| Blue Öyster Cult – Veteran Of The Psychic Wars Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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This song haunted me for years. I didnt know any background, didnt know about Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion. Although the imagery sounded much like a soldier's PTSD, I thought there must be something deeper. To me, it brought to mind the the mass media advertizing that we're surrounded by. I always hated the media. The thousand psychic wars were the thousands of advertisements both commercial and political, constantly trying to get into our heads, make us want things we dont need, playing on our fears and hopes, making us identify with one brand against another brand, what to like, what to be afraid of. "Im not sure that there's anything left of me", meant that we couldnt be sure if our opinions were our own, or if they were implanted by the media. They dont care how much they mess with your head. The war's still going on, dear, and there's no end that I know. ...we're all veterans of these psychic wars. Never diid know what the "shakes" were. Guess I didnt do enough drugs back when I had the chance. :-) One of my all-time favorite songs. |
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| Johnny Cash – The One On The Left Is On The Right Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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The catchy thing about this lyric that no one seems to have snapped to yet, is that the left right & center wording is ambiguous. Applying political meaning can go either way. "The one on the right is on the left" could mean either that the guy was standing on the right side of the stage and was politically liberal(left), OR that he was politically conservative(right) and was standing on the left of the stage. So you can get many different interpretations depending on how you assign meaning. Its similar to those pictures that show two different images depending on whether you notice the the solids or the voids. This is a very clever semantic puzzle. The only line that's NOT ambiguous in this way, is the guy in the rear. No wonder there are so many differing interpretations in the comments so far. Maybe this was intentional...??? You can make the song mean whatever you want it to mean. People who argue politics are arguing two different opinionated views of the same fact, each refusing to see what the other sees. I like to interpret the ending of the song in the ironic way: each guy ends up doing the opposite of what one might expect. The one on the left( the liberal) ends up working in a bank, in finance, a solidly conservative job. The one on the right, the conservative, turns into a late-night rock-n-roll radio personality, probably grows his hair long & smokes a lot of weed. The centrist becomes a trucker....whatever that means. Maybe it means sitting on the fence leads nowhere. Except I know truckers listen to a lot of NPR and talk radio, and you never know WHAT their politics might be, they're all over the map. And the guy in the rear - I see him as a kind of pacifist hippie protester - he gets drafted and has to learn to fight beside the ones he protested against. |
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| Johnny Cash – The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This song touches my life in numerous ways. The L&N refers to the Louisville & Nashville railroad company that hauled coal out of the mines in the Appalachian Mountain region where I grew up. If you're not familiar with the history of coal mining, the references in this song must be quite mysterious. No one in my family was a miner, but the L&N's coal cars did indeed rumble by my door, barely 50 yards away. Hazard Hollow probably refers to Hazard County, Kentucky. The song is generally about what happened to miners when a mine ran out of coal and shut down, leaving the dependent miners destitute. I remember many friends who once came home blackened by coal dust, when the jobs ran out they indeed looked white as snow. Miners do not acquire suntans. Kudzu vines are an invasive species that grows rampantly throughout the region, in the right conditions they can completely envelop and kill native trees. If left unchecked, Ive seen them completely envelop small buildings & houses. Dont believe it? http://www.maxshores.com/kudzu/ The line that most people wonder about is "with scrip enough to buy the company store." The word is often mis-spelled as "script", but its actually "scrip", which means a kind of private money or currency that was issued by the coal companies in lieu of regular money. The miners who worked for these companies, their lives were often totally dependent on the company: They lived in company-owned housing ("coal camps"), bought food from a company-owned general store, were paid in company scrip instead of regular money, and when they couldnt make ends meet, they received "loans" or advances on pay from the company... in the form of scrip, which could only be spent at the company store. Some miners went so deeply into this debt-trap, the song "Sixteen Tons" includes a line "St Peter dont you call me, cause I cant go...I owe my soul to the company store". This describes mining conditions in the early half of the 20th century. By my time, the 70's & 80's, relations had improved somewhat. When the mines were working, miners were paid quite well and had a reputation for thick wallets. But still I witnessed the results of several shut-downs and strikes, and its not real fun what happens to a small town when its major source of employment shuts down. Seems the same story is played out time and again in every industry, all over the world, with the recent recession. |
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