| Fountains of Wayne – All Kinds Of Time Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Very beautiful how the song brings you into the QB's Super Slow Mo moment - most comments here have captured that well. But remember, FOW's mini character portraits all evoke a feeling, a tone, an attitude, and one that the artists are careful to separate themselves from, even as they delineate it. That's what gives their songs a steady undercurrent of ironic detachment -- even and maybe especially the most 'beautiful' ones, like this one. After all, this portrait is deeply familiar - we've all been brought into Super Slow Mo moments like this before, in countless movies and advertisements. It's a conventional subjective POV shot - the family at home, the girlfriend, the fans and the noise, then everything quiet and slow and the receiver appearing in 'a golden ray of light'. Then FOW lards it on big time: he feels a 'strange inner peace', 'the whole world is his'. But - this is called irony. No one has 'all kinds of time' in this life. Especially a QB as he lets the ball go. As always they've set the listener up perfectly for the next image. But they let us fill it in: Just as the QB releases the ball, knowing it's a perfect throw, feeling his inner peace -- he's crunched by a defensive tackle, who breaks his neck as he falls, dead, his family watching on TV. In super slow mo. |
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| Fountains of Wayne – Mexican Wine Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Thank you Dabizi! If any FOW bandmates ever read this thread they will be completely depressed until they come to your post. Everyone else simply mirrors back the narrator's lazy, hackneyed, feel-good emotional response to the world. (Party on, dude, whatevs) You actually gave it a fraction of the human thought and feeling that the artists put into it. (For what it's worth, i think the corrosive 'tude the song captures & critiques is not ONLY found in upper middle class suburbs, but all over the place. Like in middle class towns, urban hoods, rural communities, where the posters on this thread reside!) But you're so good i'll quote you again: Rated 100 I'm a little surprised that no one has suggested this yet (and I'd also like to put a vote in for 'wheels of PROmotion', which is what he clearly sings), but this song is certainly not a positive "everything will be all right" message. The premise, as in most of the songs from this album, (and, really, most every FoW song in general) is of suburban desperation. It's the same idea as Hackensack, Fire Island, Bright Future in Sales, and even Stacy's Mom. The most important thing to realize is that you have an untrustworthy narrator here. Listen to what he's saying in the chorus: "I tried to change but I changed my mind." When you put that together with "The sun still shines in the summertime / I'll be yours if you'll be mine" you've got a pretty solid presentation of the societal ills associated with the wealthy, suburban upper-middle class in America. (Specifically the New York metropolitan area, if you'd like. Long Island, if you wanna go deeper.) It's a testament to the new post Gen-Y descriptor as the "Me Generation" - morally ambiguous [unbridled] selfishness in everything we do. Having the physical capability to change, but being so emotionally incapable and lazy that you just give up and use the excuse of "I could've, but I changed my mind." Even "I'll be yours if you'll be mine" is a barter, to pass the responsibility off on another. Everything else here is just a painting of banality. It's the theme for the whole album. |
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