submissions
| Deerhoof – The Merry Barracks Lyrics
| 12 years ago
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Like most Deerhoof songs, I think there's more meaning to the lyrics here than there might seem. I think it's about how confused and messed up our society is when it comes to confronting evil and war crimes - we look for Hollywood narratives about incoming atomic bombs and brave generals, or, failing that, maybe empowered citizen journalists winding up their cameras and jumping into the fray. But what good does any of this spastic activity really do against evil? Is Hollywood the good or evil team's barracks? The most everyone can really do when faced with evil beyond their controlling is to just sing. The "everyone, everyone sing" refrain manages to be simultaneously cynical and earnest. Awesome. |
submissions
| Deerhoof – Numina O Lyrics
| 12 years ago
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Numina is the plural form of numen, which means "the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place." Isn't that cool?? So I guess this song might be about the mystery of phenomena - how do we account for things happening? The whole song has that haunting feeling of brushing against something larger than you, something you can't quite understand. |
submissions
| Deerhoof – This Is God Speaking Lyrics
| 12 years ago
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I actually find this one to be deceptively deep, haha - I'm pretty sure that for Deerhoof, God = creativity and play. I think this song is Deerhoof tipping their hand a little - for them, God speaks through creative exuberance. At the same time, it's startlingly easy to picture God as the babyish creature on display here, arranging humans like toys, barking out childlike commands, and plonking on keyboards seemingly at random. Deerhoof can be pretty damn topical. |
submissions
| Okkervil River – The Rise Lyrics
| 12 years ago
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No comments! I'm so sad :( I freakin' love this one. So different from Okkervil River's other closers.
That constant sense of threat that pervades the album finally unravels here in a gorgeous confrontation with mortality and the raw fear of death. It's just beautifully done. Stronger than the fear of the absence of life or the self is the fear of facing that moment, as we'll all have to, entirely alone. When each of us makes that leap, no one, no matter how much we love them, will be making it with us.
I think there's an environmentalist theme to this too - glaciers melting, erratic weather patterns, the sea brimming over and flooding the land. No one wants to be there when it's time for the climate catastrophe to wipe us all out, but there's the sense that it's too late to stop that from happening, and we'll be lucky to die before it does. Depressing, haunting, absolutely not optimistic, and beautiful. |
submissions
| Liars – No. 1 Against the Rush Lyrics
| 12 years ago
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I can't help but feel that this song is exploring something a bit larger than the dynamics of a particular relationship - I honestly think, and this might be a big stretch, that this song is grappling with "hipster" culture.
Admittedly, I don't have a whole lot to base this off of, other than the lyric "This culture's a disease/when you see it through lights." Liars are self-aware; I think that's evidenced by the fact that they've consistently worked to defy easy categorization of their output as a whole. The culture Angus Andrew sings about is likely to be one he knows, and one he's implicated in. A culture that sees itself reflected best in the icy electronica Liars are working with here. A culture essentially based on irony and, therefore, completely unsustainable in the long term. What happens when the hipsters grow up? Will they ever?
I think this song plays out as the realization by someone implicated in that culture that there's real fear at the heart of all that nonchalant pseudo-nihilism. "They spiral down, they come back, a dead end, again and again and again and again." The culture's ironic celebration of its own vapidity isn't going to do it for the singer anymore; the vapidity has finally become scary. He wants out, and he wants it out of him. You can hear how it's affected him in those languid vocals - that "fuck-it" spirit is now being turned into a kind of resigned anxiety. He has to "bloody himself awake" to make something of himself; he has to crawl out of the numbing boredom of fake friends and bland hedonism and live in a way that lets him feel good about himself.
No matter what, disillusionment is a big theme in this song. In that spirit, the title No. 1 Against the Rush has got to be meant ironically; it's that self-important self-designation as someone who goes against the grain that the singer is exposing as blind. |
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