| Dire Straits – Les Boys Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| I was only 15 and pretty naive when I first heard this song and I knew instantly that it was a breezy vignette of a visit to a Cabaret show in Germany. I never saw the need to perceive it as anything else, lyrically. Musically, it's an opportunity to play around with the sound of that increasingly obscure style of music and a way to give a short upbeat ending to an album with several long involved tunes. | |
| Stereolab – University Microfilms International Lyrics | 1 year ago |
| I believe that "find a new morn" is actually "find an human", but Songmeanings tells me to log in when I'm already logged in. | |
| Steely Dan – Rose Darling Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[foolwhoknows1:32693] Plus, as it not-so-surprisingly turns out, cannabis is in the rose family of flowering plants. Your interpretation is spot-on and I feel like I even heard Fagen say as much in an interview years ago. | |
| Tom Waits – Hoist That Rag Lyrics | 11 years ago |
|
speaking of war, a digression into Tom Waits lyrics, from one of my later favorites, "Hoist That Rag" (2004)...not the whole song, just images I like with my interpretations The title, of course, refers to the raising of a flag after winning a battle...The exemplar for this tune being, of course, Iwo Jima, with the combination of the famous flag raising photo and the eyewitness accounts that the landscape in which it was raised was complete desolation for miles. "God used me as hammer boys To beat his weary drum today" As a soldier with a weapon, I was part of the mechanism of this senseless carnage...even God and his (war) drum are tired of this shit. "The sun is up the world is flat" The morning after the battle, of course, followed by an accomplished quadruple entendre, thus: * the local landscape has been literally flattened by artillery, et al. * from an island, the outlook is ocean...a flat world, horizon to horizon * the world has become flatter in the sense of more physically accessible, less diverse, closer together... e.g., Japan and the U.S. will never again be remote to one another...War has ever been the most drastic engine of globalization * the world is dumber place now; this is backward progress (e.g., blast them into the stone age) "Damn good address for a rat" This place is no longer fit for human habitation (the battlefield, the failed civilization...we've only made things better for vermin "The smell of blood, the drone of flies You know what to do if the baby cries" What?! Dear God, I hope the answer is rescue it! To me, though, the final line here evokes the search through the rubble for survivors. But I think he does mean to disturb us with the image of a soldier who might have to murder a baby--even if we reject it, we have to receive the image to do so. "Well we stick our fingers in the ground, Heave and turn the world around" This is an absurdly impossible feat, but it's what war accomplishes. This weak little species changes everything by defying physical laws out of ignorance (akin to the scene in Baron Munchausen when the rope isn't long enough, so they cut some from the top to tie to the bottom). "Smoke is blacking out the sun" Another double-plus entendre. The literal landscape as well as war's alarming remove from enlightenment, even the violent diminishment of Japan if you like. "At night I pray and clean my gun" Literal, but also illustrating the soldier's internal tension between trust in larger forces and suspicion of everything. "The cracked bell rings as the ghost bird sings And the gods go beggin' here" If the bell is so-called Liberty, is the "ghost bird" the symbolic American eagle? The whole song expresses bitterness and despondency in the face of victory, and the begging gods provide another masterful double-reference: Historical polytheisms tend to be sacrifice-oriented and they've destroyed this place so thoroughly, that there's nothing left to sacrifice, And the common folklore trope of gods who go begging in disguise to explore the character of Man "So just open fire as you hit the shore All is fair in love and war" With bitter sarcasm, an exhortation to follow orders, even as you "hit the shore" of your personal ability to grasp and countenance such a massive disaster. It's survival advice for the individual's sense of morality. You can't handle this, so don't look. Hoist that rag. |
|
| David Bowie – Sons of the Silent Age Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| The chorus is generic | |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.