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Exquisite Dead Guy Lyrics
Exquisite dead guy
Rotating in his display case
Exquisite dead guy
Swear I saw his mouth move
Exquisite dead guy
Outside my high rise apartment
Exquisite dead guy
Hanging from a skyhook
How am I supposed to let you know the way I feel
About you
How am I supposed to let you know the way I feel
About you
Rotating in his display case
Exquisite dead guy
Swear I saw his mouth move
Outside my high rise apartment
Exquisite dead guy
Hanging from a skyhook
About you
About you
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This song always made me think of Lenin as the corpse. I imagine staring at Lenin in his case, then later seeing Lenin hanging from a hook out my window, and not knowing how to tell Lenin how damn cool he is for showing up in my life over and over again. What a world this is, with Lenin in it! Look over there, it's Lenin's preserved corpse! Take a picture!
I don't know what Lenin looks like, so in my imagination it's just a corpse in a Russian uniform like Stalin wore, except somehow I know it's Lenin and not Stalin. I don't even know if Lenin wore a uniform ever, or if he just wore a lot of furs, but that's the picture that's in my head when I hear this song.
It's the man in the moon! I spent forever trying to figure it out and then it hit me in the face... can't believe I didn't see it before. It rotates in the sky (on a sky hook) outside of his apartment.
Actually, the lyric comes from a word game called "the exquisite corpse." People take turns writing one word of a sentence, without knowing what word came before, resulting in really weird and surreal turns of phrase. I know of nobody who actually sits around in their living rooms playing parlor games like this, but a lot of writers like to imagine that there are people who do.
Actually, there are people who still play Exquisite Corpse. My friends and I play it. Granted we don't call it Exquisite Corpse. We call it "Edible Lime" instead...one of my friends doesn't like the original name and thinks it's disturbing, so I changed it to something weird for her. But we still play it. We take turns passing a paper with part of something we've written on it and read the often humorous results. In that way it ends up being rather like Mad Libs but with stuff we made up all on our own. (It was especially fun playing...
Actually, there are people who still play Exquisite Corpse. My friends and I play it. Granted we don't call it Exquisite Corpse. We call it "Edible Lime" instead...one of my friends doesn't like the original name and thinks it's disturbing, so I changed it to something weird for her. But we still play it. We take turns passing a paper with part of something we've written on it and read the often humorous results. In that way it ends up being rather like Mad Libs but with stuff we made up all on our own. (It was especially fun playing the game with a Star Trek fan who is a friend of mine. References to the show kept popping up in her contributions...)
And it surprised me to hear of the drawing version warmPhase is talking about! My father and I played that game when I was a kid! He never called it Exquisite Corpse, but I guess that's not really a game you want your little six year old to be repeating. Just imagine it...asking my friends, "Hey, you wanna play Exquisite Corpse?" (But I never had friends as a child anyway.) But I'm surprised someone else played it that way! I wonder where my dad learned about it. He probably didn't know it was called Exquisite Corpse...he's not really what you'd call a Surrealist of any kind. I explained the idea of Dadaism to him, and he thought it was funny, but that's the closest.
But DavidGrimmer, at least you know that people play that game. Granted we don't sit around in a living room (we play outdoors at a park) and we mostly do it for the humor value, but we play it.
i play it and versions of it; the (slightly) more coherent and more fun ways are with writing sentences or short pragraphs/phrase groups at a time but that has little to do with the song
Try a Christian interpretation (although I'm not Christian): the "exquisite dead guy" is Christ. He's on display in all the churches, and it wouldn't be too far a stretch to have an image of Christ rotating in a display case somewhere. The singer is imagining that Christ is appearing to him in unusual ways: he thinks that Christ is talking to him, and sees him floating in the air outside his apartment building. He imagines he hears Christ asking him, "How am I supposed to let you know the way I feel about you?", i.e. "I've been trying for centuries to tell you that I love you, but you people won't listen."
It COULD be about Lenin.... he sees him in the glass casket, then after the curtin falls he sees one of the statues being torn down, on a skyhook.
Funny, I think of Lenin too. Haha.
JJ has me thinking more about Lenin now with the notion of his sculptures on crane hooks being taken down... Hmmm...
Originally, the title made me, too, think of the "Exquisite Corpse" game. Only, in the version I know, it is a visual artists' game where someone draws a head, or part of a head. The drawing is covered down to just above where the first person left off, and the next artist adds the next bit of the body without seeing what has gone before. etcetera.. The result at the end of the night is this crazy body; an actual 'corpse'.
I had never heard of the writing version until just now.
Neat!
I could be mistaken, but I believe "exquisite corpse" started as a Dada experiment. My poetry group does it once in a while. I thought of that when I read the title, but I can't see how it connects to the song.
I play exquisite corpse on long car trips and with my old girl scout troup...but we didn't call it that.
And this son reminds me of a 40s film nuar (Sorry i can't spell) i'v tried writing one about it, but it just doesn't work...