I look down from my window
To the island where I'm held
Listen while you're sleeping
Darkness is itself
Tomorrow I am disappearing
'Cause the trees are amplified
Never ending broadcasts
To which I do not despite
Kid the mausoleum's fallen
And the perfect avenues
Will seem empty without you
And the pink light that bathes the great leaders is fading
By the time your sun is rising there
Out here it's turning blue
The silver rockets coming
And the cherry trees of Pyongyang
I'm leaving
I feel like I'm floating
Persisting autotune
But never-ending roll on
To the palace of the doom
The temperature keeps falling
Soon there will be no lights
Just a red glow of glass coffins
Watched by someone through the night
Kid the mausoleum's fallen
And the perfect avenues
Will seem empty without you
And the pink light that bathes the great leaders
Is fading
By the time your sun is rising there
Out here it's turning blue
The silver rockets coming
And the cherry trees of Pyongyang
I'm leaving
(Soon there will be no light, someone through the night)
Kid the mausoleum's fallen
And the perfect avenues
Will seem empty without you
And the pink light that bathes the great leaders
Is fading
By the time your sun is rising there
Out here it's turning blue
The silver rockets coming
And the cherry trees of Pyongyang
But I'm leaving
To the island where I'm held
Listen while you're sleeping
Darkness is itself
'Cause the trees are amplified
Never ending broadcasts
To which I do not despite
And the perfect avenues
Will seem empty without you
And the pink light that bathes the great leaders is fading
By the time your sun is rising there
Out here it's turning blue
The silver rockets coming
And the cherry trees of Pyongyang
I'm leaving
Persisting autotune
But never-ending roll on
To the palace of the doom
The temperature keeps falling
Soon there will be no lights
Just a red glow of glass coffins
Watched by someone through the night
And the perfect avenues
Will seem empty without you
And the pink light that bathes the great leaders
Is fading
By the time your sun is rising there
Out here it's turning blue
The silver rockets coming
And the cherry trees of Pyongyang
I'm leaving
And the perfect avenues
Will seem empty without you
And the pink light that bathes the great leaders
Is fading
By the time your sun is rising there
Out here it's turning blue
The silver rockets coming
And the cherry trees of Pyongyang
But I'm leaving
Add your song meanings, interpretations, facts, memories & more to the community.
Damon, always very clever, is here subverting the cliché that North Korea is a mad dictatorship that keeps its population under a quasi-siege. North Korea is part of a peninsula and Blur is British: the island where he's held and that is darkness itself is Great Britain, so he decides to go live in Pyongyang, to which he goes by plane (on the plane, he looks down from his windom to 'the island'). There, "the perfect avenues / will seem empty without you [his interlocutor that will remain in Britain] / and the pink light that bathes the great leaders [the statues in Pyongyang of Kim Jong-Sun and Kim Jong-Il] is fading".
Beautiful song. Am very clueless as to any great meaning but it's so sad yet uplifting too... Blur at their best.