| Killing Joke – European Superstate Lyrics | 9 years ago |
|
"Why are the proud descendants of Plato Paying off more debts accommodating NATO?" Because they want to have six-hour work days and retire at 55. They're welcome to do that if they can make it work without taking money from other countries where they work 40 hours a week and retire in their 60s. |
|
| Fever Ray – If I Had a Heart Lyrics | 9 years ago |
|
My interpretation is informed by the use of this song in Vikings, a show about merciless barbarians. The original song may have been a response to postpartum depression, and about watching young children being cruel to each other, but I think it also fits Viking culture perfectly. I think this is why the song was chosen. Viking culture developed in an area where the cold climate makes it difficult to maintain livestock and grow crops. Because of this, they developed a society that largely relied on raiding; whatever they couldn't produce locally, they would simply steal from others, often inflicting a huge amount of violence in the process. They even celebrated this in their religion; warriors, after death, went to Valhalla, where they would fight in wars all day and then feast with each other and the gods at night. The Vikings behaved like psychopaths, and probably had a great number of them among their ranks. Psychopathic character traits would have lead many to a measure of success in a culture with relatively small social groups that were in constant conflict, the cost of this being that innocent people were victimized horribly. There are further clues that I'll get into below, but I'll point this out right away: The original voice is low, unnatural, and demon-like; and then it switches to a more high-pitched voice that tells a very different story than the low voice, that of a child being crushed under the heel of the psychopath. This is a story not just of psychopaths, but of their children, and how those children are often brutally pushed into becoming similar to their parents. The singing begins in the demon-voice: "This will never end 'cause I want more" - Psychopaths operate under the belief that all benefits should accrue to them. Whatever injury their victims suffer is of no concern whatsoever. Other people are seen as resources to be mined, and that's all. Their internal suffering doesn't exist for a psychopath except as a sterile and largely uninteresting fact, although some psychopaths do derive a sort of peevish enjoyment from hurting others. I suppose this stems from their functional belief that the whole world exists for them, and no one else; other people have to give them whatever they want, and if they don't, those other people are wrong to put their interests above those of the psychopath. It's a very solipsistic worldview, and not entirely different from how a toddler would behave. "If I had a heart, I could love you" - They don't. Having no conscious access to their emotions, psychopaths simulate them instead, by observing and mimicking others; they are, poetically, "heartless." Whatever emotion they demonstrate has been carefully constructed to get them something they want, and they are not at all inclined to ethical behavior (although they expect and stridently demand it of others). "If I had a voice, I would sing" - They can never express true emotions. If a psychopath says "I love you," you may rest assured that they do not. "After the night when I wake up, I'll see what tomorrow brings" - Psychopaths usually live in the moment, with little or no attention to the future consequences of their actions. Positive feedback - reach up and grab fruit from a tree and be rewarded with food - works the same for them as it does for the rest of us. However, negative feedback - reach up and grab fruit, eat it, get sick to the stomach half an hour later - works poorly for them. Many are quite accident-prone, and because it's very difficult for them to learn from their failures, they tend to be somewhat fatalistic. "I'll see what tomorrow brings" would be a typical psychopath response to failure because they can't easily integrate the lessons of failure into their life strategy. For neuro-typical people, that integration happens automatically and usually with little to no conscious effort. That mechanism is badly damaged in the brain of a psychopath. Now, the singing voice changes from a demon's to that of a woman. It's far more high-pitched and human-sounding, and covers a significantly broader dynamic range: "Dangling feet from window frame - Will they ever reach the floor?" This is a little kid, impatient to grow up. Now, immediately after, the demon's voice again: "More, give me more, give me more" - The psychopath sees his/her own child as an object that exists only to satisfy the psychopath's needs. The child's voice again: "Crushed and filled with all I found, underneath and inside" - The psychopathic parent is traumatizing the child's mind on a regular basis. In Vikings, Season 1, Ragnar makes his son Bjorn watch the brutal, corrupt goings-on in their village. He wants him to understand that this is what it means to be a Viking, even if it means someone gets ostracized or killed for no reason other than to make life better for the Earl who runs the settlement. Ragnar probably believed he was doing his son a favor, and the terrible reality is that he probably was (to some extent) - but a child cannot witness such brutality and leave unscathed. This is not an impeachment of Ragnar's particular parenting skills, but a commentary on the psychopathic nature of Viking society. "Just to come around" - This could mean "to have the trauma happen again, over and over," eventually destroying the child's self-esteem when he/she realizes the impossibility of fighting the parent; or, it could mean the child is "coming around" to the psychopathic parents' way of dealing with the world, like a childhood version of Stockholm syndrome in which the child internalizes the parents' abusive behavior and learns that that's how to deal with the world. I suspect that a lot of this went on in Viking culture. It certainly happens frequently in modern cultures all over the world. The demon voice finishes: "More, give me more, give me more." Whatever terrible state the child's mind is in matters not at all to the parent. The child's job is to fulfill the parents' needs, and the child is blamed for things that children shouldn't be blamed for, such as existing and requiring care and causing inconvenience in the parents' lives. The psychopath looks on pitilessly as their own child's mind self-destructs. |
|
| Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal Lyrics | 11 years ago |
|
"I was following the pack all swallowed in their coats" - Dogs "With scarves of red tied 'round their throats To keep their little heads From falling in the snow" - Red scarves tied around the throats of the dogs, in case they might get lost in a deep snow-bank "And I turned 'round and there you go And Michael, you would fall And turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime" - What happens when a boy falls over in the middle of a bunch of dogs that like him? They rush in to lick his face. Since they have scarves there would be a lot of red. "Strawberries in the summertime" conveys further feelings of nostalgia. There is also a double meaning here: perhaps the boy was bitten, and his blood turned the snow red. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.