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Supernatural Superserious Lyrics
Everybody here
Comes from somewhere
If they would just as soon forget
A disguise
At the summer camp where you volunteered
No one saw your face, no one saw your fear
If that apparition just appeared
Took you up and away from the space and shared
Humiliation
Of your teenage station
Nobody cares no one remembers and nobody cares
And you cried and you cried
He's alive, he's alive
And you cried and you cried and you cried and you cried
If you call out safe then I'll stop right away
If the premise buckles and the ropes start to chafe
The details smart
And the stories the same
You don't have to explain
You don't have to explain
Humiliation
Of your teenage station
And you cried and you cried
He's alive, he's alive
And you cried and you cried and you cried
And you realized your fantasies are
Dressed up in travesties
Enjoy yourself with no regrets
Everybody here comes from somewhere
If they would just as soon forget
A disguise
And you cried and you cried
He's alive, he's alive
And you cried and you cried and you cried and you cried
Now there's nothing dark and there's nothing weird
Don't be afraid I will hold you near
From the seance where you first betrayed
An open heart on a darkened stage
A celebration
Of your teenage station
This
Inexperience, sweet, delirious.
Supernatural, superserious.
Inexperience, sweet, delirious.
Supernatural, superserious,
Wow
Comes from somewhere
If they would just as soon forget
A disguise
At the summer camp where you volunteered
No one saw your face, no one saw your fear
If that apparition just appeared
Took you up and away from the space and shared
Humiliation
Of your teenage station
Nobody cares no one remembers and nobody cares
He's alive, he's alive
And you cried and you cried and you cried and you cried
If the premise buckles and the ropes start to chafe
The details smart
And the stories the same
You don't have to explain
You don't have to explain
Humiliation
Of your teenage station
He's alive, he's alive
And you cried and you cried and you cried
Dressed up in travesties
Enjoy yourself with no regrets
If they would just as soon forget
A disguise
He's alive, he's alive
And you cried and you cried and you cried and you cried
Don't be afraid I will hold you near
From the seance where you first betrayed
An open heart on a darkened stage
Of your teenage station
Inexperience, sweet, delirious.
Supernatural, superserious.
Inexperience, sweet, delirious.
Supernatural, superserious,
Wow
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Has anyone mentioned that the submitted lyrics are WRONG? It's actually, "Yeah, you cried and you cried/ YOU SURVIVED, YOU SURVIVED."
this is a song about an older gay man explaining to a younger gay man that everything he has gone through before coming out and finding himself with someone new (and older) is pretty common.
this is a song about an older gay man explaining to a younger gay man that everything he has gone through before coming out and finding himself with someone new (and older) is pretty common.
the message, however, is more common: you have to embrace who you are and leave old judgments behind, because although we've all been put through some wringer or another, we just don't have that much time to be happy.
the message, however, is more common: you have to embrace who you are and leave old judgments behind, because although we've all been put through some wringer or another, we just don't have that much time to be happy.
Akakuro, you're right, but it's a little irrelevant here. LA Rounder, that's entirely possible, but I think it's more a therapist. If it's the speaker saying, "Call safe" then it's more likely to be an experienced, cautious professional trying to be careful with a touchy problem
Akakuro, you're right, but it's a little irrelevant here. LA Rounder, that's entirely possible, but I think it's more a therapist. If it's the speaker saying, "Call safe" then it's more likely to be an experienced, cautious professional trying to be careful with a touchy problem
I think it's "he's alive, he's alive."
I think it's "he's alive, he's alive."
Well, my interpretation of the song is that it's about looking at the world and the people around you. Maybe it's because of personal goodness, that some people have lost their bravery because of problems they had in their youth and now they can't find solutions, so that you feel you must take a close look at how people around you live. It could be linked to the way the government is leaded, it could be about a family complex, or it could just be about the personal mind of one person, like an inner-voice admonishing about the persons abilities as a brick in a larger play. If you listen to the song with earphones, and watch the people around you, for example on the bus, it gives you this "straight-in-the-face" feeling that we all have our own history. Our lives are histories themselves, and they can be found good, bad, sad, sheltered or even embarrassed (maybe a macho guy doesn't want to be recognized as the guy who volunteered at a summer camp in his youth). This makes you resurrect the thoughts about yourself as a individual human being in a larger part. It's tough, challenging, sometimes embarrassing, often sad, but it's still a celebration of being held tight as the one you are. Everybody here has their own failed séances, whatever they might be. I guess.
The return of the Great American Rock-n-Roll Band! Hyperbole aside, I can't shake the feeling that song is about overcoming religious guilt. I went to a lot of religious summer camps when I was a kid and there would invariably be lots of kids having religious epiphanies about Jesus and "getting saved". (He's alive, he's alive!) This song seems to celebrate those of us who survived that fundamentlist trap. "Now there’s nothing dark and there’s nothing weird.Don’t be afraid." Be yourself.
I also think that you nailed it, but I will add one more possible twist on the message.
I also think that you nailed it, but I will add one more possible twist on the message.
I can't speak for all of North America, but up here in Canada, a huge number of summer camps are run by churches, and I would suspect that Stipe, growing up in Georgia in the 60's and 70's would have been exposed to some very conservative (read, not very tolerant!) interpretations of scripture etc at these overnight or week-long camps.
I can't speak for all of North America, but up here in Canada, a huge number of summer camps are run by churches, and I would suspect that Stipe, growing up in Georgia in the 60's and 70's would have been exposed to some very conservative (read, not very tolerant!) interpretations of scripture etc at these overnight or week-long camps.
Consequently, I also believe that the song is about Stipe discovering that his sexuality does not fit with this conservative view...how his...
Consequently, I also believe that the song is about Stipe discovering that his sexuality does not fit with this conservative view...how his insecurities surround that issue....and it reveals the spiritual and sexual experimentation that occured there as he rid himself of those binding insecurities.
"And you realized your fantasies are Dressed up in travesties Enjoy yourself with no regrets"
It may have been at one of these camps that Stipe litterally or metaphorically lost his virginity...
And it could have been with someone more 'experienced' or at least comfortable with their sexuality???
"If you call out safe then I'll stop right away"
"Now there's nothing dark and there's nothing weird Don't be afraid I'll hold you clear"
And - in a real epiphany - Stipe also discovered that his embarrassing secret desires (homesexual ones?) were worth fanticizing about.
"Inexperience sweet delirious"
So, while many at the camp were experimenting with/discovering their spiritual self, oblivious or ignoring the strong physical forces within them, Stipe was dealing with more pressing insecurities surrounding sexuality???
Just a hypothesis or two.... :-)
All of this talk about sexual freedom reminds me of my own "sexual dysfunction": my orientation is asexual, meaning I'm not interested at all in sex, porn, or dirty jokes (we are a 1% minority in America, 3 mil / 300 mil), and i got the same kind of cr** at school for not being interested at all that gays (Stipe is gay right?) get for being interested "the wrong way." Also, since neither preference really means much to me personally, I'm a bit more comfortable talking about gay rights than people who heterosexual (and probably think of gays as "weird" on at least some level), which means that all of my alleged friends quickly assume I'm gay. Seriously, I talk about it more than them because neither option means more to me than the other, so i don't think of one as more weird than the other, neither interests me. Would you ask a blind or color blind man to take sides in Jim Crow?
@Castle742 Stipe eschews sexuality labels, but if you were to put a label on him it would probably be pansexual
@Castle742 Stipe eschews sexuality labels, but if you were to put a label on him it would probably be pansexual
It sounds from the lines "If you call out safe then I'll stop right away, if the premise buckles and the ropes start to shake" that the sexual deviance to which Michael Stipe refers is some kind of bondage/ S and M scenario. How this related to the seance, I don't know - did the words on the ouija board spell out something of a similar kinky nature, maybe personal to Stipe, which embarrassed and frightened him, even made him afraid for his life (he cried, he's alive, he's alive)? Not into ouija boards or bondage myself, but one of REM's finest tunes ever.
Wow, I love this song. It's definitely their best single in a long time...it sounds like the band is having fun again, something they haven't shown ever since they released Up.
As for the meaning...I don't exactly know, but it seems to just say to live with no regrets and to not dwell on events in the past.
Frontman Michael Stipe has said that this track, which tells the story of a teenage séance gone wrong, was about adolescent humiliation and the kinds of things that follow you through your life. Billboard magazine asked Stipe what inspired him to write such a song now, long after adolescence. The REM frontman replied: "We all have our geek moments that we kind of carry with that or us have some impact on us throughout our lives [laughs]. I hate to use the term 'geek anthem' but it's a little bit, for me, like that. I have friends - who are adults - who move with such grace and poise through life and in fact completely embrace the incredibly stupid aspects of growing up and the humiliating teenage moments. They can totally laugh about and make fun of themselves and allow themselves to be, I think, more of a complete adult because of it. So that was really kind of the inspiration for the song."
The interviewer then commented on the way that after harboring things for years, decades later we think, "Why am I thinking about this now?" Stipe replied: "Yeah, it's like that one horrifying school picture where you either knew or didn't know that that was the day they were taking the school picture. Okay, so now anyone in the world can now pull that up online if they want to look at you when you were in sixth grade and had, whatever, really stupid glasses. But the song inhabits an almost more internal humiliation, something that happens to all of us because we were all kids and we all have insecurities on some level or the other. This one, I kind of particularly wrote it around a séance gone horribly wrong at a summer camp that then manifested itself later in life as kind of a sexual deviance, but a fun one."
love it too, their last album wasn't ace but this is really catchy :D
This song is really good. The best I could expect from the new release is another "new Adventures in Hi-Fi", which is their last great record, IMHO. Yeah, sounds like they're having fun again. Does somebody know if Berry is back in the gang? That would be awesome.
Their best single in a long time. Low Feedback hit the nail on the head in terms of the meaning IMHO.
Accelerate only too 9weeks to record and 10days to mix it, and Stringfellow's not touring with them "due to the more guitar-focussed nature of the new material." Let's hope the rest of the record's this good.