| Devin Townsend – Awake!! Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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And Derrida was an atheist of Jewish extraction who spent his rather prolific life as a philosopher working on expanding and demarcating the good bits of Levinas' work (a practicing Jewish person who used to claim, hilariously, that his sociological publications and his religious publications were on different publishers so quit asking him about the god thing). Later Derrida would often refer, using Levinas' language and expanding on it, to the "trace of God" or "the shadow of the trace" found in the context, text, and subtext of various kinds of real interactions. From an anthropological context, spirituality and music are the two uniform things we have somehow managed to more or less all do, to some regard, from ancient tribes' animism to modern christianity or whatever. Spirituality and religion have, for better or worse, informed the human experience deeply; and so even though it may not carry a literal meaning - or even though it may seem, in context, to /be/ religious and not to really make sense unless it *is* literal - imo Devin's simply drawing on a fairly rich source material that most of his audience will be at least passingly familiar with, offering great metaphorical coherence when working with subject matter as evocative as music. Most members of Greek nobility, in day-to-day life, weren't especially pious, but that doesn't mean they didn't draw very freely from their religious traditions when discussing difficult subjects. Metaphors can illuminate. Don't always, though. Up to the listener whether Devin's metaphors mean something more to said listener. As to the hermeneutics of what Devin *intends,* well, if you ever get a chance to ask him, by all means :p |
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| Queensrÿche – Queen Of The Reich Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Yeah, there's really no depth here, it's as straightforward as it gets. Kinda like if you were trying to read a deeper meaning into Van Halen's Atomic Punk. Nope, it's all surface. They were just kids, it was the late '70s/early '80s guitar-oriented rock and metal scene, they wrote something that was "cool" and cyberpunk-ish for the time. That's pretty much the whole thing they've got going on for the eponymous EP (and as others have mentioned, the song came before the name!) and for The Warning. Rage for Order is their first album where they start dealing with concepts in a more thorough way, though their only two concept albums in the sense of "one story carried through to its conclusion" are Operation: Mindcrime, of course, and Promised Land. Empire is conceptually linked to the changing times, but not a concept album any more than Hear In The Now Frontier. "But dude, what about Operation: Mindcrime II?" Okay, fine, I'll give. But without DeGarmo, nothing in the world could save the project from being a try-hard also-ran compared to their glory days. To contextualize this song and others on the EP, gotta remember that the band minus Geoff Tate was originally performing Maiden and Priest covers... Which clearly had a HUGE influence on their first work here. Geoff Tate stepped away from his band to lend vocals so they'd have something to shop around, then once they agreed to get away from covers entirely, he joined the band. Real shame about the current state of things, but not every band is like able to stay together or remain relevant for decades. In fact, history shows most aren't. But this much public acrimony in a split is a rare thing. Ah, well. |
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| Chevelle – Jars Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Swing and a miss. "I'm a supporter of stopping global warming and saving the environment," Loeffler told Noisecreep. "The only thing is, I took a little bit of a different spin on it. It's a fictional idea, a crazy one. What if we were to save some of the Earth? The imagery is just saving everything into these jars down in the basement. It's very random. It's kind of absurd. If you can picture a cellar and a shelf full of jars and each jar has something a little different in it from the Earth. It's basically just saying, 'Wake up,' but hopefully in a more creative way than just blatantly coming out and saying, 'Stop global warming.'" How can the clear answer be posted, straight from the horse's mouth, and people still argue over the meaning of the song? It's not like we're discussing intricately structured literature. The meaning of this song in all likelihood is not polysemous, but direct, and, uh, well, there you go, he explains it. He's pro-environmentalism, on account of it's kinda nice having an earth to live on and it would be a shame to ruin it. Keeping the few bits we could save in jars would be an ignominious end for a pretty good planet. |
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