| Rasputina – 1816, The Year Without A Summer Lyrics | 1 month ago |
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The opening lines humorously treat a climatic period, the "Little Ice Age" following the medieval warm period, as though it were a weather event that we could say started and ended at a specific moment: from the spring of 1315 to 1851. In reality this was a gradual cooling trend, not something that suddenly began in a particular month. Another humorous note is sounded by "You remember 1816 as the year without a summer." Of course no one living remembers that year, and few people are aware of weather events from centuries past. The sudden change of subject suggests that there's a causal link between the Little Ice Age and the freakishly cold summer of 1816, but as the rest of the song will go on to explain, there isn't one. Did many people at the time think Benjamin Franklin--who had died almost 30 years earlier--or a freemason conspiracy caused the weather events of 1816? I highly doubt it. Doing some searching for Franklin in connection with the summer of 1816 only turned up the interesting factoid that, in addition to doing experiments on electricity, Franklin was actually one of the first people to theorize that unusually cold weather could be caused by the ash kicked into the atmosphere by volcanoes, which turned out to be the cause of the freak weather events of 1816-18. What a clever guy! If anyone has any guesses as to where Melora could have gotten this claim, I'd be interested to hear. The line "That was the real cause, discovered by some explorer" is puzzling. It makes it sound like Mount Tambora, or the fact that it had erupted in 1815, was only discovered later by Europeans thanks to some voyage of discovery, when in reality Tambora is part of what was then the Dutch East Indies and was reported on by European observers at the time. That said, I'm not an expert and don't know exactly who *did* first posit a link between the eruption and 1816's unusual weather, so I suppose that person could have been "some explorer." Anyone else know about this? "You are so very choleric of complexion / Please beware the mounting sun and all dejection" is a quote from a modern English translation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, specifically the Nun's Priest's Tale, lines 190-91. The hen Pertelote is giving advice to her husband, the rooster Chanticleer, after he has related a disturbing dream he had. The gist is that he's just not taking enough care of his health, the dream being a product of humoral imbalance. How this relates to the previous 2 lines, or how this whole stanza relates to 1816, I am at a loss to understand. |
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| Nobuo Uematsu – Liberi Fatali Lyrics | 1 year ago |
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My translation: "Liberi fatali" This is bad Latin, apparently intended to mean "fated children," "fatal children," something like that. In fact "fatali" is the ablative or dative form of the adjective "fatalis," so it can't modify "liberi," which is nominative. "Fithos lusec wecos vinosec" As others have pointed out, this is gibberish, not Latin. It's an anagram for "succession of witches" (the name of another song on the soundtrack that also contains this choral chant) and "love" apparently. "Excitate vos e somno, liberi mei" Wake yourself from sleep, my children "Cunae non sunt" Very literally, this is "there is no cradle." Cunae ("cradle") can be used metonymically to refer to the period of childhood, so "your childhood years are gone" seems like a fine translation to me. "Excitate vos e somno, liberi fatali" Again "wake yourself from sleep," and see above about "liberi fatali" being bad Latin. "Somnus non est" This is not a dream. "Surgite" Get up "Invenite" Find out "Veni hortum veritatis" Come (to) the garden of truth "Horti verna veritatis" I've seen this line translated "the spring of the garden of truth," and an earlier commenter has "the garden of spring's truth." In fact I think it's another case of bad Latin. "Horti veritatis" is "of the garden of truth." "Verna" as a noun means "a slave born in his master's house." As a verb, it could be the imperative of verno, "spring" in the sense "bloom/sprout/be lively." But "Be lively of the garden of truth" doesn't make sense. "Spring" as a noun is "ver," not "verna." For what it's worth, listening to the recording, I clearly hear "veritatis," but the earlier part of the line doesn't sound like "horti verna" to me, so this may be a case of bad transcription rather than bad Latin. If anybody knows an alternative transcription, I'd be interested to see it. To me it sounds something like "chorum tuum veritatis" (your chorus of truth) for both this line and the previous one, but I could be way off. "Ardente veritate" With burning truth "Urite mala mundi" Burn away the world's evils "Ardente veritate" With burning truth "Incedite tenebras mundi" Light up the world's darkness "Valete, liberi" Be strong, children "Diebus fatalibus" In the fatal days OR In the destined days ("Fatalis" can mean "fatal" in the sense "deadly" or in the sense "related to fate; destined." The word "Vale/valete" used in the previous line usually means "goodbye," but it also literally means "be well/be strong/succeed." This line retroactively makes us read the previous line in the literal sense rather than as a conventional farewell.) |
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| The Rocky Horror Picture Show – Science Fiction/Double Feature Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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Footnotes: "Michael Rennie was ill / The day the earth stood still" -Reference to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), sci-fi film starring Michael Rennie. "Flash Gordon was there, / In silver underwear" -Reference to Flash Gordon, 1930s sci-fi comic book and film serial character. Can't find him wearing silver underwear anywhere, but like other 1930s comic book heroes, he's often drawn wearing tight shorts/briefs over his leggings. "Claude Rains was the invisible man" -Reference to The Invisible Man (1933), sci-fi film starring Claude Rains in the title role. "something went wrong / for Fay Wray and King Kong" -Reference to King Kong (1933), sci-fi film starring Fay Wray "at a deadly pace, / It came from outer space" -Reference to It Came from Outer Space (1951), sci-fi film "Doctor X will build a creature" -Reference to Doctor X (1932), horror film "See androids fighting Brad and Janet" -Reference to the heroes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Nowhere in the film do they fight androids. "Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet" -Sci-fi film Forbidden Planet (1956) does indeed star Anne Francis. "Leo G. Carroll / Was over a barrel / When Tarantula took to the hills" -Reference to Tarantula (1955), sci-fi film starring Leo G. Carroll. "I saw Janette Scott / Fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills" -Reference to The Day of the Triffids (1962), starring Janette Scott. "Dana Andrews said prunes / Gave him the runes / And passing them used lots of skills" -Pun on tendency of prunes to give one "the runs" (i.e., diarrhea) and Night of the Demon (1957), horror film starring Dana Andrews in which Andrews' character is cursed by being passed a parchment containing Satanic runes which he must then pass to someone else to avoid being killed by a demon. "'When worlds collide,' / Said George Pal to his bride, / 'I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills'" -Reference to When Worlds Collide (1951), sci-fi film produced by George Pal "a late-night, double feature picture show / By RKO" -RKO was one of the Big Five film studios from the Golden Age of Hollywood and produced many sci-fi films in the 30s and 40s, including King Kong. |
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| XTC – Rook Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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NOTES: Here's Andy Partridge on the meaning of this song, as quoted by Chalkhills.org's "Reel by Real" discography: "I was frozen with writers block. Then suddenly this song came out. I was really frightened. I mean, I couldn't even finish the demo because I was in tears. It felt like seeing yourself in a mirror and recognising your own mortality. Maybe it's something in the chord changes. I don't understand the lyrics, which is rather exciting." While he says he himself doesn't understand it, the song uses a bunch of tropes that may help in deciphering it: -Title: The rook/crow/raven is an ominous creature associated with death in a bunch of European cultures. In Celtic mythology crows could be psychopomps (creatures that ferry souls down to the world of the dead, as in the lines "If I die..." in this song). And of course in Poe's famous poem "The Raven," the speaker repeatedly questions the raven about the afterlife: will he ever see his beloved Lenore again? A similar scenario to that of this song. -"Read from your book": the idea of a book that records the destinies of everyone and especially the fates if mortals in the afterlife is also very common in Western mythology, perhaps best remembered in the form of the Book of Life mentioned in the Bible, in Revelation. -"Is that my name on the bell?" Cities used to have big bell towers, and the bell would be ritually tolled to accompany a funeral procession. This association between bells and death was cemented by a famous line from a John Donne sermon, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee." Keeping this famous quote in mind gives a sense of irony to this line of the song: the speaker is failing to recognize Donne's point: we're all doomed to die, so you may as well write your name on the bell. -"Gaze in the brook": another common folk-tale trope, gazing in a reflective surface like the magic mirror in "Snow White" in order to be shown hidden truths. -"Before I'll let go": In the Odyssey, Menelaus has to hold onto the shape-shifting god Proteus while Proteus changes forms repeatedly until he finally gives up and tells Menelaus what he wants to know. This kind of thing happens in other ancient stories, like when Jacob wrestles "a man" (God or an angel?) in Genesis until he gets the man to agree to bless him. |
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| XTC – Complicated Game Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| I asked myself, should I put a comment on this thread? No, I thought, it doesn't really matter if I put a comment. Someone else will come along and say it. It's always been the same; it's just a complicated game. | |
| Sublime – Get Ready Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Man, don't you hate how crazy and foolish some people can be? The other day, I was just minding my own business, doing drugs and playing music at ear-splitting volume, when some cops showed up. They said something about a noise complaint. Anyway I had to get out my gun and kill the cops, then track down anyone I suspected of being an informer and murder them. Jeez, how rude can you get, calling the cops like that? It's a good thing I was so level-headed and reasonable, or that situation could really have gotten out of hand. | |
| Oingo Boingo – Only A Lad Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| I remember seeing "Capitalism" on some list of the "top conservative rock songs," which is funny since I think that song is an obvious satire of its speaker's conservative perspective. I think this song is the real conservative song on the record. That's not to say Elfman should be naively equated with the speaker of the song, but isn't it cathartic when he screams, "Hey there Johnny boy, I hope you fry!" That voice isn't ironized the way the speaker of "capitalism" is, because we know he's right: Johnny's problem isn't that he's "underprivileged," it's that he's a spoiled borderline psychopath. The irony works the other way, against the societal voices excusing Johnny's behavior and hoping pathetically, "Perhaps if we're nice he'll go away." In the real world, I'm sure there are lots of criminals who really are victims of their upbringings and circumstances. But Johnny's just a little prick who deserves whatever punishment he gets. | |
| The Beach Boys – I'm Waiting For The Day Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Maybe there's a switch of speaker in the last section, the tone is so different. It's the old boyfriend she still loves reclaiming her. He had lost interest in the relationship, but now is re-invigorated by the spirit of competition with his usurper. The relationship between the two men is subtly homoerotic: "I kissed your lips... It made me think about him"; "You didn't think that I could sit around and let him go." | |
| The Police – Don't Stand So Close To Me Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| No, augustmaria is right. It was written in America while Nabokov was travelling about the western U.S. collecting butterflies. So saith wikipedia. It was first PUBLISHED in Paris. | |
| Tomahawk – Harelip Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Listen again, it's not "We'll have a mardi gras," it's "We'll have a Madeira" (a type of wine, thus the reference to "the bubbles in the wine" later). | |
| Tomahawk – Pop 1 Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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The last couple lines ("Voices collaborate / Like wind in dry grass / What will I do with all this broken glass?") are a reference to T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men," lines 5-9: "Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass" "Hollow Men" takes place in a sort of purgatory/limbo "twilight kingdom" which is neither heaven nor hell, and is full of the denizens of the modern world who live empty/meaningless lives. The speaker of "Pop 1" is kind of in a similar situation, he sees everything (seas, traffic) weirdly making room for him so he has unimpeded movement, but his dominant feeling is of emptiness rather than freedom. His victories are meaningless. |
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| KoЯn – Children of the Korn (feat. Ice Cube) Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I was thinking about how, once upon the late 90s, it became obligatory for a lot of rock bands to have songs with guest rappers, and how the rap lyrics would sometimes clash with the singer's lyrics and this song came to mind. I mean Jon, as usual, is singing about growing up a tortured emo soul, getting bullied at school and at home by people making fun of his effeminacy and physical weakness: "a little girl like me," "called a fag all my life," etc. Meanwhile, Ice Cube sounds like one of the kids who beat him up: "Class clown, already know I'm a star," "fuckin' bitches major," etc. Somehow I don't think that for Ice Cube, sex with girls wasn't something he felt pressured into but didn't actually enjoy. While Ice Cube, the gangsta, was rebelling against authority figures who wanted to STOP him from "fuckin' bitches," smoking weed, and cappin' fools (or at least while his gangsta PERSONA was--a lot of this is obviously macho posturing), Jon Davis the goth was being ridiculed for NOT "fuckin' bitches" or being assertive/stereotypically masculine at all. So while they both have a beef with authority figures, I don't really see them agreeing on much else... well, I guess at the end of the song they both "want to live." Um, I missed the part where your parents were trying to KILL you. |
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| Sublime – Chick On My Tip Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| They did and it does. "Chica" is more like "girl" than "chick" though, despite the sound similarity. This song's lyrics are not at all a translation of the lyrics to Chica Me Tipo. | |
| Rage Against the Machine – No Shelter Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I think Tom is a reasonable guy but I disagree about Zach. He's a straight-up Marxist, and this song's lyrics are about as hysterical as you can get. "Buy the products, or get laid to waste." Come now: is that really true? I mean, there was that one Pepsi ad campaign with the slogan "Drink Pepsi or we will kill your family," but that all changed when they brought Britney Spears on board for a more sex-based approach if memory serves. Bottom line: marketing doesn't consist of killing people who refuse to buy your products. The end. Also, the line "Godzilla, pure motherfuckin' filler, to get your eyes off the real killer" is a good indicator of how bonkers Zach is. For Zach, every cultural artifact that ISN'T a Marxist screed is part of a sinister plot by rich, white, baby-killing capitalists to suck the life-blood out of the proletariat and put minorities into concentration camps ("Americana" = "fourth reich culture"). Harmless entertainment, you say? But you don't realize that you spent TWO HOURS in a movie theater enjoying yourself when you could have been making molotov cocktails to lob at the IMF headquarters! "What does the billboard say? Come and play, come and play; forget about the movement." Look, I love the guy but he's a nut! When I saw them play Coachella Zach reminded audience-members chanting anti-Bush slogans that not only Bush but "every American president since Truman should have been lined up and shot." (I don't even want to imagine what he wants to do to Van Buren or Taft!) |
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| Rage Against the Machine – No Shelter Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| ??? No one in RATM was ever in APC. He was referring to the fact that after Zach left Tom, Brad and Tim formed Audioslave with Chris Cornell. Some Audioslave songs ("Show Me How to Live," for example) certainly sound religious, though whether they are or not is clearly a discussion for another forum. | |
| System of a Down – Deer Dance Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Serj's appropriation of Howard Zinn's train metaphor is kind of annoying, since he seems to misunderstand it. It's not that you can't AFFORD to be neutral on a moving train; you just CAN'T be neutral on a moving train. If you choose to do nothing, you are carried wherever the train is headed, so there is no neutral stance available. | |
| Flight of the Conchords – Inner City Pressure Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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What are you searching for, hidden treasure? All you'll find is... inner city pressure. (Inner city pressure) You've lost perspective like a picture by Escher-- It's the pressure. (Inner city pressure) |
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| Black Sabbath – Fairies Wear Boots Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| Don't you hate it when you go in for your check-up and the doctor just says, "Son, son, you've gone too far, 'cause smokin' and trippin' is all that you do--yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaahh"? | |
| Radiohead – Paperbag Writer Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| It was tuberculosis, and that isn't the reason Poe is famous. Not sure that your equation "personal misery = poetic greatness" works out. Shakespeare did alright for himself. | |
| Rasputina – Signs of the Zodiac Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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It's interesting that people have interpreted this song both as supporting unscientific medicine (astrology, bleeding, etc.) and as a renunciation of it. I think that kind of gets to the heart of the matter as this is a really ambivalent song. The line, "Haven't you found that the systems for planning always fail?" seems to indicate a skepticism about the existence of intelligible order in the universe, which the system of astrology takes for granted. But then, what was the unavoidable entity that gave daddy his heart attack? I'm assuming the expected answer is not obesity or heart disease. That question seems to imply a fatalistic mindset in which there IS order in the universe, and which WOULD allow for a predictive system like astrology to make sense. The speaker then introduces the idea of blood-letting as a form of medieval medicine, inhabiting an ancient motherly persona: "Oh, honey I know it hurts." Does she really think "this will really work"? Or is this another jab at outdated attempts to understand and control our environment? I could see a reading which reduces the whole thing to a sarcastic tirade against (specifically bogus) human atempts to understand the world, the "systems for planning" which inevitably fail; but I think the line, "Can you avoid what gave daddy his heart attack?" seriously undermines this reading. |
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| Faith No More – Just A Man Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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If these are really FNM's best lyrics... that's a pretty sad statement. No offense, but Mike Patton needs to apologize to the English language for the bridge. My hope is that he didn't write it, just kind of went into the vocal booth and said whatever high-and-mighty old-Englishy thing that came into his head without thinking about it. Because grammatically it makes no sense, if you're paying attention it's just laughable. "Like Icarus, to fly to high" should of course be "to fly too high;" and I'm assuming "far too lonely then he ought" is meant to be "far too lonely than he ought" Even with these corrections, however, it makes little sense. It begins with "Man was born to love, though..." The "though" indicates he's about to tell us something which runs contrary to the statement of man's being born to love, but he abandons this idea. Instead we get "often he has sought like Icarus to fly to [sic] high." OK, well this is a cliche, but it makes sense on its own. "And far too lonely[,?] then he ought to kill the sun of East and West and hold the world at [not as] his behest:" is he really telling us that man ought to kill the sun after flying too high? That doesn't make any sense, he has just been censuring man for flying too near the sun. Instead, I read the phrase "far too lonely than he ought" as referring man's "flying" in the previous line, with the sense of "often he has sought... to fly too high and too lonely." It's the most sense I can make out of a frustrating line. Also, now we can interpret "to kill the sun of East and West" as one more thing man "has sought" to do (I guess since he's up so close to sun anyway he might as well kill it, right?). "To hold the terrible power, to whom only gods are blessed" should clearly be "with which only gods are blessed," so Patton makes a pretty imbecilic error right at the climax of his little soliloquy. The sense of the whole passage is actually pretty easy to ascerain (because it's so trite) despite the tortured grammar: Man was meant for lowly pursuits, but often he has ignored his limitations in his striving for greatness, with disastrous results--I won't make that mistake. I guess there are two ways to look at this: either it's an epic failure to sound intelligent and literary... or the errors are intentional and Patton is mocking the faux-erudition of the song's narrator. I would really like to see it the second way, but my guess is the first is probably correct. |
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| Rasputina – Hunter's Kiss Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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Oh man, it IS "his cloudy breath"--I had thought the line was "I could see the steaming of his cloudy brow" and it was my favorite line in the song. It is "steaming" though, and not "streaming" as the lyrics here say. Also, I would vote for "froze in motion" over "frozen motion" in line 3; "froze in motion" sounds the same and it's grammatically incorrect (it should be "frozen in motion"), but "frozen motion" just makes no sense. Good call, heartwork, about the Virgil inference. But the tradition of depicting courtship in terms of a male hunter pursuing a doe goes way beyond Virgil; Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare and many other widely-read poets all have sonnets with this theme. It's interesting that the sonnet tradition almost always identifies with the hunter, whereas this song takes the perspective of the hunted deer. It takes some measures to undermine the assumptions of the genre, especially in the fourth stanza, which brings the degrading and misogynistic implications of the tale to the surface: "My life is not mine / Like a dog or a wife." Ultimately, it could still do more to subvert the genre, however. It is clear in this song that this model of courtship is bad for the woman, who is killed and carted off. But I would argue that it is also degrading to the man, and this is not represented in the song. The hunter in this song is the paradigm of idealized masculinity, powerful, enigmatic, stoic, godlike. He carts off his trophy at the end of the song with no indication that he has been reciprocally affected in any way by his violent act. While this may be the way some men prefer to see their own sexual "conquests," in reality sex and love are two-way streets and we would do well to abandon such an antiquated and patriarchal model of gender relations. |
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| Violent Femmes – Sweet Misery Blues Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I read a Roger Ebert review one time, I think it was of American Psycho and he praised Christian Bale for his lack of "survival instinct;" essentially, the point was most leading actors would have tried to make the character cool out of instinct to preserve their image. That's the same way I feel about the album Hallowed Ground. On the self-titled album, Gano plays the sexually frustrated teenage misfit throughout, but on the followup he tries on a number of extremely un-flattering personas, a pretty daring move in my mind. From the child-murdering hillbilly of "Country Death Song" and the wannabe-gangster schoolyard bully of "Never Tell" to the bizarre juxtaposition of solemn Christian hymn with awkwardly homosexual urges and racist sentiments in "Black Girls" and the creepy rapist guy in this song, this album is full of odd people you definitely wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. The unsympathetic speakers of this album set it apart from most other pop music and are a large part of what make it so compelling. It's almost like a backwoods "Goodfellas" or "Midnight Cowboy," a beautiful piece of art whose subject happens to be ugly, damaged people. |
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| Mr. Bungle – Pink Cigarette Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I know sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but is a pink cigarette really EVER just a pink cigarette? I don't think it is here, it's a symbol of the speaker's masculinity, which is threatened by his lover's promiscuity and abuse. She clearly wears the pants in the relationship, alternately ignoring and abusing him. He is penetrated, never penetrator; her lips touch everything--perhaps penetrated by others--but not him; he is touched instead by "a slap on my cheek" and penetrated by her metaphorical cigarette-phallus in the line, "I've been your ashtray." Finally, she abandons him, leaving his useless "pink cigarette" on the bed in a last insult. He needs to take action to reverse the situation, but he is conflicted because he actually desires her abuse: his continual refrain, "Hush me / Touch me" makes the link between his need for attention and repression clear. His only means of escaping this situation is self-destruction. He can thus fulfill his need to regain his masculinity by debasing others as well as his need to be debased himself. The reference to a "sillhouette" indicates he hangs himself, while the "smoke" indicates immolation. Either way, he is conflicted to the end about his decision. Like many suicides, he fantasizes about her reaction to his death, as in the closing countdown, "There's just X hours left until you'll find me dead." This almost giddy anticipation is balanced, however, by his fear of her gaze: "I'm hoping the smoke / Hides the shame I've got on my face." Deep down he fears that his self-annihilation will not restore his manhood, instead heaping shame on top of shame. |
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| Nine Inch Nails – Zero-Sum Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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One thing I find endlessly fascinating in modern rock music is its largely unsuccessful attempt to break ideologically from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Think about it: bands from the early days of metal like Black Sabbath down to modern heavy-metal and industrial bands like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson are perceived as being "satanic," "anti-religious," essentially as rebels against the whole Christian mindset. One would think, given the extreme distate for Christianity expressed in songs like "Heresy" and so forth that bands like NIN would just throw the whole thing overboard, but they seem to have a real hard time doing that. Just as metal bands continue to use Christian iconography in their stage shows, they continue to espouse traditionally Christian ideas in their lyrics. I think "In This Twilight" is a striking example. Orthodox Christianity down through the centuries has been an extremely pessimistic religion, generally seeing this world as more of a punishment than a gift. Likewise, Christian thought tends to deny the innate worth of human beings and our ability to do good in the world. The Judeo-Christian tradition also affirms "communal guilt," a sort of guilt by association. We are all burdened with Adam's Original Sin, and the inhabitants--including women, children, donkeys, etc.--of especially sinful places like Sodom and Gomorrah are sinful by association with those places and people-groups. The advent of Humanism in the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment in the 18th century, fundamentally altered the way the West thought about these issues. And where, of all places, do we find a forceful restatement of the old Christian view that human nature is evil and but for the unmerited grace of god we all shall be cast down into hell? In a Nine Inch Nails song! It's all here in the chorus: "Shame on us / Doomed from the start / May god have mercy on our dirty little hearts." The myth of progress has turned out to be a lie; the Humanists were wrong. All our technological innovations have done is allow us to express our fundamentally evil human nature in more and more destructive ways; the City of Man will inevitably collapse on itself if god (or "the Presence") does not intervene to destroy it first. If he does, which is what seems about to happen in this song, we all--young and old, good and bad--deserve to be destroyed because we are all guilty as a community for the evil state of affairs. Our only hope is that this Presence or god will "have mercy on our dirty little hearts;" i.e., unmerited grace, the crux of Christian theology. Of course, Reznor's disgust with the state of affairs is largely BECAUSE of the rise of religious fanaticism and the crumbling wall between church and state. And of course both stanzas of this song conclude with a statement of uncertainty regarding the existence of an afterlife. Reznor is certainly not a religious fanatic or a right-wing thinker by any means. But my point is that the myth he chooses to express his leftist discontent is fundamentally Christian, taking for granted Christian assumptions about morality and the human condition which Humanists have rejected for centuries. |
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| Rasputina – Watch T.V. Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I feel like she watches TV as a way of escaping from her life, so I can take the anxiety about a show being cancelled or an actor leaving a show literally. Because she is so emotionally invested in the TV world, she becomes extremely agitated when that world is disrupted. As she becomes aware of her projection of her fantasies onto the screen ("With the volume low / I make up what they say"), she is forced to face the unpleasant realities of her life ("I sit and watch TV / I see only me / Though I look for you there"). She must redouble her efforts to convince herself that living vicariously through the people on TV does "give her pleasure" and power and all the things she needs it to do. A satire of TV culture. Watching TV is a totally passive, unproductive activity, but we convince ourselves it's a deeply fulfilling and empowering one because we need it as a defense mechanism to stave off the realization that we lead empty, meaningless lives. |
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| Rush – Distant Early Warning Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| The shot with the kid riding like a cowboy on the missile is a quote from Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," a satire of the Cold War. | |
| Radiohead – Knives Out Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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A plane crashes on a mountain and the survivors must cook and eat their dead or starve. There's a long tradition in Western literature (Robinson Crusoe, Thoreau's Walden) that fantasizes about escaping society to commune with nature and discover deep truths about oneself and one's world. This song is the other side of that--think Lord of the Flies. It isn't about a desperate struggle for survival, it's about stripping away all the comforts of society and discovering that what's underneath it all is ugly. Poetry tends to take for its subject the beautiful and uplifting aspects of the human experience, but this song takes a hard look at the other side. As heterotrophs, we might not have to literally squash the mouse's head and throw him in a pot, but we all survive by killing, cooking and eating other living beings. We do this to delay our inevitable demise. Ultimately, the fate of the mouse in the pot will be ours as well; "I want you to know he's not coming back" becomes "Look into my eyes: I'm not coming back." There has never been a death that didn't benefit anybody, and we know that when we die those who are left will feed off of our flesh, literally or figuratively, as the vicious, tedious cycle of life repeats itself. |
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| The Faint – Fulcrum and Lever Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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OKRadiohead: How is the song about mankind's desire to fly without machinery when the kids build a primitive flying machine as you say? Also, I don't think this song is mocking the space race: when the narrator says "I've seen the circus / I know how they do it," he's referring to his act of jumping off the board "like you would from a trampoline," not to the space race. I like the idea that the strange phenomena of the last few stanzas are the result of the narrator's first encounter with drugs in the form of painkillers, but I think the most important result of this traumatic incident, the "change" of the final line, is the lesson learned alluded to in the first stanza. The lesson, on the surface, is simply that what goes up comes back down; but probably this lesson is emblematic of the progression from childhood to adolescence and the abandonment of the whimsical and romantic ideas of youth. |
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| The Faint – The Geeks Were Right Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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"If I could bring things back, they'd feedback wild": Say the initial state of some technology in the present is X, then the state of that technology in the future is X + 1. So if he could bring an example of future technology back to the present, scientists would be like, oh shit and present technology would immediately advance to X + 1. Which would mean that by the time the future he travelled to rolls around, the technology has advanced from X + 1 to X + 2, so the object he brought back was more advanced... Classic feedback loop right? Maybe that's what he means it's an interesting thought |
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| The Faint – The Geeks Were Right Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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"If I could bring things back, they'd feedback wild": Say the initial state of some technology in the present is X, then the state of that technology in the future is X + 1. So if he could bring an example of future technology back to the present, scientists would be like, oh shit and present technology would immediately advance to X + 1. Which would mean that by the time the future he travelled to rolls around, the technology has advanced from X + 1 to X + 2, so the object he brought back was more advanced... Classic feedback loop right? Maybe that's what he means it's an interesting thought |
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| The Beatles – Maxwell's Silver Hammer Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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rstravis, I appreciate your pointing out that joan's character is paul's way of ribbing the intellectuals, perhaps, as you say, even the university-trained musicians who wrote off the beatles. i still don't think the hypothesis that maxwell is an anti-establishment hero holds up though. ultimately that reading rests on your reading of "quizzical," which doesn't necessarily imply "derisive" or "mocking." the whole line is "joan was quizzical, studied pataphysical science," i.e., joan was eager to learn, ergo she engaged in hopelessly esoteric/ridiculous studies "in the home." i don't see how that makes her oppressive, or part of the establishment. instead, joan comes off as an isolated, lonely, pathetic figure, and i don't imagine maxwell bashing her brains in is exactly an applause line for most people reading the lyrics. also, i don't see why "in the home" necessarily implies an insane asylum, instead of an old folk's home or joan's home or her friend's home. certainly an insane asylum doesn't seem like the kind of place a student would study "late night all alone with a test-tube." (never mind that it makes no sense to study pataphysics with a test-tube to begin with.) it's not really important where joan is studying anyway. i guess my main objection is that by opening the story with maxwell's cold-blooded and apparently motiveless murder of his classmate joan, paul doesn't exactly set us up to cheer maxwell's defiance of authority. it seems more "psycho" than "easy rider" to me. |
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| The Beatles – Maxwell's Silver Hammer Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Wow, this song's lyrics really fascinated me so I came here to see what people made of them and I'm pretty disappointed. Most people just say something like "it's self-explanatory" or "it doesn't mean anything," but these lyrics are problematic in ways that require explanation. why does maxwell kill joan? how does he kill the judge? how does the narrator feel about maxwell? the other posts have put forward theories which are quite obviously wrong. some people have said that this song is "about" manson, jack the ripper or some other well-known serial killer, which it might be if paul knew nothing at all about those killers other than that they killed people. other theories don't survive a quick scanning of the lyrics, such as that maxwell is an anti-establishment hero since his victims represent authority. joan, the inquisitive female university student, certainly doesn't sound like an "establishment" figure, rather the opposite. some people have referred to maxwell as a child killer, which clearly he is not since he is "majoring in medicine." paul's quote about the song doesn't do it justice; though the hammer may have originally signified only the event which puts an end to good fortune / optimism, the story which was built around the hammer has more going on. maxwell doesn't just bring the hammer down on joan as she's preparing for her date, he also asks her on the date. and his killing of the other characters isn't correlated with their optimism or good fortune but simply prevents their punishing him. one open question: i know nothing of british courts. in an american court the defendant sits across the room facing the judge as he delivers the sentence, so it would be quite impossible for maxwell's hammer to come down on him as it does in the song. is this the case in british court? finally, my take: the lyrics are puzzling because whereas maxwell's motive is transparent in the second and third murders, the first is obscure. we are just told he calls up joan for a date and then shows up early to bash her brains in. he sounds schizophrenic in this episode; this doesn't fit with what we know about him from the rest of the song, that he is quite a bright young man (majoring in medicine) who methodically kills the people by whom he feels threatened (the teacher and judge). if i were to fill in the story a bit with an eye to continuity, it might sound like this: maxwell felt threatened by joan (maybe she found out he cheated on a test or something) so he decided to off her. he called her to make sure she would be home when he made his visit, then went to her residence. when she opened the door for him, down came the hammer, maxwell taking care to "make sure that she was dead". maxwell succeeded in avoiding police scrutiny long enough to commit his second murder, but was then arrested and charged with murder. at the trial, two other female students, friends of maxwell unable to believe the charges against him, loudly proclaimed his innocence. the judge, unmoved, began to pronounce a guilty verdict and sentencing when suddenly maxwell, having somehow escaped police custody and obtained his beloved hammer, bashes the judge's brains in. as with the first two murders, maxwell fails to anticipate that his brutal solution will only get him in more trouble. |
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| Radiohead – Paperbag Writer Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| i haven't read any interviews or anything but it seems more likely to me that they just had the line "blow into this paperbag" in mind when they titled it and thought they would make a funny little beatles joke. | |
| Violent Femmes – Never Tell Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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despite the words "father" and "sister," i don't think this song deals with family dysfunction. most of the referents ("sink down to the bottom of the river," "gonna turn rat fink?," "then the lights will go out") point to organized crime and the importance of keeping silent in that context. but the lines "Don't you know no one? You never tell on someone," combined with Gano's whiney, repetitive vocal performance give a strong impression of a schoolyard setting for the song. this makes the most sense to me, seeing as the aforementioned references to gangland violence are all cliches which any kid might pick up from watching TV or movies. in any case, this is a pretty chilling and brilliant piece. whether the tirade is ostensibly against whistle-blowers in the mafia, schoolyard, family or elsewhere, it repels us with its threatening and simple-minded taunts one minute and displays shocking conviction the next. it's hard not to admire the crook who belts out in the final section, "I stood right up in the heart of hell--I never tell!" |
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| Pixies – Dead Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| Of course we all know the French refer to orgasm as "the little death," and this song makes the connection between sex and death just as explicit. David's lustful demands morph suddenly into suicidal urges. And of course in the story death does result from David's actions, though not his own. | |
| Rush – Distant Early Warning Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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NOTES "no swimming in the heavy water" -a pun on heavy water, an altered form of H2O used in plutonium production. Nuclear fallout is thus hinted at. "no singing in the acid rain" -an ironic pun on the classic hollywood musical "singin' in the rain." The insertion of "acid" into the phrase turns the happy-go-lucky tone of the film on its head, since acid rain is a dangerous result of pollution. "take a page from the red book" -I'm betting this is a rather obscure allusion to Tolkien. We know from "Rivendell" that Peart is a fan, so I think it's fair to assume he is familiar with the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, in which it is claimed that both The Hobbit and LOTR were translated from The Red Book discovered by Tolkien. Many readers of Tolkien noticed parallels between the events in Middle Earth and political events in the '30s and '40s, including the policy of appeasement taken by Britain towards Hitler. Sauron's unchecked rise to power after his defeat by the men and elves mirrors Germany's rise after her defeat in WWI. Since this song addresses the Cold War, to "take a page from the Red Book and keep them in your sights" in this context means to remain vigilant and attempt when possible to check the power of the Soviets. "Absalom, Absalom, Absalom!" -Absalom in the Hebrew Bible is one of King David's sons, who incites and leads a rebellion against his father, splitting the Kingdom of Israel and ultimately precipitating his own death in battle. After David's victory, David mourned his son's death against the wishes of his general, who feared demoralizing the troops. This line is likely an indirect allusion to this biblical story, routed as it were through Faulkner's novel "Absalom, Absalom!" which also deals with conflict between father and son. As for how this allusion fits in with the themes in the rest of the song, I'm kind of at a loss. |
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