, maybe they should close their eyes, turn off their minds and just listen. |
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| Miles Davis – Blue In Green Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Yes, but it's a bittersweet sadness. This is not a literal interpretation but a illustrative metaphor. Say you feel the pain of having lost a loved one. Yet if you could somehow alter history so that person would never have come into your life, you would not choose to do so. Perhaps there's a bit of Rorschach Blot effect in this. Blue in Green also speaks to me of a heart which even though hurt, still harbors an unbreakable devotion. It is in any case to me, the epitome of the mesmerizing magic of the great Bill Evans. There are many songs that express conflicting emotions--despair & hope, frustration & determination, longing & self-discipline, and so on. For an example of another instrumental number evoking (in my opinion) a range of emotions, check out "A Remark You Made" by Weather Report. Yes, there is melancholy, but to my ear comes also an acceptance leading toward a kind of tentative equanimity if not serenity. |
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| Bob Dylan – With God on Our Side Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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In "Voices of A People's History," Howard Zinn said: "World War I cost ten million lives, and after it was done no one could figure out why it was fought." |
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| Pearl Jam – Masters of War Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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"You've thrown the worst fear that could be hurled; The fear to bring children into this world" speaks to me of a world threatened by nuclear annihilation. Although Vietnam was a "proxy war" where the hostilities behind the Cold War erupted into a "hot" conflict, that did not specifically cause people to question their instinctual drive to reproduce. The Cold War created that fear well before the U.S. went into Vietnam. |
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| Pearl Jam – Masters of War Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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:)4thecamera bought up the question of which war this song is "about." I think this misses the point. Yes, it was written long before the Iraq War. If it was written around the beginning of the Vietnam War, that may have been a major impetus or motivation for writing it, but the lyrics apply to war in general. Bob wrote in the liner notes that came with the record that he was "scared" by what he had written, because he didn't usually "go around writing songs wishing someone dead." Still, he released the song. This reflects the moral ambivalence inherent in confronting evil. An obvious example is, both World Wars motivated some pacifists to change their minds and take up arms. But "Masters of War" cuts thru the justifications and motivations for any particular war. It focuses instead on the difference between the old men who make the decision to make war, and the young people they send to fight and die. See also "With God On Our Side" and the more metaphor-laden "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall." The latter came out in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis as it was called, or the real threat of imminent nuclear Armageddon as it was privately, silently contemplated in the hearts and minds of people worldwide. It was the ultimate horror which lay in "the pit of man's fears," as Rod Serling called it. The later-coined phrase "The Sum of All Fears" also applies. People assumed the "hard rain" meant nuclear missiles. I've read that Bob said he didn't specifically mean that. What did he mean? I think Bob wants his listeners to figure that out for themselves. |
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