| Tori Amos – Jackie's Strength Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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It's a very feminist song. Jackie Kennedy was widely considered one of the strongest women of the 1960s because of how she handled the JFK assassination and aftermath. Tori was born in Aug 1963, with the shooting of JFK happening in Nov 1963, so it's basically her way of recognizing that there was an extremely heavy feminine influence over her life since the beginning. The song tells memories of dealing with the perils of being a female throughout her life. The chorus is the most telling: "make me laugh say you know what you want you said we were the real thing so I show you some more and I learn what black magic can do" This is basically every girl dealing with a boy for the first time. The boy's telling her whatever he has to in order to get in her pants, then once she gives up the goods he dumps her and she learns the hard way she's been tricked. The second verse is elementary school (lunchboxes, david cassidy from the partrich family), middle school (sleepovers, smoking pot) and high school where life for a girl is suddenly all about looking perfect: "you're only popular with anorexia so I turn myself inside out in hope someone will see" In the last verse is some scattered thoughts resulting in another reference to Jackie and JFK: "if you love enough you'll lie alot guess they did in Camelot " Camelot is what Jackie called the White House. All in all, this is a very sad song because it recognizes the hardships of being female while simultaneously thinking about troubles of the past. I can't listen to it without crying every time. |
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| Ani DiFranco – Two Little Girls Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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First off, this album is my favorite of hers. It's the most poetic of her lyrics without being overly political, but more importantly the music and the lyrics on every song go together so perfectly in my mind. I think this song is very clear and not at all open to interpretation while others on the album are (like swan dive, for example). The people on this thread discussing her sexuality are a little too caught up in it, I think. It seems to me that this song is more about love and disappointment, whether it be friendship or romance, and how she saw someone she came of age with in NYC end up ruining their life with drugs (not necessarily heroin, but obviously something you shoot up). There was a time when I thought it might be Tori Amos as I had heard that they were friends and that Tori had a drug problem -- the stanza that might allude to this is: "you were always half crazy now look at your baby you make as much sense as a nursery rhyme love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time" If you've ever heard Tori Amos in an interview over the course of her first 3 or 4 albums, she would often talk in tangents of these weird, abstract metaphors, so much so that I would wonder if she's at all sane ("nursery rhymes"), and the analogy/joke of a piano dropping on someone is perfect for that. More support for the theory that it's about Tori is the "fresh off the boat from Virginia", even though Tori had grown up in Rockville, MD, it's right next to DC (northern Virginia) which means to get to NYC she would have taken a bus (or boat) there. I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure Tori spent plenty of family outings in Virginia as well. I had also heard at one point that the two had a falling out of sorts and later heard Tori in an interview say that she used to have a girlfriend that was really into her but she wasn't "into that kind of thing. I mean, I am, but I don't eat hair pie." LOL She could really have been talking about anyone, but it was around the time Choirgirl Hotel came out, which is also the time Little Plastic Castle came out. So, people can argue Ani's sexuality all they want, but it's a known fact, if even from Ani's early lyrics alone, that she swung both ways ("sometimes the line I walk tends to deviate", and other lines from her early albums), and if everything I've heard and read about both of these artists over the years is even half-true, these two openly bisexual women were very close at some point. When Two Little Girls was released, I think it was Ani's disappointment in Tori Amos's life choices at that time. Another song that could be about the same relationship is Pulse. Just my interpretation, but it fits, no?? :) |
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| Hole – Doll Parts Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I have always found this song haunting. It has the same foreshadowing connotations as Nirvana's Come As You Are ("and I swear that I don't have a gun") with "Some day you will ache like I ache". I never subscribed to the conspiracy theory that she killed him, but then I hear this song again.... She's feeling like she's being treated like just another placeholder for Kurt's selfish needs, just a physical object with no real feelings that can be hurt. She talks about how she wants to be the center of attention and treated like a star instead. When I read that she revealed the song to be about Kurt, it made sense that she was jealous of his groupies and upset about how he acted. I get chills down my spine when she says that someday he'll hurt as bad as she does, and she clearly feels so hurt that she feels like she died (the music says this more than the lyrics). Kurt's suicide has been the center of controversy ever since it happened, and it makes you wonder if her jealousy had maybe taken control over her to the point of orchestrating his death. Stranger things have happened... this is more depressing and creepy than anything. |
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