| Modest Mouse – Fire It Up Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I don't know what etceteranough means, or why the singer made it up..but to me, the song is pretty obviously about a guy on a road trip, with some friends and accounts of things he did on the trip "Make a beeline towards the border Have a drink, you've had enough" the drink part could refer to him and his friends having had enough of reality and thus drinking. the ice cube and suin thing could mean that their quest is fueled simply by dreams and futility and there's no point to it, as there's no point to saving an ice cube, etc. Also, whoever said the rolling boulder/tire/acid thing is an idiot.... |
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| Modest Mouse – Invisible Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I'll use himynameisbianca's version of the lyrics here (hello, Bianca! =)) =well listen dancing shifter, got a strong cell phone arm.= --How people are so hectic (dancing shifter) even in traffic, that they talk on the cell phone (cell phone arm); this is probably written to show who the song is directed to: a busy, hectic professional city worker type of person =you're not invisible inside your car= --I think I agree with everybody else here that invisibility really stands for inability to affect anything, to be in a ghost-like state. And the song keeps saying you're NOT invisible, which means that even though you think you're not affecting anything, you THINK you're just one of several billion who can't change anything...you actually ARE changing stuff, and having an effect on, and causing, stuff talked about later in the song. Being inside the car just underlines that you're in a vehicle of pollution. You're not inconsequential when you're polluting, in other words. =No matter what consuming sort of mission you're on= --I don't think anybody else pointed this out, but this line just screams "consumer" for me, which again establishes the target of the song to be one who doesn't give back but just consumes, again, a typical working big-city person. consuming being the consumer's mission once again underlines the harming the environment theme. =So absolutely mental gonna ramble and charge= --I think this has to do with how mad everybody gets in traffic, especially since the song keeps talking about cars and big cities. Also, might have to do with how uncaring people are about the environment, to the point of madness perhaps? =no matter, you just breathe it like flies in a jar= --I think this has less to do with the fact that we're trapped and more to do with the fact that even though we complain about it (ramble and charge, perhaps has something to do with this too), we all still breathe the pollution, we're flies and the jar is the earth. The cell-phone-talking-consumer guy gets what he deserves and can't escape it. =i like the saline tea. well it's true that the moon can pull it back and forth away from me i should just let it be. well it's true that the moon can pull you back and forth away from me= --I think this whole verse talks about the same thing (for once 0.0) which is, as some other people said the ocean (saline sea) and tides (moon pulls back and forth), the speaker wants to not pollute the sea...Somebody said the "you" in the last verse was put to signify time passing and aging, but then why would the "you" be pulled "back and forth"? I personally think that the last line goes on a bit of a random direction and maybe talks about how a person on a boat gets further/closer to the shore with the tide? I'm not really sure about that one. =well it had to happen sometime gonna shake like a charm= --Probably talks about an earthquake, which is obviously unavoidable in our current climate state (according to the speaker anyways =P), although what a "charm" means here, I'm not sure. =well we weren't invisible not all along no matter how many eons came and are gone we were not invisible= --This still talks about the earthquake from the last couple of lines (we thought nothing bad would happen, but then there was an earthquake and we found out "we were not invisible all along", we caused some changes in the world), but also zooms back and reintroduces the main theme, that even though we may not see changes for eons, we still have an effect on the earth, as we saw with the earthquake he talks about (perhaps a prophetic allusion to Haiti? ^.^) =i like the saline tea well it's true that the moon can it pull back and forth away from me and there's the orphaned sea, we were never invisible but that i guess we didn't see.= --Again, I agree that the saline sea is probably the ocean, and I also agree that orphaned means uncared for and uncleaned i.e. polluted. We always had an effect on the environment, but he guesses we just didn't see the effect, our true impact on it. =of course this all had been laid down way before we laid down for it all before we had a course, of course of course this all had been laid down before of course we lay down= --We planned a course for ourselves before any disasters, before we even knew about pollution, in a kind of a haphazardly way (we laid down for it all before we had a course, i.e. we industrialized before really thinking about our planet's future). "Of course we lay down" might be a repeating of the same idea here from "this all had been laid down", but I'm not sure. =i like the saline tea well it's true that the moon can pull it back and forth away from me and like the orphaned sea, we were never invisible but that i guess we could not see= --The only new idea here is that like the poisoned sea affected our drinking supply (well not the sea per se...well it poisoned the fish, which in turn poisoned us...)...What I mean is, both the sea and ourselves were thought to be inconsequential but in the end turned out to be of an extreme importance---and this fact, that we're, and the sea is, important, is what we couldn't see. =we'll get crushed by the ocean, but it will not get us wet. = --this is the most ambiguous line of the song...But as I was writing this, I came up with a clever interpretation (although I also like the one where the sea will kill us faster than we'll be able to feel its wetness), that is that either all the oceans will dry up due to global warming and the resulting dust storms and the like will kill us (thus, the ocean indirectly "crushing" us), or the poisoned water will somehow circumvent the filters and the pollution in it will poison everybody..although the "crush" imagery doesn't fit so well into this interpretation...Either way, there are several possibilities of how an ocean can kill (which "crush" may be a synonym for) without necessarily getting us wet (without us necessarily drowning in it) Phew. Sorry this was so long, just wanted to summarize and put together what everybody said and my own thoughts into one post...And yes, I definitely believe that this song, although not necessarily others on the album, is about the environment ^.^ |
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