The song lyrics were written by the band Van Halen, as they were asked to write a song for the 1979 movie "Over the Edge" starring Matt Dillon. The movie (and the lyrics, although more obliquely) are about bored, rebellious youth with nothing better to do than get into trouble. If you see the movie, these lyrics will make more sense. It's a great movie if you grew up in the 70s/80s you'll definitely remember some of these characters from your own life. Fun fact, after writing the song, Van Halen decided not to let the movie use it.
[Verse 1]
Old man Wibble
Lush diviner
Duke of babble
Mad soothsayer
Drunken oracle drinks
The Liquid Jesus
Straight from the bottle
Spiritus Sancti
Like God full throttle
Bedlamite seer
Fortune teller croons
"Write your own fable
Believe it'll all work out"
[Chorus]
"It's gonna be alright
It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
[Post-Chorus]
"Raise," he says, "raise a glass
Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity
Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
"Raise," he says, "raise a glass
Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity
Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
[Verse 2]
Old man Wibble
Duke of babble
Drank straight from the bottle
Danced on the table
Fortune teller croons
"The world may tipple
The world may wobble
Raise your bottle
Of God full throttle
Liquid Jesus
Spiritus Sancti
Write your own fable
Believe it'll all work out"
[Chorus]
"It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
"It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
"It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
"It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
[Post-Chorus]
"Raise a glass
Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity
Beautiful delirium
Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
"Raise a glass
Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity
Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
[Chorus]
"It's gonna be alright
It's gonna be alright
It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
Old man Wibble
Lush diviner
Duke of babble
Mad soothsayer
Drunken oracle drinks
The Liquid Jesus
Straight from the bottle
Spiritus Sancti
Like God full throttle
Bedlamite seer
Fortune teller croons
"Write your own fable
Believe it'll all work out"
[Chorus]
"It's gonna be alright
It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
[Post-Chorus]
"Raise," he says, "raise a glass
Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity
Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
"Raise," he says, "raise a glass
Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity
Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
[Verse 2]
Old man Wibble
Duke of babble
Drank straight from the bottle
Danced on the table
Fortune teller croons
"The world may tipple
The world may wobble
Raise your bottle
Of God full throttle
Liquid Jesus
Spiritus Sancti
Write your own fable
Believe it'll all work out"
[Chorus]
"It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
"It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
"It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
"It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
[Post-Chorus]
"Raise a glass
Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity
Beautiful delirium
Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
"Raise a glass
Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity
Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
[Chorus]
"It's gonna be alright
It's gonna be alright
It's gonna be alright
Everything will be alright"
Lyrics submitted by Mellow_Harsher
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"Fast car" is kind of a continuation of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." It has all the clawing your way to a better life, but in this case the protagonist never makes it with her love; in fact she is dragged back down by him.
There is still an amazing amount of hope and will in the lyrics; and the lyrics themselve rank and easy five. If only music was stronger it would be one of those great radio songs that you hear once a week 20 years after it was released. The imagery is almost tear-jerking ("City lights lay out before us", "Speeds so fast felt like I was drunk"), and the idea of starting from nothing and just driving and working and denigrating yourself for a chance at being just above poverty, then losing in the end is just painful and inspiring at the same time.
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This is a hauntingly beautiful song about introspection, specifically about looking back at a relationship that started bad and ended so poorly, that the narrator wants to go back to the very beginning and tell himself to not even travel down that road. I believe that the relationship started poorly because of the lines:
"Take me back to the night we met:When the night was full of terrors: And your eyes were filled with tears: When you had not touched me yet"
So, the first night was not a great start, but the narrator pursued the relationship and eventually both overcame the rough start to fall in love with each other:
"I had all and then most of you"
Like many relationships that turn sour, it was not a quick decline, but a gradual one where the narrator and their partner fall out of love and gradually grow apart
"Some and now none of you"
Losing someone who was once everything in your world, who you could confide in, tell your secrets to, share all the most intimate parts of your life, to being strangers with that person is probably one of the most painful experiences a person can go through. So Painful, the narrator wants to go back in time and tell himself to not even pursue the relationship.
This was the perfect song for "13 Reasons Why"
No Surprises
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Same ideas expressed in Fitter, Happier are expressed in this song. We're told to strive for some sort of ideal life, which includes getting a good job, being kind to everyone, finding a partner, getting married, having a couple kids, living in a quiet neighborhood in a nice big house, etc. But in Fitter, Happier the narrator(?) realizes that it's incredibly robotic to live this life. People are being used by those in power "like a pig in a cage on antibiotics"--being pacified with things like new phones and cool gadgets and houses while being sucked dry. On No Surprises, the narrator is realizing how this life is killing him slowly. In the video, his helmet is slowly filling up with water, drowning him. But he's so complacent with it. This is a good summary of the song. This boring, "perfect" life foisted upon us by some higher powers (not spiritual, but political, economic, etc. politicians and businessmen, perhaps) is not the way to live. But there is seemingly no way out but death. He'd rather die peacefully right now than live in this cage. While our lives are often shielded, we're in our own protective bubbles, or protective helmets like the one Thom wears, if we look a little harder we can see all the corruption, lies, manipulation, etc. that is going on in the world, often run by huge yet nearly invisible organizations, corporations, and 'leaders'. It's a very hopeless song because it reflects real life.
Plastic Bag
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“Plastic Bag” is a song about searching for an escape from personal problems and hoping to find it in the lively atmosphere of a Saturday night party. Ed Sheeran tells the story of his friend and the myriad of troubles he is going through. Unable to find any solutions, this friend seeks a last resort in a party and the vanity that comes with it.
“I overthink and have trouble sleepin’ / All purpose gone and don’t have a reason / And there’s no doctor to stop this bleedin’ / So I left home and jumped in the deep end,” Ed Sheeran sings in verse one. He continues by adding that this person is feeling the weight of having disappointed his father and doesn’t have any friends to rely on in this difficult moment. In the second verse, Ed sings about the role of grief in his friend’s plight and his dwindling faith in prayer. “Saturday night is givin’ me a reason to rely on the strobe lights / The lifeline of a promise in a shot glass, and I’ll take that / If you’re givin’ out love from a plastic bag,” Ed sings on the chorus, as his friend turns to new vices in hopes of feeling better.
Well I wanted to say I can also see it from the perspective of an unconvinced observer watching a priest giving his sermon, and the observer is thinking: Old man Wibble Lush diviner Duke of babble Mad soothsayer
And then the observer taking Communion: Drunken oracle drinks (priest drinks) The Liquid Jesus (red wine/the “blood”) Straight from the bottle Spiritus Sancti (Holy Spirit, nice touch)
And the observer then struggling to look beyond all the dogmatic BS to understand the real point of the whole message: Fortune teller croons: “Write your own fable. Believe it'll all work out. It's gonna be alright. It's gonna be alright. Everything will be alright.”
And again further filtering of the priest’s words by the observer: "Raise," he says, "raise a glass Raise a glass to our, our heterogeneity Our remarkable resilience through calamity"
Celebrating our ability to remain so resilient as a species despite all of our incredible differences. This is where the perspective might have switched to another observer or a hundred others, such as Maynard (in a church??), or the observer is just himself through the whole song.
The other idea I had is that this song is actually about Maynard himself being “Old Man Wibble” and “Duke of Babble.” “Drunken oracle drinks The Liquid Jesus Straight from the bottle”. I mean I’ve witnessed the man drink red wine straight from the bottle in one hand on stage & mic in the other lol. And the message he would certainly be sending (and does send in a lot of songs) I think, are those in the quotations of the song.
It’s gonna be alright folks.
@danielwot "Weave my allegorical elogy"<br /> And in the kind of way that Fear Inoculum predicted COVID.<br /> <br /> I think, like in most Puscifer songs, he is poking fun at himself. Like saying, "If I predicted COVID, it was as a mad, drunken oracle. I didn't realize what I was doing. All of thus madness and chaos and here I am trying to tell everyone 'it's gonna be alright'." <br /> During that chorus, the words are hopeful, but the music is somber. Almost as if he doesn't actually believe what he is saying.<br /> <br /> I think Maynard is the preacher and the observer, all rolled into one.
@danielwot "Weave my allegorical elogy"<br /> And in the kind of way that Fear Inoculum predicted COVID.<br /> <br /> I think, like in most Puscifer songs, he is poking fun at himself. Like saying, "If I predicted COVID, it was as a mad, drunken oracle. I didn't realize what I was doing. All of thus madness and chaos and here I am trying to tell everyone 'it's gonna be alright'." <br /> During that chorus, the words are hopeful, but the music is somber. Almost as if he doesn't actually believe what he is saying.<br /> <br /> I think Maynard is the preacher and the observer, all rolled into one.
.. and I should have added that “it’s gonna be alright, everything will be alright” could be viewed on a grand cosmological scale as well. It’s likely we live on the inside of a possibly infinite network of black holes and what we see as our universe is merely the output of a single massive black hole. So quite literally, everything will be alright. If the universe is practically infinite, it’s guaranteed that your neural pathways or “same sense of self/consciousness” will occur at at place in our universe closer to our universe’s white hole or “Big Bang”, and that this same consciousness has occurred in the past or further out than we are from the epicenter. Due to the given size of our observable universe, it may even be possible that there are versions of your same “consciousness/neural pathways” living in the “present” or same distance from the epicenter of the Big Bang as we are.
If any of this is true, than we are quite literally infinite. Now I’m not a cosmologist, nor a metaphysician, I’m an engineer. So I’ll shut the hell up.
@danielwot hey Daniel. Thanks for your comments and your interpretation, your remarkable words. If you ever should come back here, please contact me: I would like to chat with you about your world view and of course about epic songs like this one. I think we share a lot, and those lunatics should stick together. Write me on ben.742@online.de.
..and last thought, just to attempt to get others to comment on this amazing song for Puscifer’s sake. It’s clear Maynard is an oracle, or traveled here from the future, like Elon Musk. Let’s not forget, Fear Inoculum all but flat out said the plandemic was coming, and it did. People (the smart ones) are just now getting Puscifer about 10 years after he said it would take about a decade. It’s proof lol.
@danielwot I hope you are being sarcastic. q1043.iheart.com/featured/jonathan-jc-clarke/content/2020-05-21-maynard-james-keenan-rejects-theory-he-predicted-the-pandemic-in-his-lyrics/
@danielwot Some people are tone def. I definitely get what you're saying. Maynard fucks with magick and lots of stuff people know very little about.<br />
..I just can’t stop the thoughts produced by this song lol. “raise a glass to our, our (the speaker stutters trying to find a word to land on). Our heterogeneity (the quality or state of being diverse in character or content) he lands on. As if our society achieving the most diverse culture possible is some pinnacle of human achievement. Not that it’s not a great thing, but seriously, this is what we are raising our glass for? Our remarkable resilience from calamity? That we have yet to nuke ourselves back to sticks and stones (if we’re lucky). All in all, it’s a slap in the face of a song to humanity, to awaken. To become awake, not Woke.
@danielwot Yeah, raising our glass to the resilience of our making our own calamities instead of raising a glass to not making them in the first place. I think it could be an example of the disingenuous nature of the preacher. It all depends on how one takes the song. Maynard's lyrics are like tarot cards.
..have to backtrack on the “heterogeneity”. What a complex word. Perhaps in the cynical light again he’s saying, if you take the antonym, “homogeneity” instead. As in we’re all conforming too much to a system, though we want to think we are so different and unique from everyone else. And if you say “our non-resilience to calamity”, that works too. Epic song.
The drunken lunatic is the one telling you, "It\'s gonna be alright." Maynard repeatedly reminds us of this throughout the song by saying, "he says." That\'s pretty much all anyone should need to know about this one.