| The Shins – Mine's Not A High Horse Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I agree with sam99foster. The quotation marks, which appear in the official lyrics, indicate someone other than the singer/protagonist is talking. "Don't ask for his opinion, they ought to drown him in holy water," can be interpreted as earnest (making the speaker a caricature of a Puritan and implying the protagonist is a non-believer) or sarcastic (as in, "he's so religious, I'd like to drown him in holy water", which would imply the opposite of the other interpretation). I prefer the second interpretation as it's the more interesting one. This song is really about two self-righteous, angry people in an argument. The lines early on, "I watch your convictions, melt like ice cubes in the ocean. You were so poorly cast as a malcontent" indicate a certain sense of self-assured superiority on the part of the protagonist. Accusing a person of being "poorly cast as a malcontent" is basically accusing them of being phony (if we're suppose to take the protagonist as an atheist, the malcontent part doesn't make a lot of sense - while there are certainly religious malcontents, that's not the stereotype of a religious person that would be familiar to Mercer's fans and its certainly not the sort of thing someone thinks of when they think of a religious person; indeed, it seems more fitting to call an atheist a "malcontent" and certainly plenty of modern atheists self-identify with this sort of thing - the tough rebel versus a conformist, religious society). As much as we'd like the finger to be perpendicular to the sky, it's not. It's an accusatory, pointing finger. This, the "bring it on" line about not caring how many people his opponent has on their side, and the line about neither party being able to "turn this ancient boat around" (I read "ancient boat" to mean that the argument they're having is something that people have been arguing about for quite some time) makes the title of the song a bit ironic - the protagonist might think "mine's not a high horse" but that's the sort of thing two self-righteous people would think of themselves when in an argument. Those three lines also indicates that the two are caught mid-argument. Fundamentally, I think you could read this as a religious person telling an atheist about their faith or it could be an atheist telling a religious person they don't believe in their god. It's really a song about two people who are both certain they are right and are willing to drive their relationship into the ground in order to prove they are right. |
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