Type Slowly

no comments? you're all wrong then. the whole thing just sounds half awake to me but i'm not going to attempt to ascribe meaning. just love it as a surrealist jumble of snipers, reptile homes and fairy-tale bad guys. it's also a vocal tour-de-force from sm, from the softly sung prettiness of 'the edge of creation is blurred and blushed' to the yodel of 'liberals...' gorgeous guitar, lots of genius rhyming ('people of the bay - it is excruciatingly grey', 'trolls in the glen are consorting again'; it is quietly one of pavement's best. is 'brighten' still a bit underrated? i really hope they do get the deluxe version out, cos even though i probably have most of the tracks (i seem to have about seven hundred versions of 'shady lane' for a start), this seemed a fertile period to me, with 'infinite spark', 'starlings' and 'type slowly' especially.

Pavement drives me crazy.

A lot of the bands that I listen to have inscrutable lyrics: Minutemen, Guided by Voices, Sonic Youth, Meat Puppets – a lot of the songs more or less describe an abstract thought; but they really don’t tell a story.

No problem, then.

But a lot of Pavement songs seem to be about something specific; but if you try to figure out what you get pretty befuddled, and the harder you think about it the worse it gets. Some good examples of this would be songs like Grounded or Zurich is Stained.

But the one that really drives me nuts is Type Slowly.

Okay, whaddaya think?

I have three thoughts about this one.

I work with a lot of older people including people who are demented, and to me this song reminds me of the ramblings of a demented man, waiting to die talking to his wife during a moment of relative lucidity. Some other songs on the same album, like Old to Begin and Shady Lane are clearly about aging and death.

But then again probably not this song.

Okay . . . there are a number of innuendoes about sex in this song: “our midnight vacation,” “One of us is a cigar stand . . . one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine”

And there are more - you’ll see if you look. So is this just another song about sex?

Probably not.

Okay, my third thought. This song came out in 99 when AOL was so popular. A lot of the lyrics in the song sound to me like bits and pieces from AOL chat rooms and message boards from that time. If you have ever experienced those AOL chat rooms they often don’t make any more sense than this songs does.

Examples: “snipers posted bills,” “trolls,” “liberals say they don’t exist,” and of course “type slowly.”

So maybe this song is about life in an AOL chat room, which is, of course, a lot of nonsense.

do you think people on last.fm ever cross-reference with this site?

an ode to instant messaging? type slowly? huh?

SEX

The ever illusive Pavement lyrics… To me this song sounds like it’s from the perspective of a man who has fallen for and perhaps had a rendezvous with a woman he shouldn’t be with, perhaps the wife/gf of a friend. He’s conflicted about it. Wants to be with her but shouldn’t and feels guilt. He’s singing to her in the beginning: “Sherry you smell different, get up early in the bed for you morning comes so easy. He feels guilty about it, she does not. Spells have been cast and the urge has been lost… She’s bewitched him but he’s coming to his senses. Snipers posted bills as they should of our midnight vacation Perhaps someone knows about what they did and it’s a threat to both of them. Back on the planet now and I’m beginning to show just how echelon your dreams and they’ll come true. He’s come to his senses about it . One of us is a cigar stand and one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine. Cigar..phallic..sexual…guillotine describes her..pretty, mesmerizing but can literally and figuratively take his head off. Spells have been cast and the urge has been lost not a lot of room to grow inside this leather terrarium She is bewitching, he fell for her but he’s coming to his senses because there is not room for them to have anything more than what they had: a one time escapist fling. Face the front when he comes for you.. Makes me tthink he’s telling her to face the front and deal with it when or if her man finds out. To be brief several of the other lines such as: cherish your memorized weakness…and frozen images, respected few. Also evocative of feelings one would have after a rendezvous with a person they have no business being with. You can probably read this song many ways which makes it interesting. There is also another version of it called Slowly Typed that gives a bit of a different twist but same vein.