| Butthole Surfers – Cough Syrup Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| Ah metaphors. Having spent years upon years trying to figure out some of the most "coded" song lyrics out there (I love enigmatic music, you can find new things every time you listen... The one exception being Beck {Whom I love, don't get me wrong...} who, no matter what chemicals you put into your system, a lot of his music is just utterly incomprehesible or understandable... ) and purposely imbibing in various altered states (including my favorite, DM...) in the quest to decipher them, I have a few things to say about this song. One, I think this was about River Phoenix (He was a friend of the Surfers and dropped dead outside the Viper room while they were playing there that night). From experience, the mixture of chemicals River had in his system wouldn't have necessarily killed him without a large amount of DM (The news commented how he had been on several drugs including an "over the counter cough medicine". Large amounts of DM can really increase your blood pressure which, in my opinion, mixed with the other, contra-indicated drugs, lead to his aneurysm...). Of course this is all debatable. The lyric "I'd rather be a matchstick than a lighter", in my opinion, means that while a person, like me (for two years), can take DM everyday, all day, and have some of the most intense hallucinations possible, Gibby would rather take LSD, mushrooms, ETC. (or whatever...) for two reasons, 1) once you take LSD (or the other traditionals) you acquire a short lived, but pronounced tolerance to it, meaning that you'd have to take a lot more if you wanted to get off again the next day (whereas with DM you can keep drinking that stuff and continue to get off until your kidneys give out from the repeated daily intake of the massive amount of glucose its suspended in...) and 2) many look at an LSD trip as an experience to be cherished, not something you can or should do all the time. Its cheapens the whole experience. Now, while this may be my opinion, most of my fellow Hallucinaughts agree with this interpretation. Also, River's family may have looked at his friends as leading him to this life of drug use and may have blamed the surfers and surrounding influences (The lyric "Brother... likes to solve his problems with a gun" Joqain (or however you spell it...) is NUTS and can be a violent guy. I dunno. As for the Johnny Booth reference, I have an idea, but its not solid enough to try and defend. Anyway, God love the Surfers and I hope River is hanging out at the drugstore in Heaven... | |
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