| Neko Case – Red Tide Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Ok, I don't understand it fully, but I'm going to give it my best go... I think it's about the war between nature and humanity; how natural places are being developed. The first stanza is perhaps about an industrial plant- she's commenting on how ugly and disgusting it is, and how this type of development kills animals. "Seabirds caught in the fishing line"- animals are dying because people are careless with the environment. In the second stanza, the "clouds say hush"- through storms and desolation, nature is trying to "warn" people to stop polluting, but the "chainsaws", people who are logging and cutting down trees, continue doing what they are doing. 'Mush" implies these people are doing what someone else orders them to, like sled dogs. I know Custer was a famous general who died in a battle against native Americans- a battle he was expecting to win with ease. Perhaps she's saying that if we ignore nature's warnings and don't stop ruining the environment, we're all going to suffer. I know that a red tide is an algal bloom that makes seafood toxic. It's an example of a natural phenomenon that "fights back" against people killing and eating shellfish, I guess, and the fact that it's over means that people are finally able to control nature to a certain extent. The next stanza I think she's talking about watching a childhood home be demolished, and her horror at the inhumanity and artificiality of the machine. The last stanza is definitely about her nostalgia- drive-in movies are a thing of the past, and she wishes she wasn't alive to see them ( and the other things she loved) fade away. She loves nature, so it hurts her to hear people disparage it and be unable to see the beauty in it ("die before strangers can say 'I hate the rain'"). She regrets what people and time have done to the world and place she loves. This is my interpretation. |
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