| Robyn Hitchcock – Viva! Sea-Tac Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Having lived near Seattle myself, I must say this is a pretty funny song, though I'm not sure why Robyn doesn't care for the place. For those not familiar with the city, I'll explain the references, though this song is pretty straight forward and I doubt anyone is puzzling much over the meaning. But just in case: Sea-Tac (short for Seattle-Tacoma) is the name of Seattle's big international airport. The chorus "Viva Sea-Tac" is celebrating the means of getting the hell out of Seattle. Kurt Cobain basically put Seattle on the map. When Nirvana got huge in the early 90's, Seattle was seen as a thriving, hip city at the cutting edge of culture, and it became THE place to be (kinda like the image of San Fran in the 60s). Before Kurt Cobain, Seattle was only known as being a place that rains alot. Jimi Hendrix was born and raised in Seattle, but he left the city in his late teens and never looked back (though there is a well-known statute of Hendrix in Seattle, and Seattlites like to claim Hendrix as one of their own). Microsoft, Starbucks, and Boeing all have their headquarters in Seattle. Seattle is also famous for having a disproportionately high number of heroin addicts, as well as very cheap and high quality heroin. Ballard is a neighborhood in Seattle that is home to a sizable Scandinavian immigrant population. Vancouver is only an hour away from Seattle, and the Oregon border is maybe 2 and a half hours, so there are alot of daytrippers and weekenders coming to Seattle from these places. |
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| Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Jo-Jo's Jacket Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| I figure I should also mention the Dylan quote at the end of the song is Malkmus poking fun at himself in the same way he does at Moby. He criticizes Moby's music (or just electronic music in general) as being lifeless, mind-numbing, even a 'crime'. But then including a spoken-word bit at the end of one of the verses from one of Bob Dylan's best, and certainly most profound and meaningful songs, serves as a stark contrast to the kinds of songs SM writes, which are typically only ever about pop culture, bands/the music industry, himself, or nothing at all. And he couldn't have picked a better Dylan quote to use, because this song is a great example of how 'not much really is sacred'. Dylan & his generation wrote lyrics and made songs with the belief that music really could change the world, or at least help people learn about themselves, but Malkmus just treats it as an extension of his own narcisism & cynicism, or (like Moby & the dance faction) as purely messageless, escapist entertainment. This invites the intended analogy between Dylan and Malkmus with a real gun and the toy gun that sparks in the quoted Dylan verse. And of course, the similar analogy between Dylan and Malkmus with actual Christ and the flesh-colored Christ that glows in the dark. During the 60's of course, Dylan was literally perceived by many to be a Christ figure because of how powerful his message was; Malkmus recognizes that he himself is often worshiped by his fans, but for being cool for starting an influential, critically-acclaimed rock band, not for doing anything actually meaningful or significant. So how fucking genius and hilarious is this song? I love unraveling SM's songs, they're like putting together jigsaw puzzles to follow his own train of thought as his mind just wanders around from topic to topic. And any time he gives you a glimpse of what might be some deeper, more profound further meaning (because deep down we just don't want to accept that a song as awesome and powerful-sounding as Stop Breathin' is merely about John Mackenroe/the Civil War), that deeper, additional meaning always intentionally implies either that you, the lyrics interpreter, is a huge dork for caring so much and a pathetic nerd for holding it all up to the microscope. Because if you were a really cool guy, you'd get it all right away but be like "yeah whatever" and then go start your own band instead of endlessly scrutinizing his lyrics for meaning when we should know by now that any meaning we find in a pop or rock song is going to be banal and retarded. And this is exactly one of the things Malkmus is saying by including the Dylan quote in the context of this song. And the further fact that I discovered Malkmus is presenting this message means that I actually did make an effort to trace and pin down his train of thought in his lyrics and unravel it all as if it's a puzzle actually worth solving. So S.M. has the last laugh as he personally makes fun of me and I guess everyone on these boards, and proves he's basically the coolest guy who has ever lived. Damn. | |
| Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Jo-Jo's Jacket Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| Oh and the link between the first verse and the second is that from describing Yul Brynner as a bald robot he jumps to a put-down of Moby (the bald lame techno music guy). That's how Malkmus writes almost all of his songs, really stream-of-consciousness but laden with layers of meaning and hidden references etc | |
| Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Jo-Jo's Jacket Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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from an interview, this is what SM himself has to say about the lyrics: Those were kind of joke lyrics at the start. The song is pretty giddy, and I don't want to be Mr. Psychedelic on it or something--which would probably be the only way you could go on it, you know--so I was like, "I'm going to keep it more trashy and about Yul Brynner." I started with, "I'm not what you think I am/I'm the King of Siam, yes, yes I am." Kind of a Dr. Suessy style thing. And that led to Yul Brynner, because he was in that [movie, "The King and I"], and that led to "Westworld," and that led to robotic baldheaded people for the next verse. It makes sense until the last lines about Christmas Day and the candy cane stuff--that [stuff] just sounded good to me. |
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| The Silver Jews – K-Hole Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| Ok, according to an interview I read, this song is about the K Street Project which involves congressional republicans getting kickbacks from powerful lobbyists, wikipedia has a decent article about it. But that's probably just Berman trying to be witty and piss off the interviewer who was a total tool, it's probably still about drugs. | |
| Art Brut – I Will Survive Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| i've lived in that kind of house. a punk rock house. it was fun but insane. | |
| Art Brut – Bang Bang Rock & Roll Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| I think this has more to do with rejecting what the Velvet Underground sang about and embodied and glamorized (sex, drugs, and rock and roll), rather than the way that their music sounded. The background singers sing "white light white heat" because thats one of the VU's best drugs songs. They arent singing "sweet jane" or whatever. Also explains the verse about buying bunk drugs from some girl. Eddie Argos is a huge Modern Lovers fan and is basically trying to be the 2000's version of that band, and they were all about being a normal person and not about crazy sex and drug abuse and whatever. the "i don't want a girl whose with the band, i just want a girl that's gonna hold my hand" lyric is basically a paraphrase of the Modern Lovers song "someone I care about". the drug and sex fueled rock cliche life is just not the reality of the life Eddie and his band have lived i guess, same as with modern lovers and most bands. and its unusual to find bands like art brut, ML, the Undertones, etc who make honest music that is still rock and roll. Anyway, I think of this song as really more an anti-libertines song than an anti VU song. my 2 cents. | |
| Grandaddy – Taster Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| I have a live Grandaddy show where he prefaces this song by saying it was inspired by Jason's brother, who had been an alcoholic and screwing up in life, and Jason kind of learned from his mistakes. But then Jason says that the brother eventually sobered up and Jason became the drunk depressed screw-up so maybe now the song is about himself now. | |
| Camper Van Beethoven – Where The Hell Is Bill? Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Right. About some insecure dude in the very early 80s who is looking for a subculture to fit into, or to buy into. Maybe he became a new waver, maybe he became a mod, maybe he became a punk. and CBV is saying yeah, thats nice, nice costume and trendy transportation choice and everything, but where is the person behind all this, BILL? don't let your preferred music subculture tell you who you are | |
| The La's – I Can't Sleep Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| My favorite track on the album. I love the part near the end where it threatens to turn psychedelic with "tonight" repeated again and again slower and slower, but then just snaps right back into the rest of the song. For a second though it almost becomes the middle section of the Small Faces song "Lazy Sunday". Nice. | |
| Art Brut – St. Pauli Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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"What else can we do when the kids don't like it" Got to be a reference to the Undertones song "Girls don't like it", right? There's so many classic punk references in Art Brut songs, it's fun to spot them all. |
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| The New Pornographers – The Fake Headlines Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| This song is about taking drugs to write music, and how we as the music consuming public don't care what the artist actually goes through physically or emotionally for them to write the songs, including total self-destruction, as long as the song is catchy. in fact don't we idolize the rock and roll suicides? | |
| The Kinks – 20th Century Man Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Makes me wonder what Ray thinks of the world now that the digital age is here. The internet, social networking, iPods, cell phones. And he thought the 70s were bad. Ray's generation were the first ones to have to deal with life as we know it now, in fact people's every day lives and culture were radically different before and after WW2 (to a degree I can not even fathom). Advertising, television, radio, popular music, interstate highways, affordable automobiles, the rise of the cities and fall of the country, even suburbs and housing developments. Wasn't happening before the Boomers came to be. How many times a day do you hear music? (all day long, right? how weird is that? imagine if you had to rely on [expensive] records and stereo systems. or before the '50s when hardly anyone listened to recorded music and had to hear it live) How many times a day do you see an advertisement? Travel more than 3 miles from your home? Purchase a product made by a corporation worth billions of dollars and is available everywhere? It must have driven some people crazy having to deal with all of these changes at once, the modernization of the western world. People used to have quiet, simple lives, until the last 50 years. Anyway that's what Ray is on about. If you like when he covers this theme in Kinks songs then definitely check out Grandaddy, especially the album Sophtware Slump, it picks up where this song leaves off and is completely awesome. | |
| Blur – Bank Holiday Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| A bank holiday is a holiday falling on a week day in the uk where banks and gov't buildings close down and everyone has off of work. It's like Memorial Day in the US, as opposed to say Valentine's Day. It's only appropriate that this song is as fast and frenzied as it is, Blur was a funny band. | |
| Grandaddy – Nonphenomenal Lineage Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Forgot to mention, I think the title refers to the particular music scene and musical influences of the band. Grandaddy came out of the '80s underground independent music scene, with alot of punk influences as well, which is absolutely not where the major labels and any successful band of the time was coming out of. The lineage of ancestors to Grandaddy is nonphenomenal because it's all these small hardworking honest indie acts, and not huge commercial arena rock stuff that makes money like led zepplin or whoever you want to cite as the major influences of mainstream commercial music in the early-mid 90s. Grandaddy was around and making music for like 8 years before the album this song was on was released, and this was their first full length album! so they must have really had to struggle and fight to just keep making music and survive and suffered a lot of rejection. | |
| Grandaddy – Nonphenomenal Lineage Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| It's about (the true story of) music critics or the music industry itself rejecting grandaddy, deciding they are not worthy of promotion and success and telling them to get lost. Because this happened the band is doubting their own talents and have abandoned their dreams of success. The language is really formal and computerized and its from the point of view of the industry, of The Machine. because its really all about money and not about talent or good music or just helping out a worthy artist, and money is the great dehumanizer of relations. | |
| Grandaddy – Lava Kiss Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| This song has to be in my top 3 favorite Grandaddy songs, it's so amazing. I love the guitar solo | |
| The Silver Jews – Animal Shapes Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| I think the king is Jesus, you know how people say jesus is their personal lord and savior. So i take those lines to mean he insulted his friend, who won't forgive and forget, and it's no consolation to the singer that jesus forgives him. the first verse has lots of christmas imagery, and the second one seems to hint he is tentatively accepting of god or spirituality, but then the king lines seem to put in doubt of that or denial in the face of real world problems. iduno could be reaching here, its only two lines so theres not alot to work with. | |
| The Silver Jews – K-Hole Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Berman seems to be such a burnout to me, I bet he's not even using k-hole metaphorically. I like to think he wanted to drink a bottle of whiskey to forget his troubles but it was after 9PM and he had to go home and blow lines of K instead. Small doses of K are kind of like being drunk anyway. |
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| Peter Bjorn and John – Amsterdam Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Best song on the album, so sad and lonely. Love the singer's quirky accent on the "And I was heading up north" verse. | |
| The Kinks – Lola Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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glad to see someone else gets the deeper meaning, at least theres one other real kinks fan in the world. bugoff we should be best friends! for everyone else there are three things going on in this song. superficially its a standard pop song about a girl in a bar. all slightly clever people get the second level of meaning which is the joke that hey the girl is actually a man in drag and the narrator doesn't seem to realize it. 3rd level of meaning (obviated by the theme of this song's album) is that the narrator is the young ray davies and lola is the record industry, who prey on naive young artists by pretending to offer them fame, money, & women, but then just screwing them over in the end and leaving them confused (this is what happened to the kinks and ray was very bitter). fourth and level of meaning (obviated by the plot of the album) is that ray davies is disgusted with the average music listener, who only wants to hear the same boy meets girl love song again and again, because thats what they have been conditioned to want by the media and music business, and if you want to be a big star and get rich and famous, you have to abandon your own creativity to fit in with this formula. this song was a hit in real life, and a hit in the context of the story of the album. this sort of proves ray right that the average listener is not a real music fan or a very good listener, but instead a consumer, because they dont care what the artist has to say at all. if they listened to the lyrics and knew it was about transvestite love, it would never have achieved success, its just too controversial for the times. the public just wants a sing-a-long chorus of a girls name. (think about how many mega-huge pop hits fit this criteria, it is endless, why do bands keep doing it? oh yeah easy money). anyway it's a credit to Ray's genius that he was able to be so subversive and clever as to write such an unconventional story of love and make it a pop hit, even more so that he also managed to vent his anger at the music biz and even at the listener with the same song and it's album. the only other person who manages to bury so many layers of meaning in a song like this is steve malkmus. it's just amazing how his work and many kinks songs have so many layers to be pulled back, especially when one of these layers is aware of the listener and pulls them into that very meaning. davies was very ahead of his time and it's great that history is being kinder to their musical legacy than music fans were at the time. |
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| The Silver Jews – There Is A Place Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| This song fucking rocks, what a great anthem for a man who seems to hang on to life by a single thread. This whole album is just an ode to self-destruction, from the first words of the first song ("There's a paper bag that holds the liquor, just in case I feel the need to puke") to the last words of this one. David Berman went through some hard times before and during the making of this album, I read an interview where he said he was barely making $10,000 a year and couldn't pay his rent or his bills, became addicted to crack (!!!) and booze and went to treatment for it. With the success of this album I think he began to turn his life around, and it's almost too bad because I enjoy the lows of this album as much as the highs of American Water. | |
| Syd Barrett – Octopus Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| the insane ramblings of an acid burnout turned schitzophrenic. he's obviously just free associating from one line to the next, but the intensity and passion which with he sings these nonsense words gives the song it's momentum and sense of joy. Would it be as fun if it wasn't "PLEASE!! leave us here, close our eyes for the octopus R-i-i-i-i-i-d-e"? At the same time I find it kind of scary. | |
| David Bowie – Starman Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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Does everyone forget this is a concept album? It's about an extraterrestrial rock star who comes to earth and rocks out and tries to save the world through his music. And most importantly this is glam rock so it's all about inflating the importance of rock and roll and celebrating itself. Ziggy's story throughout the album is really just a metaphor for the rise and fall of rock and roll itself in the 1950s. Rock and roll was originally a fad, and it did die a nasty death in the late 50s. Keep in mind that the number 1 song played on the radio before the Beatles breathed new life into rock and roll with their first hit single, was "How Much is that Doggy in the Window". Yeah... So Starman is about Ziggy, the alien, broadcasting totally crazy rock and roll music on the radio from outerspace and the kids are digging it, and their parents don't get it, and Ziggy has the confidence and audacity to tell everyone that it's rock and roll that will save the world. And all that is just a science fiction metaphor for the arrival and acceptance of rock and roll by kids in the '50s, from the point of view of Bowie as a huge rock enthusiast. |
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| The Kinks – Lola Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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This song is much more than just a humorous tale of gender confusion. Remember that the album (lola vs powerman the moneygoround) is a concept album that tells a story about a young singer and his raise to fame and struggles with the music industry. Very critical of the business, the media, the fans, etc. This particular track comes right after "Get Back in Line" - a song about being poor and in the welfare line, the only way out being the 'union man', to follow certain rules and join the system, to forget about being an artist and just doing what the businessmen say. The song after "Lola", 'Top of the Pops' is about how he finally did it, he has a pop single and now he can make lots of money now. So, the deeper meaning of Lola should become obvious. The song itself brought the Kinks back into popularity and was a huge successful single. In the story of the album, this is also the case. This is the song that the hero writes that finally gets him some money as mentioned in 'top of the pops', because it's a pop song about love with a sing-along chorus and it's exactly what they want. Ray Davies is basically jerking us all around, it's like we are not just listening to the song like any other song, we are listening to the song being played on a jukebox in the fictional world of the album. you dig? There is another layer as well. Lola in the song isn't an actual person, it is a representation of the music business. It will look all friendly and female and sexy and enticing, get you drunk on champaigne and say it will "make you a man" ahem...but in reality it's all an illusion, its' a devious man pulling strings and pushing you around and forcing you to your knees. And if you do what he says, he'll make you a star. |
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