| Alphaville – Forever Young Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| I think there might also be an element of "Lets just get it over with" in there as well, like it's a wish to not have to live to old age knowing every day you could get snuffed out in a nuclear inferno. There's also an element of making the most of what you've got now because it could so easily be gone. Finally there's an air of disenfranchisement to it with the line "We don't have the power". If there is a nuclear war, the people this song speaks for would not be the ones who asked for it. | |
| The Beatles – The Fool on the Hill Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I know that The Fool is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as that's a matter of public record, but that's never what the song was about to me. To me, it was about scientific visionaries who saw the world a different way from the rest of us and advanced mankind as a result, but who were derided as fools or even persecuted for their assertions. The line "The fool on the hill sees the sun going down / and the eyes in his head see the world spinning round" especially make me think of Copernicus, the most known proponent of the theory that the Sun was the centre of the solar system and the Earth revolved around it. I can imagine him standing on a hill watching the sunset, and realising that what was actually happening was the earth was rotating until the sun moved behind it, while the sun stayed still. I also think of people such as Newton, Einstein and Galileo Galilei, and especially Richard Feynman, a man renowned for acting foolish to express complicated ideas to laymen. I know that's not what the song is really about, but it's what comes to mind for me. |
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| The Beatles – Octopus's Garden Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| There are far worse songs. Revolution #9 springs instantly to mind. | |
| The Beatles – Octopus's Garden Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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The story goes that during the recording sessions for the White Album, things started getting really heated (the band was in the early stages of splitting up at this point). Things eventually came to a head during the sessions for "Back in the USSR" and Ringo snapped, announced he was quitting and walked out. He took his family on holiday to Sardinia, where he met a fisherman. This fisherman talked to him a lot about the behaviour of various sea creatures. One of the things he told Ringo was that octopuses would collect shiny stones together to adorn their dens. This thought is what inspired the song. He did return to the Beatles of course, but the band was coming apart at the seams and broke up in acrimony not long after. It's interesting to think of it in the light of the above story. At first it seems like a simple children's song, but closer examination suggests that it expresses Ringo's desire to escape from the increasingly toxic atmosphere that was forming around the Beatles at that point and just live a simple life away from the limelight, like an octopus, and build a pretty garden for himself where he could hide away from it all. |
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| The Stone Roses – Made Of Stone Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| John Squire stated that the song was about making an outrageous wish and watching it come true. I don't know who the victim of the wish is, but clearly he was not someone the song's protagonist cared very much for; he is either fantasizing about him meeting a horrible fate or revelling in the aftermath of the horrible fate he wished upon him coming true. | |
| Lana Del Rey – Video Games Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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The fact that she references the song Fast Car cleverly tells you in two words all you need to know about the guy she's in love with. The singer of Fast Car fell in love with a guy, and ran away with him from her deadbeat father, only to find that he was just as bad. I guess she's implying by saying he drives a fast car that he's like the guy in that song - a deadbeat. |
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| PJ Harvey – The Last Living Rose Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The line about selling gold hastily for nothing is an attack on Gordon Brown who did exactly that while he was Chancellor. From Wikipedia: Between 1999 and 2002 Brown sold 60% of the UK's gold reserves shortly before gold entered a protracted bull market, since nicknamed by dealers as Brown Bottom. The official reason for selling the gold reserves was to reduce the portfolio risk of the UK's reserves by diversifying away from gold. The UK eventually sold about 395 tons of gold over 17 auctions from July 1999 to March 2002, at an average price of about US$275 per ounce, raising approximately US$3.5 billion. By 2011, that quantity of gold would be worth over $19 billion, leading to Brown's decision to sell the gold being widely criticised. |
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