| Ramona Falls – I Say Fever Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| @Thisaintozkido - Jeeze. This isn't ratemyprofessor.com. Nobody is here to receive your "critique" of our forum-style analytical exposition. | |
| Ramona Falls – I Say Fever Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| @[mrdennmann:603] - I'm not saying your interpretation is wrong but I'm not seeing much from the text to support the idea that the speaker is waiting due to a painful loss. I think that the only reason she told herself to wait 5 years had to do with the advice she was getting from people like her teacher, friends, and family, who are each trying to discourage her from getting locked into the serious relationship/engagement/etc until later in life. Even if that was referring to a big loss, 5 years would still be excessive. Given that "five years" is an anagram of I say fever, it may just be that it _feels_ like a 5 year wait and all of the durations are hyperbole. I remember in my early 20s, being told I had to wait to pursue any girl I wanted badly enough would have felt like 5 years, or more. | |
| Ramona Falls – I Say Fever Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| @[Emprah:602] - I'm digging your analysis of the video. i got the overall concept but missed out on some of these key details and how they may further tie the video to the song. I'm not sure this is a different, outsider's take on the situation, but perhaps it is more reflective of the speaker's internal turmoil about everything going on. It plays well into the idea that the members of "civil" society clothe their own primal natures with innocent trappings, while clandestinely fulfilling their own animalistic nature (on their terms). The video to me is kind of the speaker's desire and feeling of rejection playing out on his own terms..like a chaotic thought process as he dismantles the excuses and disguises. | |
| Arcade Fire – The Suburbs Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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There surely is a muted sense of childish perspective that permeates through the song. Not only does it appear in the lyrics ("I learned to drive..grab your mother's keys" stanza 1) but also in the music itself--the simple guitar and piano echoing in the background. As the song progresses, it is noted that there are more twists in musical construction than can be afforded for a pure childish perspective--"moving past the feeling" takes on a rhythmic beat akin to motion. The repetition seems to cry for attention when paired with the serene whine of the violin in the background. All of these seem to confirm and reflect the idea that this is a person looking back on his/her transformation into a new adulthood as a form of adulteration, not a rite of passage. Whether or not this speaks specifically about a physical apocalypse ("the first bombs fell") or if it is part of a larger metaphysical undoing is likely to be a point of contention. Whichever you decide, I think for the speaker the idea of the latter is just as potent as the former--and neither are mutually exclusive. (The world's end will produce that feeling, and that feeling will feel like a World's end). The certainty of the oncoming suburban war captures that childhood attraction for ideal with less understanding. A call to arms, for some children, seems heroic. "By the time the first bombs fell" might be an indication of an actual conflict or struggle that they might have to endure, but yields nothing but a sort of callous dismissal when confronting the childhood mind. It never erodes them because they never participate, and in fact leaves them "bored" of war, detatched. As some of you have pointed out above, the song captures the essence of disillusion quite well. Each stanza provides this sliver of a memory, and each time falls prey to the rhythmic beat of "moving past the feeling." What is left is the haunting "screaming" from his dreams--perhaps once part of a childhood game or even the fear of something minor, now transmuted into the loss of idealism by the waking nightmares all around. |
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| Ramona Falls – I Say Fever Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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I find it hard to truly master all of the subtexts in this song. Of course I can see that it is primarily about the center of extreme tension between romantic engagement and the urge to let things develop over time. But the drive to delay the relationship five years seems to me to be quite elusive. What is the speaker waiting for exactly? At first, I considered sex, or marriage. Then, he blows that inference right out of my hand by stating that he had missed the chance to draw her near. I couldn't help but be taken aback and ask myself, "What the hell? He didn't even get close to her in that time!?" So what's the reason for this ridiculous delay? On a literal level, the speaker tells us. The woman, her teacher, and the neighbors all suggest that a five-year wait time (for some stage of engagement in the relationship) is ideal, if not necessary. A female friend, with an envious frustration, tells him that's bollocks and that he should go for her right then. But he doesn't listen to her, and then they are eventually separated. And he's left with that raw emotional drive inside him as four more years go by. With a hamlet-like indecision, he reasons that he is solving a puzzle through delay, "this is just a code to decipher." How he reaches this thought process also escapes me. Maybe it has something to do with the line "found my ploughman, chased the piper," which I don't fully understand. I can think of the piper part as an allusion to the story of the Pied Piper, who lead the rats out of a city. So perhaps he's admitting that he is hunting her down in his mind..or maybe that his thoughts have led him in a stray, however organized he pretends they can be (juxtaposing the image of all the rats falling into a line, but ending up in demise). If you put a gun to my head and demanded an interpretation, I would conclude that the song is about the extremely passionate desire for a romance with someone who does not feel ready to reciprocate. Compounding that is all the "neighbors," "teachers," envious other parties, and "the ones that talk" which create these oppressive social circumstances that create these tensions in the first place. At the end of the day, he is left with his extreme fever of an unrequited love, infatuation, or lust (you be the judge). I absolutely adore the vocals in this song, and the crescendo at the 1-line chorus, and the music video (which you MUST see if you haven't already--it's phenomenally creative--check it out on YouTube). |
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| Muse – Apocalypse Please Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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After reading through all of the commentary, I thought I would post a little bit of my own. A lot of the posts here touch on exactly my interpretation of the song, but few actually draw them all together. The interviews with the lead singer do shed a lot of light on the purpose of the song. He seems to suggest that governmental & religious leaders and speakers muse on the idea of the end of the world, and use it as a cause for extreme measures. The song's speaker is not speaking to you, or me, but to everyone. This voice craves for their matter to be an emergency. Not unlike 9/11, when an emergency was used to justify a war (regardless of anyone's feelings on the subject), there have been many times in history when the idea of some massive (apocalyptic or not) threat was used to justify a mass-scale intervention. This is how Cesar gained power in Rome. This is how Hitler gained power and brought the Nazis to power in Germany. In keeping with the political and religious sentiment of the band that we can infer from lyrics just as easily as from their direct interviews, it is clear that the speaker is not the literal voice of the writer. He is a straw man, spreading fear and prophesizing about fire and brimstone crap, and has been created based on a number of past leaders who have used fear to gain power over, and over, again. To a populace medicated by this kind of BS propaganda, even the oldest tricks in the book have seemed new. Muse mocks the idea of proclaiming victory as though it were eternal, or changing history, by using this severely flawed speaker. There is no such thing as an eternal victory, no matter how many times in history people have claimed to claim the final victory. Leaders and governments rise and fall, over and over again, but emerge by claiming to "change the course of history." The speaker feverishly demands for this to happen anew, when the sad joke is that it's already happened before, again, and again. The biblical apocalypse hasn't come. And when the end of our time comes, it would be ridiculous to expect anyone to "pull us through" it. |
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| Coparck – A Good Year for the Robots Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The speaker states that robots "never fail or fall / out of lovin'" Then he goes on to suggest "shouldn't we all?" In other words, 'why don't we all just be robots since robots are taking over?' Logically, it follows, since robots prioritize success (opposite to failure) and keeping themselves grounded high (therefore not falling) they take no risks, such as entering relationships. If humans were more like robots, they too would be met with greater success and keep up with the machine age, which privileges calculative (not emotional) decision-making. And here we have the classic irony of android scifi, centered in the song -- while robots succeed materially they fail to transcend their material interactions. No heartache sure, but also no "lovin" or dreams. And in that way, being irrational humans serves us better than our mechanical counterparts. There is also a matter of the constant questioning of the song. ("Shouldn't we all" "Do the androids dream of electric sheep?"). You might read these questions as rhetorical, and perhaps they should be. I don't think the speaker would want us to be robots. But I think there's a hint of uncertainty in the speaker's voice. There are clear advantages to be unfeeling, and there is always the possibility that the androids "dream of electric sheep" (and therefore be made to attain the human experience). What cannot be overlooked is the repetition of the titular statement "It's a good year for robots." Corporations and governments need calculators, not feelers. Feelings are not economically viable for the continuation of our systems. We need machine-like people who can "run" "many systems," while not being clouded by the "heartache" of the daily human existence. How can love solve the complicated problems of our future? Unspoken by the song is the the evident truth, however, that love and other human feelings are what tie us to our race. And as the spinning wheel of technological development rolls us into the good years for robots ahead, we're going to have to reconcile what it means to be human, no matter how inefficient that process may be. Why else would we care to survive? Without what makes us human, we're better off dead--or even better yet, as androids. |
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