While you make pretty speeches
I'm being cut to shreds
You feed me to the lions
A delicate balance
And this just feels like spinning plates
I'm living in cloud cuckoo land
And this just feels like spinning plates
My body's floating down the muddy river
I'm being cut to shreds
You feed me to the lions
A delicate balance
And this just feels like spinning plates
I'm living in cloud cuckoo land
And this just feels like spinning plates
My body's floating down the muddy river
Lyrics submitted by shut, edited by irondeep, SpyMachine, Trifonas, Jordz600, millert140, FritzHaber
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While you make pretty speeches
I'm being cut to shreds
You feed me to the lions
A delicate balance
And this just feels like spinning plates
I'm living in cloud cuckoo land
And this just feels like spinning plates
My body's floating down the muddy river
The song was written in response to Rwanda, but it certainly can be applied to it. The inequality gap that separates the modern world from the other 60% who live on less than 2 dollars a day is reality. Equality is a Utopian idea that will never be achieved, people will always be exploited.
It is important to remark that the song itself is composed of 'negative' parts of the song "I Will" and the lyrics were meant to sound 'backwards' as well. Out of the frustration of not achieving a satisfying outcome, the band members played it backwards providing an unexpected but pleasing melody. The parallelism here is that of Duat or egyptian netherworld where the dead have to pass gates guarded by grotesque spirits or in another words which directly alludes to the unsymbolizable aspect of exhaustive process. This is why Yorke sings 'i'm being cut to shreds' and 'feed to the lions'; we cannot help but feel victims of oppressive demands. After passing this stage comes a more spiritual trial with the 'Weighting of the heart', in which Anubis weights human hearts against the weight of a feather in order to pass, therefore having to reach a 'delicate balance' in order to match the weight of a feather. We see that in order to continue that tedious distilling process one is forced by an otherness that can almost make you feel 'like spinning plates' in order to live up the expectations.
At the end of the song he says "my body is floating down the river" which alludes to Lethe or the Greek mythological river of forgetfulness which Yorke connects to the gnostic notion of being stripped from memories of perfection to evade the trauma of the material world. Whether arriving to a hell or being reincarnated into our world, the dead has been 'reborn' in strict sense in the same analogous way of "I will" being reborn into a dark and abyssal "Like spinning plates".
Likewise in Laurent Briet's unpublished music video the spectator is taken to a journey through a panning in a dark abandoned parking like place, resembling the journey in the river to the netherworld which waters are claimed to erase all of your memories if drunk..After a passage of light painting mythological motifs and anthropomorphic shades we finally arrive at the destination in which a materialised version of those shadows is standing. Almost like things emanating from a pure world of ideas we are finally able to witness the sublime negativity of Radiohead's art making process.
Has anyone seen the video? I'm trying to download it from somewhere, but to no avail.
This is one of the best live songs I've ever seen. The crowd just seemed to be silent, even though they never are.
"While you make pretty speeches
I'm being cut to shreds
You feed me to the lions
A delicate balance"
People talk about doing things, and they gloss over and sugar coat what's going on. Therefore it's as if they themselves, in their ignorance, were 'feeding to the lions' other people.
"And this just feels like spinnin' plates
I'm livin' in cloud cuckoo land
And this just feels like spinnin' plates
My body's floatin' down the muddy river"
And it never stops and no one does anything. My body's floating down a river and no one cares. No one again meaning the Americans or the British or whatever other powers could have stepped in but didn't.
See the Palestinians