| OutKast – Hey Ya! Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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It's about the fear of a broken heart, the fear of loneliness. The music is his escape, and is probably "the love below" the false-love of the relationship. You start with this really 'happy' idea, "I know she doesn't cheat on me because she loves me." And that happiness really sets the tone for the whole music. Lots of people prefer the depressing acoustic covers, but the point of the chorus is that you get lost in the love of music. So the problem is not the breakup, it's the drama -- it's that the fear of heartbreak itself drives them apart. And he would rather have something casual, and simple. So the opening line immediately turns into the question -- does love just mean "I don't want to be alone?" Is it just empty, convenient, an excuse for sex? He tells himself that he shouldn't fight the happiness of the original thought -- because otherwise he'll just be unhappy -- but his respect to his parents shows that he thinks the very idea of "love" is tricky. Maybe even nonsense. So he throws himself into the chorus. Coming back from getting lost, he's reflective -- you think you're in love at first but that doesn't mean anything; you have great sex but it just comes with annoying drama, she wants to know if you *really* love her *forever* and why the hell would you promise that if nothing lasts forever? And it's clear that these worries about heartbreak are the entire problem which makes their sex upsetting. As he throws himself back into the chorus he just insists that the relationship should be purely physical, he doesn't want the drama and the fear of heartbreak. He wants to celebrate life with singing and dancing and casual sex rather than deal with the unhappy drama of a relationship. |
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| OK Go – Back From Kathmandu Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Stephanie: I *think* that the relationship suggestions are due to misleading vocabulary -- 'you', 'beautiful', 'love' -- suggesting that he is talking to a lover. It's possible that 'Back from Kathmandu' means that he is returning from a distant city back to his lover, but this is rather indirect for OK Go. I mean, if you look at how they use song titles, it's often a bit of the first line of the lyrics or part of the chorus which gets reflected in the title. I would suggest that there was a literal trip to Kathmandu which was 'like a dream' (hence the title comes directly from the repeated chorus 'in the dream it was just like it is'). This trip seems to have opened up the singer's perspective on a whole lot of topics. Kathmandu is of course the big-city capital of Nepal, and if you've never been there, visiting Nepal is sort of a bizarre time-machine experience: you return to this simpler, medieval life where people have next to nothing. When someone wants to construct a modern bridge with steel cables, human beings carry them by foot, three or four people coiling this massive heavy thing around all of them, then hiking to wherever it needs to go. Life is slow and taken as needed; the kids build their own balls out of reeds and grass because they haven't got anything else to ply with. It looks like many of the verses talk quite a bit about Buddhism. If that is the organizing metaphor, then here's what these verses mean: 1. "In the dream you were someone different, you and everyone else all at once. You were beautiful, you were beautiful: in the dream you were just like you are." I think this refers to the raw beauty of *authenticity* -- everyone acted 'as they truly are' in Nepal, and this was beautiful. 2. "You loved everyone like a sovereign -- half magnanimous, half unimpressed. And I was talking too much; I was trying too hard: in the dream it was just like it is." I think this refers to the Buddhist faith in particular, which focuses on having a compassion for other living beings, eliminating striving, meditating in silence. Buddhist love isn't this romantic ideal, but it's about caring deeply for people with this base compassion. So he's commenting on how he feels utterly struck by inferior, because he talks too much, he tries to be something he's not, and here he sees how we actually are, how to be compassionate to other living beings. 3. "Everything was so simple: things are how they always will be. You are the answer to the question that is me: in the dream it was just like it is." I think this is the 'time-travelling' experience of Nepal, and identifying a yearning to go back there, that he has found out something profound about his own potential while there. But it might also be emphasizing some less-Buddhist transcendental belief: fatalism and the some feeling of finding yourself in others. 4. "We were captive in, in a prison, where everyone was guilty by mistake. And it was infinite, it was infinite: In the dream it was just like it is." I think this builds on the Buddhism theme -- the prison is one of trying too hard, of being too attached, and everyone is born to this by mistake in Buddhism. The temptation to get attached to things becomes infinitely consuming, or so. I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's a very apt description of what's called 'samsara', the cycle of tedium, attachment, and suffering, which Buddhism says you must reject in order to gain enlightenment. 5. "And I asked if love could free us, you said, 'no, probably not -- but everybody needs to get through the night, and love is all we got.' In the dream it was just like it is." I think this is a question that he actually asked a Buddhist monk, and a summary of the response, because it certainly sounds like it. If it's so important to be compassionate, does that mean that love frees us from attachment and samsara and struggle? No, probably not: love is another attachment, as risky as the other ones, and if you get stuck in love you can end up similarly needy and suffering because of it, just as with any other addiction. But, it's still important, because compassion is crucial to living a good life: it's the only resource we have for getting through the day. |
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