| Donovan – Celia of the Seals Lyrics | 2 years ago |
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"Silky" (in line 6) is an unusual adjective to apply to a seal. But it is a pun on *selkie*, a mythological creature that can take the shape of either a seal or a human. (Watch *Song of the Sea* for a great selkie story.) Hence "enchanted" in line 4 and the notion that Celia Hammond is their queen. "Voyna" in the chorus is Russian for "war," but in this context, specifically "war-torn." "Vay" is "way." |
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| Lisa Germano – Cry wolf Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| Lisa Germano – Cry wolf Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| @[ericmvan:40770] How the f*** did that format without all my line breaks? I wouldn\'t read it myself. And there\'s no way to edit or erase a comment here. | |
| Lisa Germano – Cry wolf Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| This is the centerpiece of "Geek the Girl," one of the greatest albums of all time, especially lyrically. It\'s the only song on the album that\'s actually about being "taken advantage of sexually," a central theme of the album according to Germano\'s liner note:\n\n"hi this is the story of geek the girl, a girl who is confused about how to be sexual and cool in the world but finds out she isn\'t cool and gets constantly taken advantage of sexually, gets kind of sick and enjoys giving up but at the end still tries to believe in something beautiful and dreams of still loving a man in hopes that he can save her from her shit life.........ha ha ha what a geek!"\n\nWhat\'s initially surprising is that this is a song about "love," which tells you the emotional dynamic: she has a crush on a guy who\'s just looking to score. \n\nWhat\'s easy for younger listeners to miss is that "wolf" was THE standard term for a guy who was just looking to score, when Germano was growing up (I\'m four years older than she is, and I learned it in kindergarten!) I think it only survives now in the phrase "wolf whistle." And "cry" is of course ambiguous; it can mean crying out, exclaiming, as in "cry wolf," but it also means to shed tears, and when used twice, as in "cry baby cry," it\'s almost always about weeping.\n\nSo "cry, cry wolf" describes the guy\'s reaction to her changing her mind about wanting sex. This is not, I believe, about forced date rape by an existing boyfriend. It\'s about realizing too late that the guy you\'re so into is not into you at all, and about the gentle, seemingly reasonable guilt trip that the aroused guy lays on the balking girl, until she gives in, ironically, in concern for his "feelings" which of course are 100% faked. (This sort of pressure can include the "blue balls" argument, where the guy claims that it\'s physically painful to be aroused but not satisfied.) \n\nThis is not to say that the song isn’t about the fact that no one takes her complaint seriously. The “cry wolf” element is twofold: her friends are tired of hearing about this pattern of behavior, and they’re not convinced that she actually regrets what happened. There are plenty of women who like casual sex like most men do, so it can be easy to assume that a woman who is having a series of one-night stands is getting “just what she wanted.” \n\nIt’s this dual meaning of the title phrase that makes the song sheer genius. Listen to the way she sings “cry, cry, wolf”: it’s as much or more about the guy’s pleading. There’s even, remarkably, at least a hint of pity for him.\n\nThere are three other double meanings in the song, two created by punctuation! “She didn’t know, she didn’t want it” seems to mean “She didn’t know *that* she didn’t want it,” which is sort of true, but she *did* want it, in the beginning. So “She didn’t know” can refer to her not understanding that the guy wasn’t into her, and “it” in “she didn’t want it” can refer to his emotional indifference. “You should have known, it’s all your fault” does the same thing in reverse: she is also saying that “you should have known *that* it’s all your fault.”\n\nBut the other huge double meaning in the song comes from the switch from talking about herself in the third person as an emotional distancing effect, to the second person. People use the second person all the time to castigate themselves. Is the “you” in the final section herself, or the guy? The answer is “yes.” Following “Didn’t they tell you” with “cry cry, wolf” seems to be explicitly about her friends warning her of her pattern of behavior. But it’s also, quite devastatingly, a summary of his dynamic: didn’t the girls tell you point-blank that they didn’t want sex? And your response was to metaphorically shed tears.\n\nIt’s worth pointing out that in the available video of this song, it seems clear that Germano is singing the ending to the guy, right in his face. As autobiographical as this album clearly is, “geek the girl” is still a character Germano has created; this is art, not therapy. Germano is too brilliantly self-aware throughout this album to make it credible that she was as lost and desperate as her character. But the way you create great art is to generalize from your experiences and find the universal within them. This, kike the whole album, is astonishingly great art. | |
| Spirit – I Got A Line On You Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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@KatWmith22 As a former 18 y/o male I can vouch for the fact that love and sex are not mutually exclusive. It's definitely a sexy song. "Let me take you, baby ... to ... bed." And you can bet that they're not going down to the riverbed just to have a stone-skipping contest. But there is also the "I got a line on you" with the double meaning as above. It's about both a physical and emotional connection. My buddy and I have a tape of Randy (apparently) improvising a Star Trek version of "Hey Joe," so I can appreciate the change of lyrics story. I talked to him (mostly about how amazing his step-dad was on drums) after that gig and he was a total gentleman. |
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| Liz Phair – Canary Lyrics | 5 years ago |
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First of all, read NeonFlow's anwer with Liz's own explanation of the song's background in her childhood. Dogma72's answer is also spot-on: young women are not given options ("here's your #2 pencil"), and then gladly accept this state of affairs, because they discover that accepting it, conforming, is highly valued, while asking for something more or different is frowned upon. It's a double-edged sword: you are assigned a role, and then (even worse) you are rewarded for accepting it. It's the added verse, about how all of this manifests later in sex, where the song becomes especially brilliant. The popular answer, that it's about bad oral sex, is just so wrong and backwards that it pains me. It's about all the guys -- and it would be all of them, in Liz's experience in Guyville -- who think that if they can give a girl great head and make her come, that suffices completely. "I come, that's all." I come, but I don't get listened to. I come, but my ideas don't get taken seriously. I come, but none of my other needs are attended to in the least. (I mean, this is not happening in a small town in 1955 where the boys don't know how to give good head and the girls don't know to masturbate if their boyfriend's efforts fall short. It's not about the orgasm but the context in which it takes place. And it's not about a specific relationship, but about men and women in general, in this time and place.) There are two or three great double meanings here, too. Everyone gets that the "cherry" is a clitoris, but it's also virginity / the hymen, so it also makes it clear that this has been going on since her earliest experiences with men (when she was 17 or even, metaphorically, 12). "Canary" is probably here because it rhymes with "cherry," but it also brings to mind the "canary in a coal mine" whose failure to sing indicates danger and possible death. So "I sing like a good canary" is "I make sure he knows he gets me off because the whole point for him is not to give me pleasure, but to satisfy his own ego as a pleasure-dispensing device." Hence "I come when called," which now goes from a double entendre to explicitly sexual. And following the preceding lines, it's devastating. If there's anything that is (or should be) *all about you*, it's your orgasm. "I come when called" means it's about the other person. Which leads us into "I come, that's all" as above. I'll also note that Liz loves the alternate section that's sort of a bridge but isn't, and that is intensely personal and harder to parse ("Dance of the Seven Veils" does this, too). She's explained that "Send it up on fire, deaf before dawn" is a purely subjective attempt to describe her emotional reaction to being put into this situation. |
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| Liz Phair – Canary Lyrics | 5 years ago |
| @[milkofwonder:34912] This is completely wrong, 100% backwards. See my answer. | |
| Spirit – I Got A Line On You Lyrics | 5 years ago |
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This is much harder-rocking and less jazzy than most Spirit songs. There's a story behind that, I think. Randy California started his music career at age 15 as the second guitarist in Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. The first guitarist, "Jimmy Hames," was Jimi Hendrix. It was Hendrix who named Randy Wolfe "California" to distinguish him from the Randy in the group who was from Texas. Hendrix asked Randy to come with him to England and be the second guitarist in the Experience, but Randy's Mom would not let him drop out of high school. Listen to this song again and imagine Hendrix on the second vocal and on a second guitar. It makes you wonder whether this song was inspired musically by some "what if" speculation of Randy's. There's an alternate reality where Spirit accepted the invite to play Woodstock, and the film features their version of this, with Hendrix sitting In (he and Randy remained friends, and the plan was for them to go on before him). Of course, in that reality, this is the 30th comment on this song -- and none of the others need to explain how phenomenally great Spirit was! |
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| Spirit – I Got A Line On You Lyrics | 5 years ago |
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So, what does "I got a line on you" mean, in the context of this song? Literally, it means "I have received useful information on you (which I will now use)," which is anything but romantic! Having a line on a woman, for instance, might mean that someone told you her favorite group was the Kinks, with the idea being that you could claim the same thing and impress her with a (nonexistent) bond. That's a standard ploy in bad romantic comedies! So Randy California is sitting here with a phrase that would make a great hook for a single, but it sounds more sleazy and stalker-ish than loving.How do you fix that? By going down to a river bed. Now the line has a double meaning. If he's got a literal line on her near the water, she cannot drown, and they cannot be separated. So it means "I will always be there, and will protect you." And now the "I have information about you" simply means "I get you, I understand you." It's not a phony line, it's a real one, and it's a lifeline, too. Now, *that* would go to your sweetheart's head! |
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| Jefferson Airplane – Crown of Creation Lyrics | 5 years ago |
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Excuse me, Mr. Jefferson Airplane's Publisher's Lawyer, they don't own the rights to these lyrics, since all but a line or two were written by John Wyndham and used with his permission. And quoting them is fair use! In his novel The Chrysalids (Re-Birth in the U.S.), the U.S. survivors of a nuclear holocaust ("the Tribulation") are fundamentalist Christians. They persecute mutants -- "Deviations" -- without realizing that there are, among them, a new species of telepathic humans. Late the in the novel, the narrator David is furious at his father and asks aloud, "Am I supposed to forgive him, or try to kill him?" He gets an unexpected telepathic reply from a member of the established telepathic settlement (I've emphasized the exact portions Kantner used, and noted the slight alterations). She tells him: "Let him be. Your work [-> "My life:] *is to survive.* Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They [-> "You"] *are the crown of creation*, they are ambition fulfilled, they have nowhere more to go [-> "and you've got no place to go"]. But *life is change*, that is *how it differs from the rocks*, change is its very nature." "The living form defies evolution at its peril, if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend. *Soon they will [-> "you'll] attain the stability they [-> "you"] strive for, in the only form it is [-> "way that it's] granted -- a place among the fossils. [added to fill out the melody line: " .... of our time.] In their next conversation she explains how species must always fight against their extinction. "*In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our rise [-> "minds"]. In loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.* I cannot find a source for "I've seen their ways too often for my liking," but I'm only skimming through a novel I last read many years ago, and it does sound like Wyndham. The last line, "And be alive for you" seems to be original. One interesting thing about the adaptation is that he changed "they" to "you" in the first quote, in order to speak directly to the Establishment, but left the pronouns in the second quote unaltered. He also changes "rise" to "minds" in order to get a rhyme, the only one in the lyric until the end, and since it is literally the minds of the new species that the Old People could not tolerate (were they to learn of them), that's a cool shout-out to the book. But it may be the reason he left the pronouns unaltered (which is somewhat confusing at first): the claim that the Establishment "cannot tolerate our minds" would seem a little over the top. Kantner was a huge science fiction fan, and Re-Birth was the very first item in the huge (and superb) two volume _A Treasury of Great Science Fiction_ that you got when you joined the Science Fiction Book Club. He likely read it there. His first solo album (also credited to Jefferson Starship), _Blows Against the Empire_, was a sci-fi concept album, and he wrote some sci-fi songs for the Airplane as well ("War Movie" is an underrated one). It's not surprising that he found what seemed to be a perfect metaphor for the battle between the counter-culture and the Establishment in a science fiction novel, and turned it into one of his very best songs. |
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