| Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band – Sugar 'N Spikes Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Ttsabout: urban/cosmopolitan multiplicity, the joy therein, against the classical logic of either/or & for the postmodern logic of and/and/and/and. Seen thru beefheart eyes, the city becomes and sprawling collage w/ neon lights stapled to faucets glued to smoke, the city becomes a ramshackle symphony where chevy's warble tremolo spiedel's(wristwatch) & whoopin' coughs punctuate a diamondback(snake)'s time signature. In this collage, bad mixes with good, sugar mixes with spike, and one can inhale the full variety of existence. If Beefheart is an absurdist/surealist, because he mixes and matches disparate images & sounds, guided by his subconscious dameon, well then, so does the city, powered by its libidinal economy. Like an octopus, nothing escapes postcapitalist urbanity's tentacles: the moon is for sale in a dime store. Instead of church, vicars, peter, paul, matt, luke & john the people congregate in darkness at the cinema, where images are spliced onto images, & the flick that is playing seems to be king kong, starring "misses" fay wray (so the city is probably nyc). |
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| Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band – Bills Corpse Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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You forget: these lyrics were written @ the height of the vietnam war. To me: its about man manufactured disasters & how our american 'dreams' support them. The lady with the redwhiteblue wears her patriotism like a hairdo, lives it like a 'dream', which would be shattered could she hear the children screaming- our sons, shipped oversea, trained to carpetbomb & machinegun; the innocent women, children they murder: what once was beautiful is now: bones, ashes, bones, ashes, bones. We murder them for their past beliefs, the religious & political & cultural thought that jerrymandered the world into nation-states, majorities & minorities The "all got together... out of shameful grief" lines are so poignant, cynical, sad: the power, knowledge, wealth, imagination of our nation, not used for good orbeauty, is instead harnessed to manufacture grandiose machines of death, to pollute our land with cancer & filth, to incarcerate & ghettoize & benumb. But beef<3 left the particulars vauge on purpose: humanity will always be at war with itself, will always harness its shame and grief as a community, and only love in private. Saddest lyrics ever. |
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| Tom Waits – Take It with Me Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Buelah might also be a reference to William Blake's cosmology, wherein Buelah (in the bible it is Palestine redeemed) is a metaphysical plane between Ulro (reality in all its cold, newtonian determinism) & Paradise. Buelah is where Blake's songs of innocence take place and could be equated with the freudian subconscious & the Jungian Collective unconscious. In The Marriage of heaven & hell blake calls it a place where "contraries are equally true". Buelah, a land of imagination & dreams, would be a place where death coexists with life and love could indeed be eternal. I think it fits, & wouldn't be surprised if Waits was a Blake fan. He's been in Jarmush films & Jarmush's Dead Man is full of Blake. | |
| Basement Jaxx – Raindrops Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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everyone list their favorite song(s) about rain! there are seriously bucketsfull! Mine- this one, billie holiday singing Stormy Weather, Bob Dylan Shelter From The Storm, and dusty springfileds 'i can see clearly now' |
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| Animal Collective – Turn Into Something Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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An adolescent, going thru changes - twisted insied ... you'll turn into something He takes his girlfriend's virginity - oh BLISSful BLEED i CAME out peaking & LEAKED out on prom night, or school dance - DANCED to some duds... GOWN his first time too, cuddling in afterglow - so often GREEN but she held me or maybe they just fingerbanged, & presented his pals the blood on his fingers? (And the cheers rolled out) [i HOPE not!] Or the bleed is blissful because she's not preggers... phew! She wishes he could stay every time because they're still in school, living with their parents, who frown on teenagers f**king. & dont miss me, I Rub away... has to be, don't miss me, when we're apart lets think of each other & ..touch.. ourselves. Turn into something... ACs songs are chock full of transmorgifications. Even the words turn into other words the more you listen! I'd say transformation, perception, naturalism/tribalism & anti-materialism are their big 4 themes... can anyone think of a 5th, its a better nunmber? Or maybe my interpretation is wrong and.. will something completely different? |
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| Animal Collective – Bees Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Final thought: On banshee beat, if you'll remember, they sing: "The words they sting like a stump of old wasps" So maybe the bees are the very words of this very very song! Sly words, wide words, wild words... they fly out of their mouths (like candyman) and sting us, getting under our flesh - & it hurts soooo good |
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| Animal Collective – Fireworks Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Finally, it could be: I am all; I see sometimes. But, that doesn't really make any sense. (or does it?) |
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| Animal Collective – Fireworks Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Another possible interpretation -- i'm ONLY all i see - out & about, in the world, we ARE our senses. I am the tree that i see, the fireworks i hear and the poo i smell, the turkish food i taste, the YOU that i hold up. That's why in so many animal songs, people transmorgify into animals, plants, words, sounds, minerals, objects... & Right now, you, reading this, are a computer screen, you are my words sliding across the slip stream of your mind. But when we are in a vacuum, without our sensual escape from our ego-prison, we cave-in on ourselves. We feel our pours. We feel ugly. We forget we are more than just this all too mortal flesh. (Besides senses: Genetically, we are our children, our babies too. And by extension, we are our babies poo. But our senses are ephemeral, the pass right by us, behind us, and are: gone. |
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| Animal Collective – Fireworks Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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They've got two flashing eyes and they're colored why They make me feel that I'm only all I see sometimes - most important lines in the song. Our senses are our only access to the physical world outside of our self. Our eyes, ears, nostrils, flesh, ask questions: 'who, what, when, why?" And the world answers us as best it can. Yet our senses are part of us, inside us. So all we feel and see is, in the most solipistic sense, ourselves. I'm only all i see... sometimes. Sometimes we reach out beyond the prison of our senses, of our selves. When we love. When we create. Words, lyrics, music, kisses, hugs. These things are half inside us, half outside us, jutting into the ears, eyes, mouth, flesh of another. A shared space. So, i'm only all i see sometimes... and sometimes not. |
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| Animal Collective – Fireworks Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I heart your interpretations! But i must beg to disagree on a few points. 1) This album came out on 2007. But your interpretation still applies - bush was blowing up our deficit still six years after '01. 2) While the genii made us out of earth 'chemicals' you forget that the genii is himself magic. We are yes, a bundle of molecules and Newtonian/Einsteinian physics, but its all held together with something, greater, more ineffable, more mind blowing than just carbon and water. Science + Magic = You. 3) Unless you live in disneyland, fire-works are not normal every day occurrences that we take for granted. The sacred night, fireworks, family beaches makes me think its a 4th of July beach BBQ. |
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| Animal Collective – Street Flash Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Fill your life with VERBS, not NOUNS, is the moral to this song. I don't care about material things- sings the animals on My Girls. And on Sweet Road, the traveler must learn to lay down his burdens before she can move on. And so many of their songs are about what the philosopher Felix Deleuze calls becoming-animal. They are about learning how to use your body as if it were a new thing, about going native, running wild, getting us 'ancient apes' in touch with our inner monkey. The more crap* the narrator has, the less he seems able to do. Now he has installment plans, tivo'd flicks, facebook updates, and so forth crowding out his life. His TV shows him all the things he is not doing. Inside Fever- watch out, its contagious!! * - its important how we refer to posessions as sh*t and crap - as children our first object we have to store away is our feces - always in the same spot (like a bank deposit), always the same ritual before & after for which we were rewarded or punished, leads to screwed up behavior concerning objects latter on down the line. |
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| Animal Collective – Did You See the Words Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Words are alive, for the animal collective. (Theres something living in these lines) They are (maybe messy) bodily functions. "The subconscious is structured like a language" - Lacan The AC cut words open, spilling out their oozey, glitchy, nonsensical inner gist. Before we learn to talk, we scream, and the scream is our first word. It means 'i am here! i am alive! Listen!" And the collective screams a LOT. Words presume the presense of another lifeform outside of ones self. Language is not our ego, but our desire, the gooey perforated membraine that designates an area inbetween a YOU and a ME. Words are sex. Without language, there would be no love. But the couple becomes quieter at home. The membraine between them is no longer linguistic, but fleshly. Instead of words - tongues, arms, hair, noses, breath. A different language. |
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| Animal Collective – We Tigers Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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"Katie did" is, has to be a pun (the a.c. loveth their puns) The katydid, latin name Tettigoniidae, or bush-cricket. They are li'l green masters o' camouflage & as such are often mistaken for leaves: I'm like this, and your like this, but the katydid is like 'that'. It jigsaws in with the transmorgifying 'becoming-animal' theme of the song - people as animals, love as chips, bones as sounds, insects as leaves. By this logic, maybe ogres are the tigers saying "Oh, grrrr" !? Katydids also like to fly around the jungle pretending to be airplanes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tettigoniidae |
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| Animal Collective – We Tigers Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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"Katie did" is, has to be a pun (the a.c. loveth their puns) The katydid, latin name Tettigoniidae, or bush-cricket. They are li'l green masters o' camouflage & as such are often mistaken for leaves: I'm like this, and your like this, but the katydid is like 'that'. It jigsaws in with the transmorgifying 'becoming-animal' theme of the song - people as animals, love as chips, bones as sounds, insects as leaves. By this logic, maybe ogres are the tigers saying "Oh, grrrr" !? Katydids also like to fly around the jungle pretending to be airplanes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tettigoniidae |
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| Animal Collective – Sweet Road Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| The song has a simple, childlike dream logic. Put down your burdens (stones, purse, guilt, worry, materialism, status, the blahs) and the sweet road of life will roll out before you. | |
| Animal Collective – Bees Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Some other good 'Bee' songs are: Muddy waters: I'm A bee Syd Barret: Kingbee Mercury Rev: Chgasing a bee (if you like animal collective, you'll like early mercury rev) &, of course, Rimsky-Korsokov's "Flight of the Bumblebee." Can anyone think of any others? |
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| Animal Collective – Bees Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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The reason bees fly in articulate (good word slowdown!) jackson pollock squiggles is their multi-lensed polygon eyes askew their p.o.view. Evolution did this to make them hard to catch. To the bee, she is flying straight - it is the world that squiggles around her. Which makes you, like SlowDown & Summer said, think about perspective. Suss it out. 'flying', 'violent' 'sly' 'scary' 'wide' 'wild' 'crying' Each of us has our own private time ( see slowdown, above) & world & meaning & needs. The words suggest the danger of bees - the stingers, the yellow & black warning hues. The music suggests the beauty, the wonderment, the amber, the honey. Animal Collective's world is like William Blake's Buelah, "where contraries are equally true." & the similarity of bees with needs suggests the bees as needs, the swarms of petite desires that thrall and animate our lives. Do you need us, then, is do you need my needing, do you need me to need you, do you need me to need you to need me, etcetera, etcetera. The long ee sound, the long, trailing strumming sounds. & the repetition of I take my time, you take your time - how strange we think of time as a possession, something we can own, the perennial equation of time with money - when to 'take' your time really means to let it go, set it free. |
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| Animal Collective – Bees Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| I think part of the reason the animals garble, murmer, mummer, mumble, lisp, lilt, squeak and spit their lyrics is to encourage mis and re interpretation. Just like they have a non-hierarchical (no lead singer) rhizomatic, tribal band structure, they have a non-hierarchical 'fill in the blanksish' approach to audience and meaning. You mishear something, you like it better than what it really is, you realize you can write lyrics too, you realize what funny little things words are, you realize mistakes are the gateway to wonderment. | |
| Afghan Whigs – 66 Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Replace please for me "'69" (oops) with (my) "'65" (bad). | |
| Afghan Whigs – 66 Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Animal Collective also rhyme rabbit with habit. & of course Jeff Airplane's sonic LSD oddesy "White Rabbit". Probably no relation. Just saying. More likely, this is a song about furry sex. But really, show me where you got it cause i know you have it is more than most like 'come on babe, i know you've got some extra coke/weed/junk/pills on you, lets get high together and drill baby drill etc' What it is I most really want to know, tho: why is the album called '69 (i assume cover is a reference to Apollo Moon Landing), but this song is called '66. Why did Dulli opt out on an easy sexual allusion?? That is SO not like you Dulli. Know what it is I am saying? Any answer would equal most appreciated, thankx. |
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| Tom Waits – Jockey Full of Bourbon Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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At times the narrator seems to be a pirate, at times he seems to be a new yorker - but indeed, there were pirates in 19th new york - though they mostly just stole docked ships, they were some hellacious palookas. This makes the price of the 2$ gun make more sense. The 2$ gun shows up again in 'Potter's Field', where it *doesn't* jam, & indeed causes a $100 dollar wound (price of the bandaging). Here, a $100 bill makes 'the lights go out' - either the going rate for an assassin, or, more likely, the price for enough narcotics to balm the narrator's bleeding consciousness. Dutch Pink can be a chalk or yellow dye*, a yellowish dutch lake, a small, flat bottomed dutch ship, or 'pincke', or the little finger (our work pinky comes from the dutch pincke). But probably, its slang for blood. Slingerland is a New York town famous for its drums (though they never made 'ride' cymbals). If anyone knows if Stazybo and Edna Million are anything but made up names, let me know! |
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| Tom Waits – Jockey Full of Bourbon Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| as sinister as touch of evil, but as sureal as Kiss Me Deadly | |
| Tom Waits – Misery Is the River of the World Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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The Pixie's "This Monkey's Gone To Heaven" makes a good comparison, as in both mankind, through an odd evolutionary synecdoche, is a single, symbolic monkey who can't help but destroy himself and everything around him. In FishThatSwim's nursery rhyme's [above] moral, every object, every animal, every person is given an infinite worth through a kind of 'butterfly effect'. In Wait's take, everything in the world is found lacking, and that lack (which we might call desire, for we can only want what we don't have) engulfs us, destroys us. There's nothing kind about mankind uses one of my favorite rhetorical devices: antanaclasis, where a word is repeated with different meanings, like othello's "Put out the light[candle], and put out the light[murder]." I'm assuming the bit about thistles and tree trunks doesnt refer to the prior church/chapel, but to the miniscule good in the world - big as a thistle up against an oak. But that doesnt seem quite right to me- any ideas? I like to think of the song as a Theodicity- a meditation on the origin of evil in the world. I love especially the line where the devil knows the bible like the back of his hand. |
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| Tom Waits – Misery Is the River of the World Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Good point! Its nice to compare this song to the Pixie's "This Monkey's Gone To Heaven", where mankind is also, through an evolutionary synecdoche, a single monkey who can't help but destroy himself and his world through a reverse midus touch that turns it all to shit. | |
| Tom Waits – Misery Is the River of the World Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Charon shows up in Wait's Potter's Field, piloting a Ferry across (if i recall rightly) NYC's East River. Whoever's talking, he has intimate knoledge of the workings of God & the devil. | |
| Tom Waits – Potter's Field Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Finking on your own mom: one shot of whisky. Blackmarket gun: $2. Bandage for the gunshot wound: $100. A Dancehall girl's crooked smile: $1,000. Listening to the songs of a sureal degenerate hobo shaman: Priceless. The lyrics scan like the some mad, sureal, fever-dream of a film-noir - "Kiss Me Deadly" on acid. 'Nightstick' is a policeman's baton, metonomically a policeman; a shillelagh, an irish cane. So the narrator, perhaps the 'blind man', is a whisky soaked stool pigeon, exchanging, for a drink the location of a crooked irish cop, who misled his superiors ('stackin' the deck against a dragnets eye') so he could take revenge upon a druglord solo, pocket a half-mil in bloodmoney, and by 'throwing out handfuls of blood-stained salary' takes over the local blackmarket. Potter's Field is where NYC once buried its nameless dead. A scarcrow might mean a strawman - a person who doesn't exist. So maybe the 'hero' or the 'nightstick' has stolen the identity of someone buried in potter's field. |
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| Tom Waits – A Sight for Sore Eyes Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Palooka is a 20-30s term for a boxer of average skill: a big, dumb lug who get paid to be punched in the face - like the narrator, a palooka's life is all about rolling with the punches. Notice how the mention of a car parked under a bridge foreshadows the crash in the next verse; Donger's point is especially prescient- the line "& he died with the radio on" is cut short, just like his life was cut short - by a car suddenly coming to a stop by hitting a telephone pole as punctuation mark. 'Hey barkeeper whats keeping you keep pouring drinks' is especially brilliant. Its an example of either polyptoton or antanaclasis- repetition of the same word with different a) roots b) meanings*. Like lots of Waits, this could be 1/2 of a play's dialogue. With the other conversationalist's words elided, it seems as if the narrator is talking to himself more than his friend, speachifying as drunks do. Its as if the more he drinks, the more the past comes swirling into focus, making the present fades away. I wouldnt be surprised if his 'new' car was almost a decade old. Its 'new' because his old friend hasnt seen it yet. * An example of antanaclasis if Franklin's: We must all hang together, or we'll all hang seperately; and of polyptoton is Shakespear's "With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder." Wait's phrase is a mix of the two - different meanings, different roots. |
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| Tom Waits – Coney Island Baby Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Oh: the 'world is a pearl' in Wait's "Good Old World 'Gypsy Instrumental'. Looks like the rhyme was so nice, he used it twice. | |
| Tom Waits – Coney Island Baby Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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For you non NYers out there, 'Dreamland', located next to Astroland, was one of the amusement parks in Coney Island (1904-11). I believe it was the one that featured an entire miniature NYC peopled with midgets living on premises & where an infamous escaped elephant rampage occurred, which lead to the world's first electrocution of a living creature (done by Thomas Edison). Now, it is home to one of the worlds last freak shows. As you can see: Tom Wait's kind of place! P.S. Coney Island Baby was a 60s doo-wop song (not sure by who) & a Lou Reed Song as well. P.S.S. Love rhyming princess w/ red dress (something too dangerous about red for a princess to wear it), and off rhyming pearl w/ world - it makes you think of the world as a pearl, perhaps a pearl inside a clam washed up with the syringes and bottlecaps and flotsam, on a coney island beach. |
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| Tom Waits – Telephone Call from Istanbul Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Buelah is a reference to the bible & perhaps William Blake's cosmic mythology. In the bible, Buelah is the name for Palestine redeemed: "and they land shall be called Buelah, for the lord deligteth in thee, and thy land shall be married (Buelah is hebrew for married)." Isiah:lxii:4. For Blake, Buelah was inbetween Eternity (Heaven) & Ulro (eality in its most materialistic, newtonian, soulless form). Buelah is the wellspring our Freudian subconscious and Jungian collective unconscious where "contraries are equally True" (Marriage of Heaven & Hell). It is the spiritual location of Blake's "Innocence" poems. In short, it is certainly a place where you could "drive a car when your dead", cut holes in time, where fireballs (like burning bushes)talk & where you might find your long lost love returning from halfway around the world. | |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.