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Sky Saw Lyrics

"All the clouds turn to words
All the words float in sequence
No one knows what they mean
Everyone just ignores them"
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Cover art for Sky Saw lyrics by Brian Eno

The main "coherent" stanza most likely has something to do with the a sequence of ideas or pastiche of sentiments from the rest of the album.

That stanza equates words as meaningful and ultimately as concrete as the vaporous, intractable nature of clouds. There is a natural flow, or proclivity, of man to ignore the meaning of words with the whole history of words being invoked; "one th atdoes not learn history is doomed to repeat it". But the up-side to this is that Man will carry regardless just like the unthinking amorphous clouds, continually reforming, colliding, swallowing, evaporating. There will always be water... much like the "water" that Eno often mentions in songs like "By This River", "Spider and I", "Deep Blue Sea", and really any song in his career or anyone's career that invokes the archetypal subconscious of the ocean (and archetypal consciousness of the sky). So these clouds are how the subconscious inhabits the conscious... as words which act as mere symbols of a person's interior(subconscious) self (emotions, attractions, sensations, "ineffables" that never quite do "it" justice). So the "sky saw" is the clouds that carve across the sky. ...So the sky saw is the "clouds" that "carve" across the "sky". By carving it there are sections that are made... cultural partitioning of ideas, subjective/objective.

The "incoherent" stanza in the background is an example of the "sky saw" in the main stanza. "Some cut better than others.", is the meaning... but they're made of the same stuff. And no one is any more effected, convinced, or moved by them than they wish to be. A subtle way of sidestepping, or "re-prioritizing", any responsibilities you may have in life...

Makes me think of that line from Dr. Strangelove, ""I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

Some "fluids" are more convincing than others...

Cover art for Sky Saw lyrics by Brian Eno

As of the posting of this comment, the lyrics posted here are for 'Anthrax' by Gang of Four. The actual lyrics to this song are:

"All the clouds turn to words All the words float in sequence No one knows what they mean Everyone just ignores them"

Lyric Correction
Cover art for Sky Saw lyrics by Brian Eno

I like this.

Brian's songwriting process is quite often based more on the sounds of the words than on the meaning, and these few lines (in the middle of an excellent piece of instrumental music) say that it does not really matter if you do not "understand" or "appreciate" the lyrics of a song, they can still contribute to the piece of music.

Cover art for Sky Saw lyrics by Brian Eno

Yeah, like that last dude said, it's not really about the words so much. Except for the fact that the meaning of this song is about Brian Eno's phobia of huge metal rotating circular saw's being used by extraterrestrial entities coming down from on high, out the sky, down to cut some pizza pie, like with one of them circular pizza cutters.....no no no..look come on, this is just a fun song, fun opener for Another Green World,,,, bah doo da dooh.

Cover art for Sky Saw lyrics by Brian Eno

I feel like this song pretty much sums up Brian Eno. He tells us outright, no one knows what the words mean. So why not have fun with them? Create textures and moods with them?

Cover art for Sky Saw lyrics by Brian Eno

Guys. These aren't the lyrics to Sky Saw. They're the lyrics to Gang of Four's Anthrax.

Interesting interpretations, though.

 
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