| Radiohead – There There. (The Boney King of Nowhere.) Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Just a universal cry of how anxiety and doubt colonize relationships & keep us from taking care of those we love, like a father who can't even believe words of comfort he says to his own baby. Here we see the personal side of the Thief album's observations on an era of terror in a wider social, economic, political context- fear, the "thief" of the album title, makes us feel powerless and divides us. When we surrender to the "thief" and his sirens, we hurt, we can't love each other. | |
| Neil Young – See the Sky About to Rain Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| Someday... a change gon' come, oh yes it will. | |
| Joni Mitchell – Night In The City Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| Joni originally wrote this about Yorkville, Toronto | |
| Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Two extended observations, which may or may not be relevant, but I feel may have been somewhere underneath the more straightforward meaning of the songs, or maybe I just want them to be there, given my interest in these subjects. *The title, Tiger Mountain Peasant Song and its possible reference to the founding and subsequent history of the People's Republic of China. Tiger Mountain is of course in rural Washington, not that far from where this band originate. However, not being from the Northwest (sadly) I was not even aware of that mountain when I first heard the song. I also first heard it in the gorgeous version by the Swedish sisters, to date the best and most perfectly filmed cover of anything I've seen on YouTube. In any case, watching those girls in their forest, I was a little confused about the title of a song that's so obviously based on American or European folk music. Since we don't have tigers in the USA or Europe, I just assumed we didn't have Tiger Mountains, either. Washington State proved me wrong. Until I became aware, however, my first thoughts were of two things- the brilliant Brian Eno album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)- and the Chinese revolutionary opera on whose title it was indirectly based. Another reason I thought of that immediately is the use of the word "peasant" in the Fleet Foxes' title, a word which is not typically used to describe people in rural North America at any time in history, and not used for a very long time to describe people in rural Britain, where it turns out the melody drew influence from. In both countries, the transfer of the rural poor into capitalist-run factories, and the formal extension of legal rights to them, even if these rights were useless or nonexistent in practice, ended the use of that term, which denotes a kind of rural serfdom or slavery. Given that the cover of the album references medieval Europe, the setting of these songs could well include peasants. But in more modern times, the word "peasant," just like the group of landless rural laborers described by it, tends to suggest the revolutionary movement in China, and those inspired by it. Mao's innovation was of course to adapt Soviet interpretations of Marxism, which had mobilized urban workers in a technologically developed society, to a radically different, partially colonized, society, China, comprised almost entirely at that time of rural peasants. These innovations were later extended by Che Guevara in Latin America and Africa, and have been picked up by many Maoist movements worldwide, particularly those currently fighting the government in India. Once in power, Mao's peasant-centered ideology caused at least as much suffering as it directly cured, and set up a hypocritical state which continues to this day to justify its lack of democracy on Maoist grounds even as it came to reject Mao's ideals, moving to state-controlled, extreme capitalism. However, knowing even in its most excessive period, the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, that the state, with its history of manmade famines and false accusations of rightism, had few accomplishments more worth bragging about than its army's heroic struggle against the right wing Kuomintang back in the civil war of the '40s, Mao's wife Jiang Qing banned all existing movies and ordered that film production be reoriented around producing versions of her "eight model plays," most of them depicting the cruelties of pre-Communist life, or narrating the most heroic moments of the revolution. One of these revolutionary plays, translated to English as Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, depicted a heroic battle by the People's Liberation Army in 1946. Eno was in San Francisco when he stumbled on a set of postcards of images from the play, whose title was recycled for his own album, which by the way, bears no musical or lyrical resemblance to this song or anything by Fleet Foxes. I don't suggest this song is related to that Eno album, but I think the Chinese opera and the film based on it may be more likely sources of connection, even if the band arrived there through Eno. The Tiger Mountain film is apparently one of the most viewed in history, due to having been forced on so many Chinese in the early '70s as part of mandatory cultural sessions, yet it remains difficult to find with English subtitles. I would be extremely surprised if they'd seen it, even if they have a great interest in Chinese cinema. However, I think the use of the word "peasant" in this particular song title suggests that the band were well aware of this Chinese revolutionary context, probably through the Eno album, and that they were either playing with the Chinese association, or perhaps even meaning something by it. Mao's death in 1976 abruptly ended the reign of terror that had been unleashed in the previous ten years by his wife Jiang Qing and the Red Guards, leaving China in a chaotic, briefly unstable period of limited freedoms. This ultimately ended in the stability, market reforms, social unrest and crackdowns of Deng Xiaoping from 1978 to the '90s, during which, the economically successful China we know today (which is of course always very different from the China of yesterday or tomorrow) was born. Mao's portrait hangs over Tiananmen Square, and unless one is the leader of the country, one still cannot publicly criticize him, or the Cultural Revolution, even though both its best and worst ideals have been officially abandoned. It would probably be going too far to interpret this song as being about the death of Mao, and the way Chinese have distanced themselves from virtually all of his legacy while at the same time remaining, metaphorically, nostalgic peasants visiting Tiger Mountain, the site of his troops' heroism, trying to locate his body, and living in his "shadow alive and well", purporting to uphold his dead ideals while really "turning... to a [capitalist roader] demon". Yes, it would probably be going way too far. But, I still wonder... this band are just about ambitious enough, and their new song Helplessness Blues is just about quasi-Maoist (in a good way) enough in its yearnings to be a peasant laborer and belong to something greater than themselves, that I have a feeling they've read a bit about these things, in however scattershot a way, before titling a song "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song", and who knows what may be in there. *"I don't know what I have done/I'm turning myself to a demon" with reference to Twin Peaks When I looked at a map of Washington state to locate Tiger Mountain, I noticed it was very near Snoqualmie. That is where important parts of Twin Peaks (the waterfall in the credits sequence, for instance) were filmed. All I have to say here is that, like most of us, I'm sure this band have seen much if not all of the 1990-1991 Twin Peaks series and 1992 film, which present one of the few intensely affecting examples of turning into a demon. Twin Peaks is centered on the death of Laura Palmer, a seemingly perfect prom queen in a town whose most powerful adults are deeply selfish and hypocritical, and whose selfishness seems to embody itself in the demon BOB, who possesses Laura, and may or may not be real. Ancient woods, which Twin Peaks, a sawmill town, has in abundance, are metaphorical in the David Lynch/Mark Frost series, representing the deepest and purest source of life, as well as a place where the worst spiritual forces gather to prey on people's weakness. The story someone posted about a girl they knew who had sung carefree in the woods before she was living addicted on the street, reminded me of the story of Laura Palmer. Given that Tiger Mountain was probably even visible in some of the landscape shots used in the series, I wouldn't say this is a totally random connection. Greil Marcus wrote an interesting essay about Twin Peaks in 2006 in which he talked about the show's embodiment of the spirit of a murder ballad, "Down on the Banks of the Ohio," which I was reminded of, when someone interpreted this song similarly. |
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| Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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Two extended observations, which may or may not be relevant, but I feel may have been somewhere underneath the more straightforward meaning of the songs, or maybe I just want them to be there, given my interest in these subjects. *The title, Tiger Mountain Peasant Song and its possible reference to the founding and subsequent history of the People's Republic of China. Tiger Mountain is of course in rural Washington, not that far from where this band originate. However, not being from the Northwest (sadly) I was not even aware of that mountain when I first heard the song. I also first heard it in the gorgeous version by the Swedish sisters, to date the best and most perfectly filmed cover of anything I've seen on YouTube. In any case, watching those girls in their forest, I was a little confused about the title of a song that's so obviously based on American or European folk music. Since we don't have tigers in the USA or Europe, I just assumed we didn't have Tiger Mountains, either. Washington State proved me wrong. Until I became aware, however, my first thoughts were of two things- the brilliant Brian Eno album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)- and the Chinese revolutionary opera on whose title it was indirectly based. Another reason I thought of that immediately is the use of the word "peasant" in the Fleet Foxes' title, a word which is not typically used to describe people in rural North America at any time in history, and not used for a very long time to describe people in rural Britain, where it turns out the melody drew influence from. In both countries, the transfer of the rural poor into capitalist-run factories, and the formal extension of legal rights to them, even if these rights were useless or nonexistent in practice, ended the use of that term, which denotes a kind of rural serfdom or slavery. Given that the cover of the album references medieval Europe, the setting of these songs could well include peasants. But in more modern times, the word "peasant," just like the group of landless rural laborers described by it, tends to suggest the revolutionary movement in China, and those inspired by it. Mao's innovation was of course to adapt Soviet interpretations of Marxism, which had mobilized urban workers in a technologically developed society, to a radically different, partially colonized, society, China, comprised almost entirely at that time of rural peasants. These innovations were later extended by Che Guevara in Latin America and Africa, and have been picked up by many Maoist movements worldwide, particularly those currently fighting the government in India. Once in power, Mao's peasant-centered ideology caused at least as much suffering as it directly cured, and set up a hypocritical state which continues to this day to justify its lack of democracy on Maoist grounds even as it came to reject Mao's ideals, moving to state-controlled, extreme capitalism. However, knowing even in its most excessive period, the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, that the state, with its history of manmade famines and false accusations of rightism, had few accomplishments more worth bragging about than its army's heroic struggle against the right wing Kuomintang back in the civil war of the '40s, Mao's wife Jiang Qing banned all existing movies and ordered that film production be reoriented around producing versions of her "eight model plays," most of them depicting the cruelties of pre-Communist life, or narrating the most heroic moments of the revolution. One of these revolutionary plays, translated to English as Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, depicted a heroic battle by the People's Liberation Army in 1946. Eno was in San Francisco when he stumbled on a set of postcards of images from the play, whose title was recycled for his own album, which by the way, bears no musical or lyrical resemblance to this song or anything by Fleet Foxes. I don't suggest this song is related to that Eno album, but I think the Chinese opera and the film based on it may be more likely sources of connection, even if the band arrived there through Eno. The Tiger Mountain film is apparently one of the most viewed in history, due to having been forced on so many Chinese in the early '70s as part of mandatory cultural sessions, yet it remains difficult to find with English subtitles. I would be extremely surprised if they'd seen it, even if they have a great interest in Chinese cinema. However, I think the use of the word "peasant" in this particular song title suggests that the band were well aware of this Chinese revolutionary context, probably through the Eno album, and that they were either playing with the Chinese association, or perhaps even meaning something by it. Mao's death in 1976 abruptly ended the reign of terror that had been unleashed in the previous ten years by his wife Jiang Qing and the Red Guards, leaving China in a chaotic, briefly unstable period of limited freedoms. This ultimately ended in the stability, market reforms, social unrest and crackdowns of Deng Xiaoping from 1978 to the '90s, during which, the economically successful China we know today (which is of course always very different from the China of yesterday or tomorrow) was born. Mao's portrait hangs over Tiananmen Square, and unless one is the leader of the country, one still cannot publicly criticize him, or the Cultural Revolution, even though both its best and worst ideals have been officially abandoned. It would probably be going too far to interpret this song as being about the death of Mao, and the way Chinese have distanced themselves from virtually all of his legacy while at the same time remaining, metaphorically, nostalgic peasants visiting Tiger Mountain, the site of his troops' heroism, trying to locate his body, and living in his "shadow alive and well", purporting to uphold his dead ideals while really "turning... to a [capitalist roader] demon". Yes, it would probably be going way too far. But, I still wonder... this band are just about ambitious enough, and their new song Helplessness Blues is just about quasi-Maoist (in a good way) enough in its yearnings to be a peasant laborer and belong to something greater than themselves, that I have a feeling they've read a bit about these things, in however scattershot a way, before titling a song "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song", and who knows what may be in there. *"I don't know what I have done/I'm turning myself to a demon" with reference to Twin Peaks When I looked at a map of Washington state to locate Tiger Mountain, I noticed it was very near Snoqualmie. That is where important parts of Twin Peaks (the waterfall in the credits sequence, for instance) were filmed. All I have to say here is that, like most of us, I'm sure this band have seen much if not all of the 1990-1991 Twin Peaks series and 1992 film, which present one of the few intensely affecting examples of turning into a demon. Twin Peaks is centered on the death of Laura Palmer, a seemingly perfect prom queen in a town whose most powerful adults are deeply selfish and hypocritical, and whose selfishness seems to embody itself in the demon BOB, who possesses Laura, and may or may not be real. Ancient woods, which Twin Peaks, a sawmill town, has in abundance, are metaphorical in the David Lynch/Mark Frost series, representing the deepest and purest source of life, as well as a place where the worst spiritual forces gather to prey on people's weakness. The story someone posted about a girl they knew who had sung carefree in the woods before she was living addicted on the street, reminded me of the story of Laura Palmer. Given that Tiger Mountain was probably even visible in some of the landscape shots used in the series, I wouldn't say this is a totally random connection. Greil Marcus wrote an interesting essay about Twin Peaks in 2006 in which he talked about the show's embodiment of the spirit of a murder ballad, "Down on the Banks of the Ohio," which I was reminded of, when someone interpreted this song similarly. |
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