| Steely Dan – Bodhisattva Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| sounds like these guys wanna do an oriental person | |
| Steely Dan – Peg Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| You scared of ponographs? | |
| The Stooges – Down On the Street Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| What about rioting? Like, see a pretty thing-ain't no walll can be equated to looting and the lack of morals, thousand lights can be riot police, face shine can be white people etc | |
| The Stooges – I Got A Right! Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| Iggy's like fuck all these people telling me how I should sounds what I can't take I'm gonna live by MY RULES! | |
| The Beatles – Please Please Me Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| The singer's really annoyed. He does "things" for his girl but she won't give 'em back. He's tired of all this, and he starts to lose his composure before recovering it once before going onto a troubled rant. Eventually, though, marked by the end, he gets his way. | |
| The Beatles – Run for Your Life Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| Yeah, John's voice here is cool. It kinda wavers like it's fucking batshit insane, but trying to hold it in. | |
| The Beatles – Not a Second Time Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Oooh I read a really good explanation of this song. This is from T.P. Unaschov. Popular music is of course meaningful to us subjects. Recordings are calculatingly produced industrial mass products, but they bring about undeniably concrete, in fact even physiologically measurable, feelings in both their producers and consumers. The formalist aesthetics of music, established by Eduard Hanslick in his Vom Musikalisch-Sch̦nen (1854) and developed in the 20th century by Susanne Langer, thinks that music is the most formal of art forms, because its form is the same as its content, and that music cannot be a means of self-expression, owing to the performer's inability to make himself experience the feelings the music is supposed to express. Music can at most make a sophisticated mapping of potential feelings. This is true, in a sense. But one cannot deduce the validity of formalism from it. The somatic and instinctive features of music, overlooked by formalist aesthetics, do in fact emanate from the form-content's not being so atomistic that it cannot contradict itself psychologically. 5 The song "Not A Second Time", recorded by the Beatles in September, 1963, is a good example of this. The tune begins with piano and guitar vamping between major and minor chords as if to urge the vocalist, John Lennon, to get on with it. On paper the lyric by Lennon Рwho is probably its sole author, although Paul McCartney is listed as a co-writer in the usual fashion Рis a stern, decisive rejection of false love: You're giving me the same old line, I'm wondering why You hurt me then, you're back again No, no, no, not a second time 6 As heard on disc, however, it feels like something completely different. Lennon's singing sounds confused and hurt, and it almost sounds like he's certain of going for the same trap again. The line between love and hate is of course among the most popular themes in rock songs, but it is usually explicit and a central point in the lyric, whereas it is hidden very deep in our example. In the end the large amount of hate in the lyric of "Not A Second Time" can only make the hate feel more untrue. Even ostensibly unambiguous lines like "And now you've changed your mind / I see no reason to change mine" do not suggest their presumptive meaning Рthat the disappointment caused by the ex-lover is still vividly on the singer's mind Рbut, contrariwise, that it never really was there at all. 7 There is no bass or electric lead guitar to be heard on the recording, as the only instruments used are Lennon's double-tracked vocals and acoustic guitar, Ringo Starr's drums and producer George Martin's piano. The absence of bass makes the harmony eccentric, and a piano sound exercising an effect of mediating contentment only raises the level of strangeness, especially as the piano solo appears in a section based on the refrain instead of the verse. The sparse instrumentation creates a peculiar touch of fullness, but it is only an illusion in light of the song's general view. During the fade-out Lennon self-deceptively repeats the words "not a second time" to himself again and again. 8 It is a part of the semiotic view that the forms of texts depend greatly on identification. To make a text intelligible, the reader, viewer or listener must take a position in the narrative. The listener of songs in the first person is usually advised implicitly to take the singer's position. When the singer and songwriter are the same person this is emphasized. Lennon's extraordinary reading of his own text makes the thought of identifying with the singer of "Not A Second Time" an exceptionally difficult and unattractive one. 9 The music critics who have analyzed Beatles recordings furthest, Tim Riley (1988: 81) and Ian MacDonald (1995: 74-75), consider all of this proof of the inauthenticity and weakness of "Not A Second Time" compared to balanced early Beatles gems like "If I Fell", "Tell Me Why" or "I'll Get You". But I feel that the strength of "Not A Second Time" is precisely in its incoherence. 10 In his research in phonography Evan Eisenberg mentions the concept of cool, which is to him one of the three main modes of performing arts, the others being projectivity and uncommunicativeness. A cool performer does not court his audience, but neither does he ignore it. Instead of being observed, a cool performer observes (Eisenberg, 1988: 129). In addition to technically impeccable musicians like Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra, one of Eisenberg's examples of cool is John Lennon. He does not have sovereign virtuosity, which would make it possible to get praise for reproducing the musical text faithfully. Instead he wants the listener to think for himself, and withdraws behind the scenes to mock the listener's bumptious nervousness when facing a schizophrenic performance like "Not A Second Time". Lennon got so tired of the pretentious pseudo-analysis accorded his lyrics and prose texts that he wrote an entire song ("Glass Onion") about it in 1968, while still with the Beatles. 11 Sean Cubitt (1984: 210, 223) theorizes that the use of fade-outs to end rock songs is what tells the listener that he's hearing a mere record of something that has already happened in the real world, but which can nevertheless be experienced countless times. (In the liner notes of With the Beatles, the album containing "Not A Second Time", journalist Tony Barrow also hopes that the listener will feel able to start over after the record ends.) According to Cubitt, the fade-out also contradicts the Aristotelian view that an aesthetic object has a beginning, a middle and an end, and therefore also the Cartesian conception of the subject as something integral, autonomic and closed. This conception is also part of what formalist aesthetics rests on. 12 In the case of "Not A Second Time" the aestheticity is something downright wilfully fragmented and unpredictable. Yet this is not a Barthesian "writerly text" revelling in its refusal to interpret itself (Barthes, 1970: 5). It can obviously be grasped neither on the listener's terms nor the text's. The song's seeming conclusion's being faded out suggests that the real meaning cannot be found in the song itself. The song asks those seeking information on it to turn elsewhere. 13 Unlike purely formalist or emotivist music, "Not A Second Time" seems to require the transparent, "questionable" subject endorsed by much twentieth-century continental philosophy. (But it is at least conservative enough to require the visibility of a subject, as opposed to more radical views РHeidegger, Bataille Рthat consider the subject wholly useless.) The subject gets its meaning in an open forest of discourses, the parts of which are dependent on each other in unforeseeable ways. Sometimes they have to call attention to themselves quite uninvitingly. Even though it may be impossible to see such a theoretically flawed work of art as "Not A Second Time" as culture, it is fruitful to think whether it could be counter-culture. |
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| The Beatles – Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| It's about two fucking monkeys fucking in the middle of the street. Probably orangutans. The deeper one monkey goes, the higher he flies, the higher he flies, the deeper he goes. So come on, other monkey, lets fuck in the middle of the street! Everyone else hides their sexuality behind doors and close,but we got nothing to hide, cuz we're two monkeys fucking in the street. | |
| The Stooges – No Fun Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| One of many stooges songs where iggy complains about the fact that he's single. | |
| Iggy Pop – Nightclubbing Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| kinda funny considering iggy started off as a blues drummer, and has talked about having to "feel" every note you play. | |
| Iggy Pop – I'm Bored Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I always thought it was "lengthily" monologue and living like a "dog". | |
| The Stooges – Head On Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I prefer the Georgia Peaches version myself Buttfuckers buttfuckers buttfuckers trying to run my world Head on Head on I'm gonna give 'em what they deserve |
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| The Stooges – Raw Power Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Yeah kinda sounds like a drug addiction a pure high the father of rock and roll |
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| The Stooges – Shake Appeal Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| Is it like the transition between dancing, sex, rape and fight? | |
| The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I sort of interpret it as something like the corporate system, where someone has to be someone else's dogs, and just kiss total ass in order to get anything. | |
| Rush – BU2B Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| With this song placed at the beginning of the single release, and lyrical similarity to caravan, with this one setting up an ideology and caravan a bit of a narrative, along with the sleeve calling the two songs the "first two parts of clockwork angels", a song that is, according to wikipedia, going to be an epic multi-part, piece, I wouldn't be surprised with this being the first part of a narrative. | |
| Rush – By-tor And The Snow Dog Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I heard somewhere that this song was about one of Rush's friends who had to slept at their manager's house. Apparently, the dude had a dog that wouldn't let the other dude sleep, kept trying to fight, and eventually the dude just had to leave. | |
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