| Blue Öyster Cult – Flaming Telepaths Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| @[dale112070:35434] I would suggest that anyone's actual drug use in reference to telepathy would probably be a hindrance. Experimentation is fine until it becomes a crutch for those who refuse to take off the training wheels. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Flaming Telepaths Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| @[yannick102:35433] For you it's about autism. I'm not sure if it is for most people or the band. | |
| Blue Öyster Cult – Flaming Telepaths Lyrics | 3 years ago |
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If the penultimate line in the song is in fact "Is it any wonder that my jokes an iron," it seems to me to be the most enigmatic line in the verse. Open to interpretation naturally, but I do not feel the term 'iron' here has anything to do with a device for pressing one's clothes. So I looked up some information on iron symbolism. Iron could refer to irony - the joke being on you that you've opened your mind only to drive yourself crazy. Likewise, iron in the bible is sometimes used to symbolize natural truth, e.g. a truth as hard as iron. In that case, Is it any wonder that my joke is a natural truth, and the 'joke's on you' referring to your natural demise. This was my first sense of the song before delving deeper. Of course there is, as is so often the case with those of the soft white, a literary reference as well. In the short story, I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen, the iron stands between the secondary character and the first limiting her ability to fully engage with the other. I'm not saying this is what Lanier et al was thinking, simply that these sort of things have a way of creeping into the collective. Hence the joke is the blockage itself, and your blockage is your desire. To be honest, I want to believe there is room for all three given the development of the last three songs on the album. Even in this day of MP3 players and short attention spans, I have HoE, FTs, and Astronomy all in one track. There is a progression here if you look with your eyes closed: HoE being this amoral monster in pursuit of knowledge beyond his own vision, FTs experiencing it and its ramifications, and finally a vision spanning time and space, Astronomy. I could be wrong. It's probably just about vampires. |
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