| The Residents – Weight-Lifting Lulu Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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This track seems to deal with the kind of power games that sometimes get played over women. The narrator is allured by Lulu’s charm and scent, but is repulsed by her body that she’s built from weight-lifting, which she may have done to cope with or defend herself from her grandfather’s abuse. During one such abusive episode the infatuated narrator gives Lulu’s grandfather a gun, which he then presumably shoots her with. Why did the narrator do that? Because he could not reconcile what he loved about Lulu with the body that so repulsed him and the (to him) bothersome implications of what she, a woman, could and did do to get it. Therefore, he used her grandfather to annihilate that part that repulsed him so that he could keep his vision of the rest of her intact without it being contradicted or distracted from. However, in his persisting need for her “touch” he eats the rest of her half-eaten pork chop — a common bodybuilding food — and either gets a new sense of the goodness of her lifestyle or just become thrilled with the closest he could've ever gotten to her touch. In either case, he really does want her. But by that point it’s too late: Lulu is now just a corpse buried under “the lawn”. Whether that’s the narrator’s lawn or her grandfather’s or someone else’s is probably irrelevant — whose ever lawn it is, she has been stopped in her path and forever kept, physically and existentially, within the domain of those who could not accept her strength, will, and deviations from their expectations; and seemingly nobody has truly learned their lesson. Lulu built herself despite an oppressive environment, only for the result of this effort to further ensnare her in an even larger power dynamic as yet another person cannot accept how she is for different reasons. The result of their inability to accept her leads inevitably to their not being able to have her at all. But the greater injustice is that they feel they should "have" her in the first place. Granted, the track may not necessarily be intended as a feminist critique — hell, maybe it doesn’t really have any meaning, because a lot of Residents lyrics seem like nonsense — but I think regardless it’s one of those little short stories that gets you thinking about the way we often-blindly treat each other and why. In any case, it’s a great track off a great album by a great band. Long live The Residents. |
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