| Menomena – Five Little Rooms Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| A wrong interpretation it may be, but this song's references to spacious freezers and little rooms for spouses makes me think of the story of Bluebeard, in which the titular character has a secret pantry to store his many wives' corpses. Except, of course, that the Bluebeard in this song doesn't appear to have actually been married to his "husbands" at all. What with their bodies being preserved alongside those of their sexual partners. And their children. | |
| Radiohead – Climbing Up the Walls Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Isn't there a case to be made for this being the voice of the repressed id? Given the album's Orwellian overtones it's worth remembering that sexual repression was one of the ways in which the Party retained power in 1984. No matter how much you might keep it locked up, though - denying yourself pleasure, only making love with the lights out, after the children have been put to bed - it's still inside you: a pick in an icy facade which you try so hard to cultivate. And as frightening as such a beast is, you two are going to be pals 'til you die. Perhaps. |
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| David Bowie – The Man Who Sold the World Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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To me, when you strip away the nonsense-poetry wording, this song is about becoming infected - polluted - by another person's nihilism and hopelessness. The song's protagonist meets a man who claims to be an old acquaintance. This man denies that he met with any kind of disaster - he certainly hasn't died although clearly *something* has happened: he takes some pyrrhic pride in calling himself The Man Who Sold The World. The protagonist laughs this off and goes on his way, but in time he finds he has been changed by that meeting: no matter how he searches for something solid and meaningful in his life - for "form and land" - he can no longer find it. Instead he sees humanity as wandering aimlessly across the planet, and comes to believe that "we should have died alone, a long, long time ago". The second time the chorus is sung, it is not the stranger who identifies as The Man Who Sold The World, but the protagonist: he has lost any sort of faith which he previously had. The nonsense-poem about the "man who wasn't there" matches the absurdity of the human condition. Not only that, but this mournful realisation has been passed onto you, the listener, by contact with the song, in the same way as it was passed onto the protagonist by his encounter on the stair. ...which was nice. |
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