AStrangeMonkey
34
Points
34
Points
In some countries, it's okay to rape and kill your wife; in another country, there's worry about gluten. There's also a country that made music illegal and a country whose economy is 70% moonshine production and consumption.
| A Perfect Circle – By and Down Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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The longer I listened to this song, the more puerile the speaker became. Over time, it gets to feel old. Maybe I'm just responding to the song again, but it feels like the speaker is naive -- childish in being so thin-witted as to believe that their lover was so innocent. The flat truth is there is no one we will meet who has done nothing we might abhor in some way. No one is innocent because innocent is relative and life is not as simple as pallid relativity. Maybe this is just another device or another overanalysis, but it would fit into the song such that the song now represents a naivete lover coming to terms with an adult reality. Furthermore, maybe the naivete is actually love dipped in avoidant denial. The song's direction is steady but slippery; I never feel like I've a solid footing on this ground -- too much "maybe." Still, this is what I continue to think of the song. |
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| A Perfect Circle – By and Down Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Thanks man, this is a bit over the top on the negativity, but I figured that it was safe, given Maynard. Here are a few corrections: -It never states that the onlooker's search is futile, just that this person is no saint. -The subject who "caught his crippled alchemy" was never specified: it could have been the piper or the onlooker. The Piper was both evil and good, he was betrayed but he stole away thousands of children. Either the good in the piper died, or he did evil and was brought down by it. At the end of the piece, it's tough to say whether or not the onlooker is ready to let go of his lover. It's also unclear as to whether the beloved is truly regretful. In the prose, we're as unsure as the onlooker. Like many of Tool's pieces, the lyrics are an enigma. However, we know one thing, the onlooker is doubtful, and the beloved has earned this doubt. The ending is a cliffhanger, and ultimately unsure. What I take away from this piece is that being there is winning for the condemned man or his loved ones. What we are and what we are pictured as will morph as quickly as the weather in a world so driven by chaotic automata. |
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| A Perfect Circle – By and Down Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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People do evil things. This song reminds me somewhat of "Night, Death, Mississippi" by Robert Hayden. In it, brutish violence takes place beneath the shroud of darkness. Here, darkness is betrayed by man. Beneath its cover, horrors took place over and over again -- as part of family, as part of tradition, as part of everyday life and fun. Not only did these people show no remorse for rape, castration, beatings, and sloppy, shallow graves, they joked and drank to it. In a time that seems farther away than it actually is, real people with perfectly unremarkable lives and personalities took part in acts like this. In disgust, Hayden examines this black hole in humanity's rationalized conscience. In short, people who are loved can take part in or spearhead atrocity. Some of us have loved people who have done abhorrent things. Looking into their eyes, sometimes the most important thing is noting the empathetic remorse in their self-reflection; sometimes just a trace of humility will allow us to preserve the precious image we hold so close. In this song, the onlooker is trying very hard to see some. Evidently, his search is fruitless. Beneath the cold lens lay no doubt -- no regret. An allocution is a chance for the condemned to speak to the judge in an attempt to reduce his or her sentence or present cause for not pronouncing judgement against him. With empty, firm eyes, the onlooker is listening to someone very close to him flatly, vacantly ask for either a reduced sentence or for a break this time. Usually, an allocution include specific details regarding the crime, or evidence against the fairness of the jury or context of the crime (i.e. a jury of racists or a beaten housewife accused of murder in self-defense, respectively). The onlooker can't believe his ears: bits and pieces of his loved one's atrocity are surfacing, and he is unmoved in his admissions. Even if the Pied Piper lured a village full of children away to a distant land, he was still betrayed by a greedy, oblivious populace. His floating, bloated carcass in the river is a potent image for an unfiltered view of what his loved one has done. He has betrayed and murdered the owed party. Trying to hold up the increasingly heavy conception of his loved one, he "Caught his crippled alchemy From pounding waves of adoration," the "Bloated carcass crippled me The weight of adoration." The waves of adoration he feels are torturing him, the weight of his adoring image is crushing him in light of his unforgivable act. The tide of the coast, the exposure of the light and the flow of a river are unstoppable forces; in Dosteovsky's "Crime and Punishment," so too is the truth behind an evil deed. However, instead of lying broken and disheveled beneath the weight of guilt, this wrongdoer seems exposed simply by happenstance. It seems only unstoppable forces have brought this horror from behind the shroud of darkness. It is as though the tide of the water concealed the dead -- inevitably pulling back; it is as though the flow of the river brought the victim of his will down the river to be viewed by his poor, incognizant lover: it is as though a lucky ray of light caught this thrifty rogue in an unlikely, suspicious circumstance. The forces of nature and the universe -- not the torture of guilt -- brought this criminal before his loved one: convicted and about to be judged. When a loved one is even accused of a crime and evidence is presented, it can become a mission just to hold on to how you pictured that person just a day before the officers came. It is a long and painful process coming to terms with what they've done -- or even quelling your doubtful mind if they're proved innocent. This onlooker is on a mission: introspectively defend his loved one. Even if the world thinks him something horrid: he can't be -- he hasn't done this. It's often bitterly noted that the first thing we notice about someone when we first meet someone is how they look. If our visual perception leads the way, is not the light a medium through which we perceive another? Betrayed by this light, this wrongdoer was seen. The onlooker caught a glimpse of something terrifying, and it's standing before him now: speaking clearly, but nugatory. In trying to morph the two images -- this creature and this lover, the image becomes amorphous, the defined silhouette a formless shadow. Caught in the barbed wire of cognitive dissonance, we rip and we tear. The comforting love we held onto has become the razor which digs into our flesh and bone. The tone of this piece sets the mood: ominous and foreboding, but somber and pleading. Reconciling love with abhorrence is the topic discussed in this passionate piece. As this piece comes to a close, the tone of the voice changes: once shaken and weak, it's doubtful and steady: "It's no easy mission, Holding onto how I picture you." A familiar theme once again, this onlooker is ready to let go. What we see others do affects what we see in others, and we will change as we change our perspective on them. When the bits and pieces meet the missing pieces, the puzzle becomes an image, and that image may break our will to forgive -- to love. Historical archives are practically overflowing with testaments to the banal sadism of the human race, but what of your daughter, your husband, or your mother? When the evidence is collected and presented -- when the mystery is solved: what will you believe, what will you feel? When the thick fog of moral ambiguity subsides and someone you love is stained with the insidious ichor of iniquity, what follows? theWMann is right on track. |
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| Pink Floyd – Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Maybe I'm just depressing, but I always imagined an old man about to die, looking out the window solemnly at the hills beyond and thinking on them as he passes. In the first stanza I saw him meditating on his youth and early struggle against the constant burn of existence -- the attrition being enacted against all mortal beings of matter. As the "night" of nonexistence turns around, he imagines birth: trembling leaves filled with the life and light of the sun. Young and weak but strengthening, he sees lotuses accompanying the leaves, leaning on each other in yearning: humans struggling together -- codependent unions of beings trying to hold onto life by leaning on one another. And then a mantra is heard: "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun." I imagined him thinking this with a soft, surrendered chuckle as he gazes out the window, reminding himself of the coming end, and telling himself to set the controls for the heart of the sun, and ride head-on into his final outro. He thinks further into life as notices someone "watching the watcher," that for every success out there, someone is watching. Someone is waiting. For every inch of love, there is an inch of shadow accompanying it; for every good, an evil -- every love that fizzles out brings darkness in its wake, every life that shines burns out and leaves its blood and pain right next to its smiles and joy. The man finds paradox and chaotic equilibrium in life. And again, he reminds himself, and drifts off in the fatalist thought -- imagines it for a moment, imagines "the heart of the sun" he will be venturing into. He imagines death and loses himself for a moment. As he tires further, someone approaches him asking him questions that have already been framed for him, funneling him into a specific, pre-determined answer. Over the years, time has erected a wall through which this man hears others, as we age, we lose the fluid nature of consciousness we once had, we tend to cling to things as our idols of nostalgia decay, fade, and drift off in the current of existence. This man standing at his wall asking him meaningless questions assumes he will be alive tomorrow. As in-tune to the universe as this old man will get, he realizes just how fragile and precarious our lives are, and finds his assumption odd. He is not fazed; he simply wonders if the man understands the penultimate importance of helping another being as he sits there alone. In his last moments, his mind fades and leaves him wondering if the man before him, or any man at all, will remember how transcendent the act of helping and loving one another can be. Fixated on his departing mantra, the man drifts one last time, setting "the controls for the heart of the sun." The thought echoes as he fades away, and the calming sound of the ocean and the gulls lulls him into his one last great slumber. HOWEVER, I suppose the meditation theory is much more of a comfort, and much less depressing. |
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| Pink Floyd – Echoes Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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After saturating in this song for a bit, I agree most with this interpretation. However, the structure of the poem suggests at the above even further. Run-on sentences make up a good half of the song. Much like life, lineage, and history altogether: we are but a long string of biochemical reactions made into sentient beings that leave their individal mark on the great cognitive consciousness known as history and knowledge, be it big or small. The lyrics are written in one big run-on sentence, strung along just like us. Each sentence wanders about, again, just like us. The pinging sonar I imagined more as a sign of life, and, as the song progresses, it becomes more of a searching. It is as though the pinging is some attempt to contact something... or, more likely: touch something, reach something. Sonar is simply the act of sending out a sound wave to bounce off something. Are we not so ourselves? How we present ourselves every day we live, is it not how we make our attempt to ping others around us, so as not to feel alone in this mysterious existence? The first stanza in each of the three chunks gives us a solid state of humanity: past, present, and future. These things make up our sense of self: what has been, what we are and what we have been made, and what we hope to be; what we will be. Our obscure and humbling origins lay buried and subtly crawling upward to the light of our consciousness, trying to show us what we really are: the struggle to understand the long-buried truth of what came before. Our busy-bodied, punitive civilized existence drowns us in a crowd of people we don't know who are pushing past us, telling us to shut up and move along, or just ignoring you. We are distracted from these thoughts by our survivalist lifestyle. What luck brings us is the chance to meet some of the people in our world, and in these people we will strive together to understand some portion of this existence: past, present and future. Whether or not we understand these things, they will always stay with us: they are inextricably intertwined with us. For a good 6 minutes there is a long conceptual instrumental, where the echoes of the past seem mysterious, and we get lost again and wander through the mysterious depths of the has-been, caked in the dust of the now. But then we hear a ping again, our peers calling to us, or an attempt for us to contact someone, while we're buried and overwhelmed by the horrifically gargantuan task of combing through the past, present and future. When we're crushed by the immensity of the universe, humanity, and our own lives, the only thing to perk up our eyes and ears again is the ping of another, else we're lost in the ambient echo of all that was or could've been, but was not. In the companionship or the love we create for ourselves, we find solace. Our best friends, our family, our lovers, our pals, our blood brothers, our twins; the people that are burned into our memories and that stay with us invite us into the day, and all those that came before, all the is now, and whatever may lie ahead on the great, infinitely-spinning loom on the tapestry of time shines into our waking eyes and invites us to go out to the window and scream -- call to the future and to all our fellow humans; call to life and love. |
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| Tool – Disgustipated Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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In the Tool FAQ, it is mentioned that Maynard spoke of Disgustipated in an interview. Remember how the story at the close of the song sounds like a recorded phone message? Turns out it was a message from the landlord recommending he pay the rent. As for the song, well, there are three portions. The first seems to be a humorous giggle mocking the use of religion in the context of a Reverend speaking to cattle, or sheep from the sounds of it. Once again, this was inspired by the look an audience gave Maynard during one of his earlier shows with the Melvins. He noted the blank expressions on their faces and began "bah-" ing at them, mocking their also subservient expressions. I would assume he uses this part to illustrate our complacent tendency to serve and observe -- blindly and almost apathetically. The central portion, well, it's a loop-based phrase. Life cyclically feeds on life, energy in all organisms comes from the consumption of other organisms, at least multi-celled organisms, anyway, since most are too large to directly harvest and digest an adequate, carbon-based form of ATP and other vitamins and minerals directly. It's instinctual to consume for every animal, be it herbivore, omnivore, or carnivore. We consume, and we justify it all -- we feed on the idea that -- this is necessary. Everything we are doing is right and necessary to survive. As the mood darkens and gunshots are heard, our sights broaden to remember that we do more than eat genocidal quantities of carrots, we invade, burn, break, kill, and slaughter, too. In the rush of the moment, we, too, think it is necessary, we tell ourselves it is. The last part is an eerie calm, something to unsettle you -- put you on edge. It is ended with the aforementioned story -- a short psychological tale that has no face and little explanation. A man wakes up in a daze covered in what he calls red goo with a knife, a missing camera, and a locked car. "If God is our Father, Satan must be our cousin," says the speaker, a simple note to set the closing mood of this song. This acknowledges that humankind isn't all consumptive destruction, but we are all equally capable of every cruelty Hell theoretically has to offer. As the speaker follows the two people he sees walking by "his woods," the speaker claims they are, "his too." It's an eerie way to word it, but an effective one, they are his next victims and they have invaded his space, tread too close. We don't know what has happened or what will happen, but I'm sure you all have an idea. And then the phone hangs up. |
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| Tool – Flood Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| Humans have a tendency to rely on self-created delusions. Usually, it is simply something concrete, something too simple to be true -- a rock on which to stand and take comfort in. But rocks erode, and so do delusions; they are worn away by the ruthless water that is our chaotic universe. Truth is a relative crapshoot, and so is reality: nothing more than a rough translation -- an interpretation. When the rock we have created for ourselves cracks and crumbles, it is swept away in the current, and we are left scrambling desperately to survive the aftermath. Destruction is as natural as creation; ideas and matter both tend to grow and reconstitute themselves, but all must be destroyed someday, in some way. This song depicts a struggle to cope with that destruction, to survive it, and, hopefully, to let it wash us clean. | |
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