| Soundgarden – Beyond the Wheel Lyrics | 16 years ago |
|
I love this song, especially the live version. It pretty much makes every other band's attempts to sound like doomladen harbingers of the devil look like cartoons. Here's my take on the meaning: As noted by rock_hawk the placing of the song between 665 and 667 suggest this is the devil's song. So what does the old bastard have to tell us? In the first verse we are reminded that waiting for us beyond our journey along life's road lies Hell. "The road between your house and home" is a very clever way of describing life as a journey. In a simple sense life's road involves leaving the house where we were born to find our own home, our own place in the world. In a more religious sense (hey, its the Devil speaking!) the house is our material incarnation, our body, the house of the soul. The journey of the soul through life and death is to leave this material house behind to find its true home, hopefully Heaven, or Nirvana or whatever. But the Devil claims that no matter what, beyond this road lies a churning storm of hailing burning bones: Hell. That will be our home. Rude! Why? Well it turns out that the road is not so pleasant either... We are born tiny babies, helpless and shaped by a world not of our choosing. We are pawns whose lives are served chasing profit. Capitalism. We grow, become men and marry. We do what we can to make a home through work. This consists of collecting material things to build a home. The Devil taunts us by calling these 'stones' - in the long run, just a pile of worthless rocks. We worship these 'stones' (material wealth), consider them precious, and train our sons to be like us, to defend them by killing anything that threatens them. Sound familiar America? So this is the wheel, that travels down that road, steering our lives round and round. Endlessly turning, but going nowhere but Hell. Ultimately it just crushes people, drives them into the ground...below the ground, into that churning storm of hailing bones. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.