| Vampire Weekend – A-Punk Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Sometimes a song is meant more to raise questions than answer them. This is such a song. You can put any story to it, and project your own life onto it because it is deliberately short of details. A song like this is not so much about what it is about, as it is about what you hear in it. "Johanna drove slowly into the city The Hudson River all filled with snow" Tension is established immediately in the first two lines. A single individual, Joanna, is driving into a city of millions of people. That is heavy contrast, why is she coming into the city? Is she coming home or beginning a new life? We don't know and are not meant to know, it is about a moment in her life. The snow on the Hudson is more contrast and tension. In the summer, spring and fall New York City teems with life on the streets and in the parks, and you can meet anybody anywhere, it is overflowing with possibilities. But when you have snow on the Hudson it is very cold and all of that life is closed down as everybody huddled inside. So all we know is Joanna approaches a city teeming with life and possibilities, but it is cold and she is driving slowly. Why? "She spied the ring on His Honor's finger Oh-oh-oh" Since VW is not giving many details, we can assume that "His Honor" is a simple shorthand for any powerful or respected person. Joanna sees the ring and it catches her attention. It seems to me His Honor and his ring are connected, and they draw Joanna to them. "A thousand years in one piece of silver" Nobody can really understand 1000 years. It simply means the ring represents far more than any single person can ever be. Possessing such a ring brings a person into the world of the timeless, makes them larger than they are. His Honor has the ring, but then: "She took it from his lily-white hand Showed no fear--she'd seen the thing In the young men's wing at Sloan-Kettering" It is definitely important that Joanna took the ring, His Honor did not hand it to her. Whoever "his honor" was there was at least one moment in Joanna's life when she took possession of something larger than herself, when she joined into the stream of human events so much larger than anything she could ever be on her own. That is what the ring is. I would imagine "the thing" she does not fear is death, something she'd seen before. Think about what Joanna had to do to get the ring. Most people will not touch a corpse, but she would have had to get a good grip on the dead wrist, grasp the ring, and slide it off, likely touching his dead hand repeatedly. Finally, there is something about taking from the dead that is particularly creepy in all human societies. Joanna really wanted that ring. So we know the ring has some great value, and Joanna took it by doing something most people would not do. "Look outside at the raincoats coming, say "oh" Look outside at the raincoats coming, say "oh"" Raincoats cannot be good news. This line could mean anything, but it is generally about bad news. In the end I think this song shows that VW has gifted lyricists who can see a woman in the subway and make up a backstory, with enough details to make it beautiful but not so many as to spell it all out and ruin the mystery. "His Honor drove southward seeking exotica Down to the pueblo huts of New Mexico Cut his teeth on turquoise harmonicas" The phrase "cut his teeth" means learned how to do something. It might be that His Honor was simply a jewelry trader who first learned to make money by going directly to the American Southwest and carrying items back to "ordinary" places like New York City. Perhaps this is how he came to possess the ring. Did he even know its value? "I saw Johanna down in the subway She took an apartment in Washington Heights" In this verse things come down to earth. First we know the singer did not know Johanna well, because if he did he would have described a more intimate contact. It's like he noticed her in passing. At this point you wonder if he just saw a woman in the subway and made up this story. Next he gives us the mundane detail that she lives in Washington Heights. Where is not important here, he is drawing us back down to Earth, whatever passed between Johanna and "His Honor" is past. She is just another person now. But what happened to her journey to the sublime, when she took the ring? Well now he tells us: "Half of the ring lies here with me But the other half's at the bottom of the sea" This is perhaps the saddest. Whatever it was that Johanna gained in the ring, she has given it away. Some of it has passed to the singer through his brief contact (perhaps because as a poet he picks up these things more easily), but only broken and partially. The other half is gone forever, Johanna has it no longer. Perhaps it is a curse, and Johanna has freed herself of it and passed enough understanding to the singer so that he could tell the story. Or Perhaps it was an heirloom, a memory of lost wealth and power from hundreds of years ago. There is no way to know for sure, but if we did know for sure the song would be so much less powerful. |
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| Mindy Smith – Out Loud Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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This song is an invitation to make up, to reconcile, extended to a friend with whom the songwriter has fallen into conflict. The verses are pretty self-explanatory, they describe how the songwriter feels about the conflict, that it is useless, damaging, and is getting them nowhere. She then explains what has happened to her, "I thought about it, I prayed about it, out loud." She has been considering the conflict. The verses tell us her thoughts. As for the result of the prayer, the invitation then comes, "We can talk about it, we can pray about it, out loud." She is inviting her friend to talk, to make up, to pray together. There is no promise of any result, and no demand for any particular outcome. She makes herself vulnerable in the invitation, she can be rebuffed, told to forget it, insulted, or belittled, but she makes the offer. A beautiful song. |
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