| Manu Chao – Me Gustas Tú Lyrics | 4 years ago |
| @[nickt33:40024] : This is brilliant! It answers some questions I had been entertaining about the meaning of this song, but hadn\'t quite resolved (though I had been well aware of this everywhere-and-yet-nowhere aspect of Manu Chao\'s personal and cultural identity). \r\nStill (if you\'re still there and still interested), don\'t close down the comment section before checking out my comment (just posted, as I write this)…. | |
| Manu Chao – Me Gustas Tú Lyrics | 4 years ago |
| @[nickt33:40025] : This is brilliant! It answers some questions I had been entertaining about the meaning of this song, but hadn\'t quite resolved (though I had been well aware of this everywhere-and-yet-nowhere aspect of Manu Chao\'s personal and cultural identity). Still (if you\'re still there and still interested), don\'t close down the comment section before checking out my comment (just posted, as I write this)…. | |
| Manu Chao – Me Gustas Tú Lyrics | 4 years ago |
| There are three voice roles in this song, all introduced in the first verse: the singer/songwriter’s own (let’s just call this “MC”), that of his beloved, and that of the clock radio (radio reloj), announcing the hours from 11 PM (Central American time) to 5 AM. “MC” introduces the theme in line 1: “Qué horas son, mi corazón? (What time is it, my darling?)” Line 2 answers in a female voice: “Te lo dije bien clarito (I told you quite clearly)!” [This is the one line in which the voice of the beloved intrudes; as with Line 1, the audio is backgrounded, as if these were voices of memory.] The clock radio voice then comes in: “Permanece a la eschucha (Stay tuned).” In the second verse, the clock radio begins the countdown toward dawn, and in the third, MC begins enumerating all the things he likes. The intermittent intrusions of the clock radio voice gradually provoke a realization: MC is spending a sleepless night, and his endless listing of all the things he likes is all in a vain attempt to fall asleep (like counting sheep). \n\nWhat is keeping him awake? As much as he tries to focus on the breadth of his delights in life, every second thought comes back to “Me gustas tú!” Clearly this torments him. How do we know? Because of the recurrent refrain, in which he racks his brain: “Qué voy a hacer (What am I to do)?”, and can only come up with despairing answers, finally reverting to his initial question: “Que horas son, mi corazón?”\n\nThere is a delicious (but heartbreaking) ambiguity in the phrasing of this question. The first verse yields to the natural interpretation that “mi corazón” (literally “my heart”) is the conventional Spanish term of endearment, here addressed to the beloved. The answering female voice (Line 2 – see above) confirms this interpretation, but also contains a little shock: she has already told him “quite clearly” what time it is: it is time for him to forget her, because this relationship is history. In his pre-sleep(?) torment, he nevertheless can’t resist addressing her and hearing her voice in his mind. But as the song progresses and we realize that this is all an insomniac torment, a potentially different interpretation emerges: this “mi corazón” is really addressed to his own unsettled heart, as he wonders how much time he has by now passed in this sleepless anguish. (Anyone who has experienced this sort of anguished insomnia will empathize.) | |
| Leonard Cohen – The Window Lyrics | 5 years ago |
| @[PicoMania:35346] -- nice explanation -- quite consistent with the detailed exegesis provided by Doron Cohen in the article "Speaking Sweetly from 'The Window': Reading Leonard Cohen’s Song," available for download at academia.edu -- https://www.academia.edu/8553088/Speaking_Sweetly_from_The_Window_Reading_Leonard_Cohen_s_Song | |
| Indigo Girls – Tried To Be True Lyrics | 6 years ago |
| @[greenjay:31204] Just wanted to thank you for your insightful remarks. This is one of those cases where one has the sense of listening to a great song lyric, but is not sure why, until the (inter)personal background is made clear. Thanks for doing that -- it really opens up the song. | |
| The Velvet Underground – Sweet Jane Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Yes, fantastic. I had a sense that this was the sense, but you've nailed it. If by chance you're still following this (after almost 3 years!), maybe you can say a bit more about that refrain you touch on at the end ("…but anyone who ever had a heart, they wouldn't turn around and break it…"). Why "…it"? It sounds as if he's talking about people breaking their OWN hearts, where the sense would seem to require "…turn around and break one" (i.e., someone else's). The "it" confuses me, but maybe it's meant to. Maybe the idea is that we all (whether or not we admit it) have a heart that can easily be broken, and we all must play roles–at some level, it's all the same sort of role-playing, and it's all the same human heart underneath it all? | |
| The Velvet Underground – What Goes On Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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[It is indeed “lady”–and more crucially, it’s “see the BELLS up in the sky,” not “bills”!–hopefully the curators of this great site will fix this!] As to the song’s theme, I frankly see nothing here about getting dumped, or about drugs. (Either might of course have been involved, but neither finds any clear reflection in the text itself. ) This, it seems to me, is quite simply a song about loving someone who is going through turmoil, who is beset by their own inner “demons” and knows it, but is at the same time unwilling to just open up and reveal “what goes on” inside of them. The authorial persona (the “I” narrating the song) is not only distressed over this, but is in fact on an emotional roller coaster (“one minute up, one minute down…), excitedly agitated (“…fly from side to side…”), probably even vacillating between ecstasy and depression (“see the bells up in the sky / somebody’s cut the string in two…”). They passionately wish to know the beloved’s mind, to know more intimately what the trouble is. They want to offer support, consolation, solidarity in any way possible but, finding they are shut out, the best they can do is to continue to suffer all these emotions in silence, while trying to offer some kind of consolation in the vaguest of generalities–after all, that is really all they have to work with (“lady, be good, do what you should, you know it will work alright…). Note that this hope (even confidence?) that some kind of divine grace may intervene, in the midst of one’s apparently hopeless struggles to “find [one’s] proper place” and “do what [one] should” is the central theme of “Jesus” (on the same early VU album). That song is explicitly formulated as a prayer. The “lady be good…” consolation offered in “What Goes On” may be imagined as something actually said to the beloved, but it might also be understood as a prayer on her/his behalf. Having little way of knowing what internal “demons” are involved, the authorial persona (on this reading) simply “gives it over” to divine grace, hoping and praying for the best. (Ordinarily, I would hesitate to freight this song with such interpretive baggage. But sorrow over sin and separation and a fervent desire for redemption are indeed themes that recur throughout Lou Reed’s work….) |
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| Alanis Morissette – You Learn Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| This is about learning to live with the lacerating heartache that slowly emerges after you have thrown caution to the winds, let someone know that you are hopelessly in love with them, and then had to swallow that “jagged little pill.” At first, you may even think it feels good, swimming in your stomach; the ecstasy of your affection has deluded you into imagining it to be so powerful that you can handle even the eventuality of its not being powerfully requited. But you have yet to digest this pill. As the smoke clears and the dust settles, you realize you have in fact bitten off far more than you can chew emotionally. If you had not stuck your foot in your mouth, maybe you wouldn’t be feeling like your heart has been trampled underfoot. As it is, you’re stuck with this anguished longing and heartache, together with the sure knowledge that it is NOT reciprocated. Eventually, you’re going to have to melt it down, even though right now you can’t imagine how. Maybe you’ll just have to wear it out, the way a young child wears out a toy she is currently obsessed with. Meanwhile, your lack of caution has left you completely exposed to reality’s cold winds and the harsh sunlight. The fire-truck lights are flashing, the sirens blaring, and now it’s obvious to everyone that your emotional house is on fire. Who knows whether even they can douse the blaze, before the house burns down? Well, you live, you learn… | |
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