| Melanie Safka – Brand New Key Lyrics | 7 months ago |
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I spent a while trying to think of what the nonsexual meaning could possibly be for this song. I completely agree that when she was asked about the meaning she answered delusively, but the problem I was having was coming up with any possible innocent interpretation. I think even if I was a kid when the song came out and knew about roller skate keys I’d know something was up because it’s weird for someone else to have the keys to your shoes unless there’s something going on there. But the best I came up with is that, if we pretend the key is not to her roller skates & instead his family recently moved or changed the locks on their doors, she could be saying “I’ve got a new way to come over faster and you’ve got the means to let me in, so let’s hang out together or go on a date at your place.” Again, the obvious meaning is that it’s a puppy love type song about experimenting with sex using the lock and key as a sex metaphor and the roller skates as a metaphor for youth. There’s also a sense of the first taste of freedom in a brand new pair of roller skates—you don’t have to rely on your parents to drive you as much, and it can be easier to learn and use than a bicycle since you just need enough room for yourself and pavement that you won’t die on. I think that connects with the blossoming sexuality of a young person. If they wanna “hang out” at his house when no one is around, she’s got the means to get there, he’s got the means to help her “take her skates off,” and if his parents come home early she can skate her way out of trouble pretty easily. |
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| Talking Heads – Psycho Killer Lyrics | 8 months ago |
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Mister David Byrne has said before that this song is about Norman Bates from Psycho, but I don’t see any connection to his mindset at all in these lyrics, and instead I had a very different and personal reading that I haven’t seen anyone get into before. To me, my family, and my friends, this song is one thing: An autistic meltdown caused by sensory overload as told from the point of view of the person experiencing it. Let me explain myself, because some people with misconceptions about autism are going to assume I’m comparing being autistic to being a “psycho killer.” First of all, nothing wrong with being psychotic, the killer part is the problem, second of all David Byrne identified as autistic from a young age up until he was rich and famous enough to control every aspect of his environment so the more “negative symptoms” wouldn’t surface—his autism informs a lot of his songwriting, and third of all I am actually autistic and I promise I’m going somewhere with this. It starts almost immediately in the first verse. “I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax / I can’t sleep ‘cause my bed’s on fire / Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire” This immediately rings true to me as a sign of sensory overload. Unable to relax, writhing in a bed that feels too hot and too cold and too hard and too soft, needing everyone to keep their distance. The way he says “don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire” speaks to me on a deeply personal level. The second verse is the most obvious to me. “You start a conversation, you can't even finish it / You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything / When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed / Say something once, why say it again?” He’s stuck in a room with (presumably neurotypical) people making small talk. To some autistic people, even with very low support needs, small talk is agonising. It’s empty words that don’t communicate anything repeated over and over ad nauseam. You’re expected to have a specific answer to certain prompts, and if you engage too earnestly or don’t engage at all you’re seen as weird. Sitting in a room where this is happening is slowly overwhelming him and making him feel like he’s going to lose his mind, which is where the chorus comes in. “Psycho Killer / Qu'est-ce que c'est / Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa / Better run run run, run run run run away” (as well as all vocalisations that accompany these lyrics) When you are autistic, high masking (means good at suppressing your autism enough to appear neurotypical to an outside observer [this is not a good trait to have in many cases]), and having a moment of sensory overload you begin to silently _panic._ I’m not exaggerating. You go into fight, flight, freeze, and fawn simultaneously. Your thoughts become jumbled and frenzied and oftentimes downright _mean_ in a way that does not align with your true personality. I’ve asked my autistic friends and even my mother who probably has undiagnosed autism if this rang true to them, and they all agreed with me on this point: When you are being overwhelmed by a specific thing, person, or group, you start thinking evil thoughts about it to express your distress. It’s not uncommon to think “If you don’t shut up/stop it/turn that off right now I’m going to finally snap and kill someone, I’m going to end it all, I will literally crazy murder you,” & then the actual thing that happens is you say “Hey, can you please stop chewing for a second so I can put my earplugs in? I’m really noise sensitive right now.” And then everything is fine. “Qu'est-ce que c'est” could have a number of interpretations, my favourites are that the brain gets very jumbled in this situation, so he might be switching to French on accident—my mother does this sometimes, and she hasn’t spoken French since the 90s. Alternatively, taking the meaning of “basically ‘what is this’ or ‘what’s that’” (gonna have to trust my mother on that translation) it could be some kind of confusion about what’s even happening to him and why. “Run run run run away” can easily be read as him warning others to run before he snaps on them, but it also makes me think of the urge to just get up and run out of a room that’s overwhelming me. That’s the “flight” response in action! The vocalisations are amazing in this chorus, I can’t sing it without doing my main overload stim which is to shake out a hand in front of my chest. The “fa-fa-fa” part sounds like hyperventilating, the “oh, ayayayayay” part sounds like yelling to try and disperse some of the panicked energy, and finally the “ooh, hoo, hoo, hoo, hooo…” sounds like trying to full yourself together afterward. The French in the bridge is the closest to being Norman Bates related in the entire song but I don’t think he’s thrusting himself to glory in that movie even in his own mind. That said, I don’t have an autistic reading of it unless French is a comfort language for him in which case muttering to himself in French could actually be a form of stimming. I do it with singing in Japanese because the consonants are so delightfully placed that it feels amazing in my mouth. “We are vain and we are blind / I hate problem when they’re not polite” is probably the most straightforward thing possible. Humans are flawed, we make rules just to break them, and we’re unkind. So that is my reading of the song and why it’s my personal autism anthem! |
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| The Raconteurs – Broken Boy Soldier Lyrics | 8 months ago |
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The way I interpreted this song was very much shaped by a particular person I was thinking of at the time, but I keep it in my head, and though I don’t think it’s the intended meaning, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to read it the way I do. What I see is a song about someone who is desperately trying and failing to throw away the childish aspects of himself because he’s been stuck for too long not acting his age. I interpreted “toy broken boy soldier” to mean something like “someone who grew up acting disciplined like a soldier, letting himself be treated as a toy, until it broke him.” Again, I was thinking about a loved one (who has told me in depth about their struggle with an experience like this) when I had this association, so it made me think of the cycle of children forced to act like adults by their circumstances only to become adults who can’t escape their childish nature. It feels like a problem to them that, despite the fact that they’ve grown up, they can’t seem to get rid of the aspects of themselves that feel childish. Sometimes it’s a genuine unhealthy behaviour, some kind of over-dependence on a perceived authority figure or extreme difficulties with confrontation to the point of reading others’ feelings as attacks, while other times it’s just liking to sit on a swing set or sleep with a plushie or ask for help now and again. Sometimes the thing that feels like a crime is having emotions. “First Love/Late Spring” by Mitski has a pair of couplets about this that I think of from time to time. The first is “Wild women don’t get the blues, but I find / that lately I’ve been crying like a tall child” and the second is “And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five / but now I find I’ve grown into a tall child.” In that song she describes being overly emotional in her eyes, crying easily, feeling like her chest will cave in if she doesn’t hear from the one she loves. She’s admitting and succumbing to the childishness she’s so ashamed of, while Jack White’s narrator has a much angrier approach. There’s something to be said about gender roles here, but I’ve gone long enough. “Pulling my questions from the shelf” could mean he’s not making his questions available anymore (pulled from shelves = recall or something to that effect) and is trying to handle everything entirely by himself. Interestingly, he says “I’m going back to school today, but I’m dropping myself off” as if the childish part of going to school is being dropped off & not the age that schoolchildren are? Which I think goes to show that as much as he wants to act like an adult, the roles of adult and child have been so blended in his mind that he doesn’t know where to begin. The last thing I want to touch on is admittedly probably a stretch but I thought it was an interesting way to read the verse. “You're rifling through a box of toys That were handed down to me Just take all the ones you want and then Give the rest to my family” This can obviously be read as his overzealous attempts to destroy the child in him leading to him getting rid of precious things—these sound like heirlooms, not a toy he got as a middle schooler and kinda liked but wasn’t that attached to. But another way to read it, my “stretch before you reach” reading, is that the box of toys represents the circumstances that made him this way to begin with. A burden that was handed down to him by generations of trauma and immature adults. If you don’t take his burden from him, it will go back into his family and the cycle will continue. So what I see in this song is a man who feels he cannot adapt to being an adult, and whose perceptions of the roles of adult and child are mixed up to begin with, who feels angry and broken and wants to forcefully fix what he perceives as the problem. He targets his dependence on others—he’s only going to ask himself questions, he’ll be dropping himself off from now on—and tries to discard everything that reminds him of his childhood, like his passed-down toys and his memories. His misguidedness leads to an endless cycle of child and man and child again, he never truly grows up. |
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