The Scarecrow

I read about this song in a book behind Pink Floyd's lyrics and this song is basically about a scarecrow who realizes one day hes going nowhere he will forever be stuck up on a pole doing nothing and going nowhere and he slowly accepts that fact.

what happened to syd is much like the lyrics in the song ..what a sad loss....but yeh its a very potential theory tht he was predicting his own doom..i like it

Kornchild you sound like your from a right ugly kettle of fish. No fair - be nice to Syd he's a star. He's done much more for you than you have for him and much more than Korn will ever do for anyone. For instance, he made music.

Syd is a shame - but for himself, not us, his solo work is better than anything his backing band come Floyd ever did on their own.

And Syd wasn't insane - his apparent madness was abstract oppositional defiance over people assuming he was insane. By overplaying it he stayed free of their assumptions and was mocking them. Syd's mistake was that he credited his friends with too much intelligence and humanity.

As someone pretending to be mad he was actually in control and therefore may have known where things were heading - so it can be prothetic

And and and - it wasn't particularly LSD as far as I've read, more the Mandrax he was prescribed, and the frustration of being surrounded by a sea of thickery.

I think it's about the working class people who spend their whole lives doing long shifts of repetitive labour. "His head did no thinking" suggests to me that this is someone who knows they are capable of a better job than the one they are doing, but can't seem to find one. "His arms didn't move except when the wind cut up." This raises some questions. How can you be a labourer if your arms don't move? It's a metaphor for the frustration of a dead end job. You feel like your life isn't moving. You don't feel like you're making progress, merely scraping by. "Life's not unkind, he doesn't mind" sums up the class system in Britain at the time. Generations of working class people did the same job that they didn't really like, sometimes for their whole lives. But it put food on the table, so it was enough.

Some have theorized that when Syd wrote this song it was sort of like he was prophecizing(spelling?) his own doom later on in his life, when he completely mentally broke down.

"His head did no thinking, his arms didn't move" when things got really bad for Syd it was almost as if he was in a catatonic state, not moving or saying a thing, just staring off into space.

These are the actual lyrics, those are wrong:

The black and green scarecrow as everyone knows Stood with a bird on his hat and straw everywhere. He didn't care. He stood in a field where barley grows.

His head did no thinking His arms didn't move except when the wind cut up Rough and mice ran around on the ground He stood in a field where barley grows.

The black and green scarecrow is sadder than me But now he's resigned to his fate 'Cause life's not unkind - he doesn't mind. He stood in a field where barley grows.

But it is a very sad song..Imagine that, knowing what happening to you, and writing about it and everything..Very sad.

Shine On Syd

Actually, this came 5 years before Darkside, and Darkside has no intentional connections with the Wizard of Oz. So I doubt that, Zeppelin123.

Classic Syd.

Umm, actually, this song was on the list, just under THE Scarecrow.

It seems he is saying he would like the band to move on without him. Syd had his moment with the wind. So Syd predicted his fate.

This song is great!

Nice, Black&Green!