| The Sisters of Mercy – You Could Be The One Lyrics | 11 years ago |
|
I see a really nice pun in the term Karma. Could be mistaken for comma there. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=comma (Plus I had heard "Shaking one´s comma" as saying "bloke having a wee" in some film, which initially gave me the idea there might be a sexual allusion covered in a pun here. As a non-native english speaker, one´s not nearly good with colloquial terms, as they are (surprisingly enough) not being taught at school, but apparently when dealing with Sisters of Mercy Lyrics, one should be expecting to encounter them, for example Hallways.. Like that, a non native speaker requires a couple of decades to get through the ironies in the lyrics. One should be ashamed, really.) In that context I'm in a hurry to get my karma straight 'Cause life is short and I can't wait But don't worry about the state Of this pretty little thing in the armour plate could be read as the narrator putting words into the mouth of the person he´s adressing in the lyrics, saying something like "I´m mainly worried about the body liquids and their connection to the universe, never mind politics".. Remembering that this song was written about 1½ decades before the dawn of the cybergoth stuff and the (inane) militaria thing in the goff scene, a "Pretty litle thing in the armour plate" most likely doesn´t refer to a goth girl in fake military clothing or anything similar, but probably a gun between the parts of protective shields on top of a riot control vehicle or a tank´s canon, an Uzi hidden in an armoured limousine or something of that kind. For me But all those precious things are better left unsaid When you can give me hair And run your fingers though my head also points in that direction. This song was written in the very last phase of the cold war, the threat of a nuclear holocaust still looming over everything on earth. It is a symptom of Acute Radiation Syndrome that a person loses all hair. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome So a person in the final stage before dying from radiation could easily give you a handfull of hair. If your head exploded before that, it could even run its fingers through it. And that´s how I understand this. The entire song seems to be saying "Sure I like having fun with hippes, if only they´d wake up and face the real world the way it is, though." to me. In a pretty ironical way. |
|
| The Sisters of Mercy – Floorshow Lyrics | 11 years ago |
|
BonjourLaFille, you almost got there. As anyone interested in The Sisters of Mercy, you should have a look at what the "1959 and all that"-site has to offer. http://1959.tsom.org/prefla_notes.html#song7 It´s "The violet hour", the evening hour, that strives homeward. It´ s the spare time after the working part of the day. "To the violent sound" -Bearing in mind that the sond was written around 1982/1983-ish, that was at least 5 years before anything technoish got on air and some 10 years before the techno/club -scene went mainstream (Lucky days, them.) Gothic then was Bauhaus, The Cure, all the classics, but no techno, and it probably wasn´t even called goff back then. But there was something else: The cold war, the ever present threat of the nuclear holocaust. There was the ever present awareness that at all times, two parties that were deadly enemies, had the potential to blow up earth and all life on its face several dozen times over at the push of a button. The dancers the song mentions, the pagans in the low damp ground, also are the dead to be after the bomb fell. "I feel the light I feel the heat" -A thermonuclear explosion works by radiadtion heating large quantities of air. FIrst, there is that intense flash, that is strong enough to evaporate human bodies entirely if they are close enough to ground zero. You´ll feel the heat. And you´ll see the light. Very brightly, actually. Even if you close your eyes. Maybe even if you don´t look in the direction ofthe flash at the moment. Then, after the radiation had time to heat up a couple of cubic kilometres of air substancially, the air expands like the gases in your car´s engine, causing a blast. You´ll feel that beat. After that hellfire glowed in the sky, there will be faces (or what were such) glowing. As in burning, or being red hot. (As human tissue mainly consists of water, the actual faces will have evaporated by that time, and there will only be skulls glowing by that time, but that´s me being pedantic, the effect is the same: The audiences of this song are dead then.) Oh, and a *BOOM* that takes out several square kilometres of city with concrete buildings at once is kinda violent a sound, isn´t it? "The bodies on the naked on the low damp ground" are not just the club guests dancing in front of the stage, they obviously also are to be a pile of dead. Only in the recent years, a few stories leaked out how incredibly close the world was to this catastrophy in the early eighties a couple of times. It was a very realistic and dreadfull threat to everybody in the world. Every person with some kind of realism about what their life´s situation was had to be a bit sceptical about having a good time next year. …and sadly, it still is. With a substantial potential for nuclear destruction still being present and new tensions between what was the Soviet Union and the Nato countries being more intense now than at any time during the last 20 years, this topic gets contemporoary again… I´m not quite sure who is called "the new elite" here. Did Andrew mean the yuppies, a group that just had been given that name back then, young buisness people that were nothing but buisness people, ocial climbers that wouldn´t dare to speak up or even contradict for not to risc their careers, or was it the political elite of the western/Nato world, Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterand? Maybe all of them? -Andrew made it clear often enough that he had no sympathies at all for the conservative block in politics, that were largely in power in the countries of the west during that time. "The western dream", the ever more, more, more. The permantent expansion and growth. Even into territories that aren´t yours, which causes conflict. Quote the homepage: "The Sisters of Mercy are a left wing institution." In some interview, Andrew described the band as a political animal. I can´t remember where exactly right now. On a different note, violet and purple are pretty similar. Maybe there is some connection between theViolet in Floorshow and the Cobalt Red, Cobalt Blue, Purple Light in Ribbons? |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.