| Roxy Music – Pyjamarama Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| @[forlornus:44111] Thank you! I've always linked the "rama" to something like "cinerama", a way of projecting a film on a panoramic screen, a bit of a novelty. "Pyjama" itself sets the scene (echoed in the opening line with "couldn't sleep a wink last night"). | |
| Roxy Music – Pyjamarama Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| @forlonus Thank you! I've always linked the "rama" to something like "cinerama", a way of projecting a film on a panoramic screen, a bit of a novelty. "Pyjama" itself sets the scene (echoed in the opening line with "couldn't sleep a wink last night"). | |
| Bryan Ferry – Zamba Lyrics | 3 years ago |
|
The song is about a girlfriend (in what sense? Unclear) with whom the narrator has become estranged. She has made her way to high society and forgotten about her former friends (“now you’re such a lady, why your feet don’t touch the ground”). Maybe she has married a wealthy landowner; maybe she has made a fortune through being an amazing burlesque performer, who knows? Whatever the case, our narrator feels betrayed by her (maybe unfoundedly so, just to add another twist). The last few lines are definitely my favourites, though. “Autumn clearing, all the leaves are falling down” brings to memory the classic Autumn Leaves, another song about two people that are tragically not together anymore. Zamba ends with a cliffhanger: “I can see you clearly now”. I find that last line frustrating and compelling. It welcomes more than one interpretation. Maybe he sees that, despite her fully immersing herself in that strange world, she’s truly unhappy and lonely up there á la the girl from Bitter-Sweet (“as you turn to leave you try to force a smile, then you break down and cry”). Or, maybe, he sees that she has changed completely as a person, or just revealed her true nature which makes him realise he never truly knew her and he has been mourning the loss of a person that never really existed. Both are unhappy outcomes. I just can’t come up with a happy one that makes sense to me. Either way, I love how Zamba is so wonderfully open-ended. Depending on the day, I go for one ending or the other. |
|
| Bryan Ferry – Zamba Lyrics | 3 years ago |
|
The song is about a girlfriend (in what sense? Unclear) with whom the narrator has become estranged. She has made her way to high society and forgotten about her former friends (“now you’re such a lady, why your feet don’t touch the ground”). Maybe she has married a wealthy landowner; maybe she has made a fortune through being an amazing burlesque performer, who knows? Whatever the case, our narrator feels betrayed by her (maybe unfoundedly so, just to add another twist). The last few lines are definitely my favourites, though. “Autumn clearing, all the leaves are falling down” brings to memory the classic Autumn Leaves, another song about two people that are tragically not together anymore. Zamba ends with a cliffhanger: “I can see you clearly now”. I find that last line frustrating and compelling. It welcomes more than one interpretation. Maybe he sees that, despite her fully immersing herself in that strange world, she’s truly unhappy and lonely up there á la the girl from Bitter-Sweet (“as you turn to leave you try to force a smile, then you break down and cry”). Or, maybe, he sees that she has changed completely as a person, or just revealed her true nature which makes him realise he never truly knew her and he has been mourning the loss of a person that never really existed. Both are unhappy outcomes. I just can’t come up with a happy one that makes sense to me. Either way, I love how Zamba is so wonderfully open-ended. Depending on the day, I go for one ending or the other. |
|
| Roxy Music – Oh Yeah Lyrics | 3 years ago |
|
Oh Yeah tells the story of a summer love soundtracked by a song that the couple hear every now and then on the radio, so that it becomes their song. It starts a bit clunky with the line “some expression in your eyes overtook me by surprise”. I mean, how else can you be overtaken if not by surprise? But anyway. It sets the scene: these two are in the car, listening to the radio on their way to the drive-in cinema, when they become a thing. The snapshots we get from their relationship are the ones that take place when the song is playing. When they first fall in love, during their honeymoon summer days and, finally, after the break-up. The narrator finds himself again on the way to the cinema when the radio plays their song and he has a little moment. “There’s a band playing on the radio and it’s drowning the sound of my tears”. Jesus. The song in question is called (surprise, surprise) Oh Yeah. It’s another meta lyric! The song they’re playing on the radio in the words is the song the words are a part of. Furthermore, Oh Yeah was released as a single in mid-July of 1980 and it must have gotten fairly decent airplay since it got to #5. It could have, very much so, come alive and been the soundtrack for a real-life summer thryst. Isn’t that kind of amazing? It may be a bit gimmicky, but I like gimmicky. |
|
| Roxy Music – Spin Me Round Lyrics | 3 years ago |
|
Terribly underrated set of lyrics. Maybe I’m reading too much into them or completely missing the point but here it goes. It may be an elegant and unobtrusive ballad but, giving the text a bit of thought, it’s actually a rather unsettling song. The lyrics open with the Ferry cliché, the lone spectator to the aftermath of a party (impossible not to think about Avalon when hearing “now the ballroom’s empty”). It’s the next bit when it starts getting interesting: “everybody I’ve known has been and gone. With the music over here am I, a shadow hanging on”. Our narrator is caught in a strange limbo, without sense or purpose now that the show is over (did I mention this is the closing track of the “Manifesto” album?). Immortal but merely “a shadow hanging on” waiting to be brought to life again whenever the song is played. And here comes the chorus and its plea: “Spin me round”. It works as a double entendre. It could be “take me out for another dance to keep the party going” as well as “play this record again to keep me going”. The bridge towards the end has Ferry’s voice referring to itself as a “netherworld dancing toy”, subject to the listener’s whims (“does it matter to me who turns the key?”). If that wasn’t sinister enough, the last few lines are the cherry on top: the recording shows some self awareness of its plight (“I don’t understand why the dream has ended yet I can’t wake up”), being not quite dead, not quite alive. A piece of soul trapped in a piece of plastic. It’s straight up “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” territory. Spin Me Round is just a fantastic little sci-fi horror story and I love that. Spin Me Round ends with the chorus being repeated over and over, slowly fading away until all we can hear is a music box playing until it halts, needing someone to wind it again. |
|
| Roxy Music – Pyjamarama Lyrics | 3 years ago |
| Although at a first look Pyjamarama might seem like a song about puppy love, after a few listens, the lyrics acquire a weird compelling meanness. I always imagine this song as a conversation over the telephone. On one side, a man; on the other, the object of his affection, a woman of luxurious living. She appears to find him totally grating (“I may seem a fool to you for everything I say or think or do”, our hero concedes). On top of it, she has discovered that he has been lying to her. Not great grounds for a relationship. But that’s not going to stop him: she may know about his shady business but now he knows all about hers too (“They say you have a secret life, made sacrifice your key to paradise”). She cannot get rid of him. The last line perfectly sums up this miniature musical play: “Diamonds may be your best friend but like laughter after tears I’ll follow you to the end”. | |
| Roxy Music – She Sells Lyrics | 3 years ago |
|
She Sells, with its convoluted lyric, seems to answer the question merely suggested by Duran Duran's Girls On Film: who has really got the upper hand, the voyeur or the voyeuree? The protagonist of the song is a cover girl, but the lyric is written from the perspective of the magazine reader, who is almost wondering if she’s looking back at him (“hold the frontpage up as a mirror. Are you reading me?”). We learn more about her, which actually tells us less (“she sells country and modern, ancient western song of oriental confusion”). She’s a shape-shifter able to embody any fantasy for your pleasure, and seems totally in control of it, leaving the on-looker confused, unable to see through her (“watch you walking in waltz time, a jigsaw puzzle in tune”). But, who cares about that? Here, as in In Every Dream Home a Heartache, is the commodification of sex, trying to infuse the elusive wonder of intimate human relationships in mass-produced knick knacks, all for profit. Love as chemistry and sex as mechanics (“auto-erotic, please”). And so the focus is not so much in the act of looking, but in the act of buying. The easy answer would be then that the seller is the one truly profiting off this relationship. Is it though? The song, which up to this point had been backed by a springly piano courtesy of boy genius Eddie Jobson, suddenly changes it’s pace for the bridge. “Nine till five, the daily grind. Made-up lies, make up my mind. Same machine consuming me, consuming you”, which is probably the most overtly-political that Roxy Music ever got. She Sells comes to its claustrophobic yet realistic conclusion: there’s no ethical cons… I mean, everybody has got to get on with their lives. On one hand we have this girl that has to accommodate the buyer’s fantasies in order to make a living, and on the other we have the buyer, who fantasizes about her in order to make life more bearable. And so, we have Ferry lamenting “she sells, I need”. Simple as that. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.