| Tom Waits – Bad as Me Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I'm hearing a question mark after "bad as me" and a condescending tone any time that notion is proposed. In the first six examples the person being spoken to is inserting themselves noisily into a situation and fouling it all up. The head on the spear is what causes the trouble, "the nail on the cross", "the fly in the beer". The narrator later typifies his kind of bad as reactionary or symptomatic. "The blood on the floor", "the thunder and the roar", "the detective of late" are all things that come after the event, not that cause it. The narrator, he can withstand the events, "I'm the ship that won't sink". The person spoken to, the noisy (young, dumb, full of come?) cause, cannot withstand: "You'd bite down on the sheet / But your teeth have been wired / You skid in the rain / You're trying to shift / You're grinding the gears / You're trying to shift". They are actually two fundamentally different kinds of bad, but maybe not without overlap. What's there to withstand if there's never anything gets started? "They told me you were no good / But I know you'll take care of all my needs". So, same or not, they inhabit the same world. Up till this point in the song the narrator has been a product of his surroundings. Now he's playing more a facilitative role: "I'm the mattress in the back" and where before he was weathering the storm, now he's ready to bleed. He's a lot like that fellow that he'd earlier distanced himself from. I'm imagining two fellows sat next to each other in a seedy bar, one young and over eager, the other hard and perhaps a little jaded but self-assured by long experience. |
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