| Syd Matters – To All Of You Lyrics | 2 years ago |
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This is a song about idealization. "American girls in the movies No one can tell where your heart is American girls like dollies With shiny smiles and plastic bodies" The song touches on a cultural perception of American women as a perfect, cinematic ideal, and the narrator expects American girls to live up to this plastic, movie-perfect standard. So when the narrator talks about wishing he had an American girlfriend, he's playing into that idealization and expressing his desire for a glamorous archetype of an American woman, not a place of actual understanding. Then the final verse implies that he actually meets an American girl, one to whom he "cries sometimes talking about his own place," supposedly his home country. Then lo and behold, his utter confusion when the girl has the exact same experience—crying when she "talks about her own place." Despite the narrator's fake, plasticy, movie-perfect, cinematic ideal of careless, endlessly optimistic American women who do nothing but smile and drive by the beach, he's forced to come to terms with the fact that this ideal is not true. That these women are in just as much anguish as he is over the problems of his homeland, if not more, and that life applies to everyone—even glamorous Americans. I like to think that the song ends on an optimistic beat, one of greater wisdom. The guy says that he'll "fly to the wildland, to your land"—maybe he's ready to fly to America and experience the realities of the country himself. Something beyond the movies. This was a pretty great addition to the Life is Strange soundtrack, being a game made by a French developer about two American girls who face a lot of agony over time travel trauma and their friend's disappearance. The game made my childhood, check it out if you haven't! |
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