Broken Boy Soldier

impetuosouls post i feel is a very good interpretation.

jack white tells us how boys grow up and start thinking they will be a man someday. your soul is the same your whole life. the only thing that changes is your brain and it tries to tell you how to be a man.

but you're just 'the same boy you've always known.'

I don't know about any of you guys, but it seems as if our dear Jack seems to have a bit of a fixation with not growing up (not unlike that Michael guy)... illustrated well in this song this Stripes song I love, "the Air Near My Fingers":

Don't you remember? You told me in December That a boy is not a man Until he makes a stand Will, I'm not a genius But maybe you'll remember this I never said I wanted to be a man

See? See? I love that song.

My take on the Racs song is that it's a guy--or a person--who is contemplating their struggle with growing up and letting go of the past,

I'm asking about it by myself... I'm through ripping myself off... I'm done ripping myself off...

Then there is the issue with debating whether or not to stay the same or become a man (...Jack?)

I'm child and man and child again... The toy broken boy soldier... The boy never gets older...

And maybe finally making a decision to get over one's self and try again,

I'm going back to school today... But I'm dropping myself off...

Anyway, apparently I talk too much...I should go now.

Yes,

The way I interpreted this song was very much shaped by a particular person I was thinking of at the time, but I keep it in my head, and though I don’t think it’s the intended meaning, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to read it the way I do.

What I see is a song about someone who is desperately trying and failing to throw away the childish aspects of himself because he’s been stuck for too long not acting his age.

I interpreted “toy broken boy soldier” to mean something like “someone who grew up acting disciplined like a soldier, letting himself be treated as a toy, until it broke him.” Again, I was thinking about a loved one (who has told me in depth about their struggle with an experience like this) when I had this association, so it made me think of the cycle of children forced to act like adults by their circumstances only to become adults who can’t escape their childish nature.

It feels like a problem to them that, despite the fact that they’ve grown up, they can’t seem to get rid of the aspects of themselves that feel childish. Sometimes it’s a genuine unhealthy behaviour, some kind of over-dependence on a perceived authority figure or extreme difficulties with confrontation to the point of reading others’ feelings as attacks, while other times it’s just liking to sit on a swing set or sleep with a plushie or ask for help now and again. Sometimes the thing that feels like a crime is having emotions.

“First Love/Late Spring” by Mitski has a pair of couplets about this that I think of from time to time. The first is “Wild women don’t get the blues, but I find / that lately I’ve been crying like a tall child” and the second is “And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five / but now I find I’ve grown into a tall child.” In that song she describes being overly emotional in her eyes, crying easily, feeling like her chest will cave in if she doesn’t hear from the one she loves. She’s admitting and succumbing to the childishness she’s so ashamed of, while Jack White’s narrator has a much angrier approach. There’s something to be said about gender roles here, but I’ve gone long enough.

“Pulling my questions from the shelf” could mean he’s not making his questions available anymore (pulled from shelves = recall or something to that effect) and is trying to handle everything entirely by himself. Interestingly, he says “I’m going back to school today, but I’m dropping myself off” as if the childish part of going to school is being dropped off & not the age that schoolchildren are? Which I think goes to show that as much as he wants to act like an adult, the roles of adult and child have been so blended in his mind that he doesn’t know where to begin.

The last thing I want to touch on is admittedly probably a stretch but I thought it was an interesting way to read the verse.

“You're rifling through a box of toys That were handed down to me Just take all the ones you want and then Give the rest to my family”

This can obviously be read as his overzealous attempts to destroy the child in him leading to him getting rid of precious things—these sound like heirlooms, not a toy he got as a middle schooler and kinda liked but wasn’t that attached to.

But another way to read it, my “stretch before you reach” reading, is that the box of toys represents the circumstances that made him this way to begin with. A burden that was handed down to him by generations of trauma and immature adults. If you don’t take his burden from him, it will go back into his family and the cycle will continue.

So what I see in this song is a man who feels he cannot adapt to being an adult, and whose perceptions of the roles of adult and child are mixed up to begin with, who feels angry and broken and wants to forcefully fix what he perceives as the problem. He targets his dependence on others—he’s only going to ask himself questions, he’ll be dropping himself off from now on—and tries to discard everything that reminds him of his childhood, like his passed-down toys and his memories. His misguidedness leads to an endless cycle of child and man and child again, he never truly grows up.

Amazing, a really amazing song. I... cant... stop... listening it!

jack white seems to be exorcising his demons, from the beginning of his career/his rise to fame, etc.

"i'm done ripping myself off"

a reaction, perhaps, to the criticism he's faced from alienated fans and those who have claimed he's "sold out".

"the boy never gets older" a theme similar to the stripes' "same boy you've always known".

"whatever you say, freakoid. actually I like it too. do you think the raconteurs are even close to being as good as the white stripes? I think jack needs TOTAL control. brendan benson needs to be ditched."

No way, then it would be the stripes. Brendan benson is probably more important here then jack white is too. They made the band together cuz they didnt want total control they both had that already they wanted to split up ideas and try new stuff.

Good Song, very Zeppelin like, he reminds me of robert plant in this song.

I think this song is about growing up and fighting your way through life.

This song roolz, reminds me a lot of white stripes except the slightly different drumming style

my opinion is the same as twigs&leaves its in same boy youve always known too! yea jack has some sort of fixation on it but he sees children as innocence...and this song is about losing that innocence

maybe he realizes that as we exist in time's illusion, we are tricked into believing we "grow up". we reach certain ages and think we know things we really don't.

"Children wake up, hold your mistake up, before they turn the summer into dust.

If the children don't grow up, our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up. We're just a million little god's causin rain storms turnin' every good thing to rust."- Arcade Fire, "Wake Up"

maybe he's not fixated on it as much as he's trying to tell us something. By going back to school, he's re-educating himself outside the government mandated education we're all stuck with. a revolution for the mind.

Wake up. The boy never gets older