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Dirty Projectors – Gun Has No Trigger Lyrics 13 years ago
I find it political as well. It may be on a sort of deeper level as well but here's mine:

"If you had looked, you might have just seen them
Stretched in the background
You'd see the oceans swell
And the mountains shook
You'd see a million colors
If you really looked"

The first verse is maybe the toughest in my interpretation. It's about the political structure that's created the world-wide situation that's happening atm. The inequality and greed is ever more evident but people fail to see what's happening ("if you had looked"). The "million colors" doesn't seems to fit in, though.

"Now quick the night draws near
Her curtain spreads quicker
The safety's off,
But the gun has no trigger"

This goes on to tell that a fall of some sorts is at the door, in my interpretation pointing towards a rupture in the level of society.

"If you had looked, you'd be no one's coward
Distance, justice, power
You'd glimpse the password
You wouldn't need the book
You'd own both slave and master
If you just had looked"

Here are the actual words "distance, justice, power" to hint at the same direction. "If one had looked" how the world actually is, one could have used it to the same advantage that e.g. the richest 1% has so far done.

But now the banks all close
And nothing gets bigger
The crowd will yell
But the gun has no trigger

As you can probably imagine, this is the chorus that made me think of this in the first place. Everyone's enjoyed the economical growth to some extent in the past few decades. Just that some have known it to be impossible and still taken advantage of it. Soon nothing will get bigger (=hyper recession) and the banks will actually close and then the crowd won't know what to do. But the "gun has no trigger" in the sense that there's nothing to do about it really.

"If you had looked, you might reconsider
Or just maybe you already have
They watch you sleeping
You watch their garbage cook
You'd weep a bowl of tears
If you had looked"

Here the "they watch you sleeping" refers to the elite watching the crowd sleep through the deception and on the other hand crowd "watching the garbage cook" as everyone knows the debt crisis is impossible to solve but and nothing concrete happens to fix it.

It may be a far sho tand Longstreth may be laughing his ass off reading this but to me it's at least comforting to think that there might be a pop song that nutshells it all so neatly. :) Anyway, the best song on the best album in years.

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