| The Beatles – Blue Jay Way Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| My older brothers played The Beatles a lot when I was but a wee one, and this song scared the everliving crap out of me. There's the ominous sound of the effects on George's voice, the fairly sinister sound of all the reversed and chopped up instruments and backup vocals, and the lyrics pleading, pleading, pleading not to be left alone in this place. Somehow this song manages to suggest everything terrifying about being lost or alone without implying the existence of any malicious entity or even anything dangerous. It still grabs at something that connects me to that childlike panic-steeped helplessness of being left. | |
| The Evens – All These Governors Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I think FusionSecret has it pretty well summed up; this song is not particularly esoteric. It is worth considering, however, that The Evens are a DC band, and there's probably something in the frustration with governors that comes from a form of sour grapes. That is to say, DC citizens would probably need buy-in from either state governments or from congress to have the rights that citizens of other states have: not only do we lack the rights of other states, but part of what makes things fail to work for Washingtonians is the work of all these governors. Then again, the song does point to failures on the part of governors that affect their constituents more than anyone, so perhaps this song points to a notion that DC Statehood is not the great prize Washingtonians treat it as. |
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| TV on the Radio – Robots Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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With the exception of the carwash, all the places the robots are fucking are clearly tied to mass media or consumerism; although the carwash is not necessarily inconsistent. I think this song is about the way that sex is commodified by consumer culture. Sex, as human beings experience it, is about pleasure, love, and procreation, all of which are outside the ambit of a robotic existence. While sex sells, the commodification of sex takes all the fun and the meaning out of it - sex is of no use to robots, and the sex we buy into in the commercial marketplace lacks any of the elements that make sex worthwhile. The impersonal vocorder "vocals" on this song make it a piece of meta-art, showing media depersonalization of sex by the example of a depersonalized song about fucking. Is there anything genuinely sexy in the song? Is anyone actually aroused? My feeling is that this song is a way of pointing out the absurdity of the sexualization of marketing by associating it with robot fucking - an act of pseudo sex more desperate, pointless and impersonal than masturbation. In essence, buying into the culture that sexualizes consumerism makes us into fucking robots. |
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