I chime in with seago; Bird’s “Sovay” is a song which—if you can put these things on a linear scale—rivals Costello’s “Shipbuilding” for antiwar lyric power. Add to this the fact that it possesses an understated musical depth, and you’ve got something very precious.
There seems to be a little bewilderment among the prior posts, so I’ll undertake a little exegesis.
First stanza: This one’s relatively vague; later he’ll start to come on strong. At his point we’re in the vestibule of the mansion which is the depth of feeling about what he sees going on. It’s a general statement reflecting the fight against the suicidal attitude of powerlessness in the face of a huge evil. The powers that be would very much prefer that people like Bird would just go ahead and kill themselves. A spiritual death would be just fine, thank you very much; no need to get out the razor blades. If folks like Bird would comply, the crooked path would be a little straighter for them. Bird seems to successfully fight off this impulse, stand back, reflect, observe that history is repeating itself (it is), then is given a precious gift: The gift of “a word;” which washes to the shores of the collective mind. He beach-combs this word, then vouchsafes it to us in the form of a song, which he calls “Sovay.”
Bridge: Sorry, don’t know what “Sovay” means. I could cheat, and google it, but I won’t.
Second and third stanzas: OK, here’s where he names names: He’s ready for action. The “Board of Trustees” he’s about to sack are, of course, the present-day souls entrusted to oversee our grand American experiment. At the time when Bird wrote this song, it was the Bush II administration. These pricks may be Don Quixotes, but frankly I think they probably see clearer what the stakes are than the average American. It’s the American public that these adventitious parasites (like Carl Rove) are particularly skilled at getting to psychotically tilt at their fabricated windmills; laughable windmills such as, say, Iraqi WMD (while ignoring our own very existent WMD); Iraq as an immanent threat to the U.S.; the notion that Russia’s, Germany’s, and France’s weighings-in on matters of global import are plainly to be scoffed at (“Freedom Fries,” and Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” comments); etc. “Acting on vagaries,” indeed! All this and more: We can’t laugh it off. These guys have access to the chain of command and the U.S.’s unparalleled coercive power. Bird may be a showing himself a little behind the times with the reference to B17s, but he can be forgiven: We need less omnivorously, anally, preening power-apologetic Clancys and more positively, honestly spiritual Birds. Anyway, half the top dogs in the Bush II admin are dogged, tempered power jackals from the Reagan Era. Their violent proclivities were firmly established from adventures in Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, etc., This crew is quite fit to blow us back to the eighties, although inertia could cause us to overshoot and find ourselves back in the seventies, as Bird asserts: I almost want to ask him if he had the 1470’s in mind. The reference to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is dark, sinister, and should shake us to our cores: Is this a needed prod to turn and look at something almost impossible to face; that what underlies this rising official will-to-global-dominance is something with a racial tinge; a new and popularly “mandated” Manifest Destiny?; a new kind of White Man’s Burden, where the new “white man” is the one who fully understands the possibilities—nay, the necessities—of power, privilege, and control?
Well, I guess that sums it up for me. I think I hit all the key expressions. Hope this helps someone!
I chime in with seago; Bird’s “Sovay” is a song which—if you can put these things on a linear scale—rivals Costello’s “Shipbuilding” for antiwar lyric power. Add to this the fact that it possesses an understated musical depth, and you’ve got something very precious.
There seems to be a little bewilderment among the prior posts, so I’ll undertake a little exegesis.
First stanza: This one’s relatively vague; later he’ll start to come on strong. At his point we’re in the vestibule of the mansion which is the depth of feeling about what he sees going on. It’s a general statement reflecting the fight against the suicidal attitude of powerlessness in the face of a huge evil. The powers that be would very much prefer that people like Bird would just go ahead and kill themselves. A spiritual death would be just fine, thank you very much; no need to get out the razor blades. If folks like Bird would comply, the crooked path would be a little straighter for them. Bird seems to successfully fight off this impulse, stand back, reflect, observe that history is repeating itself (it is), then is given a precious gift: The gift of “a word;” which washes to the shores of the collective mind. He beach-combs this word, then vouchsafes it to us in the form of a song, which he calls “Sovay.”
Bridge: Sorry, don’t know what “Sovay” means. I could cheat, and google it, but I won’t.
Second and third stanzas: OK, here’s where he names names: He’s ready for action. The “Board of Trustees” he’s about to sack are, of course, the present-day souls entrusted to oversee our grand American experiment. At the time when Bird wrote this song, it was the Bush II administration. These pricks may be Don Quixotes, but frankly I think they probably see clearer what the stakes are than the average American. It’s the American public that these adventitious parasites (like Carl Rove) are particularly skilled at getting to psychotically tilt at their fabricated windmills; laughable windmills such as, say, Iraqi WMD (while ignoring our own very existent WMD); Iraq as an immanent threat to the U.S.; the notion that Russia’s, Germany’s, and France’s weighings-in on matters of global import are plainly to be scoffed at (“Freedom Fries,” and Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” comments); etc. “Acting on vagaries,” indeed! All this and more: We can’t laugh it off. These guys have access to the chain of command and the U.S.’s unparalleled coercive power. Bird may be a showing himself a little behind the times with the reference to B17s, but he can be forgiven: We need less omnivorously, anally, preening power-apologetic Clancys and more positively, honestly spiritual Birds. Anyway, half the top dogs in the Bush II admin are dogged, tempered power jackals from the Reagan Era. Their violent proclivities were firmly established from adventures in Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, etc., This crew is quite fit to blow us back to the eighties, although inertia could cause us to overshoot and find ourselves back in the seventies, as Bird asserts: I almost want to ask him if he had the 1470’s in mind. The reference to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is dark, sinister, and should shake us to our cores: Is this a needed prod to turn and look at something almost impossible to face; that what underlies this rising official will-to-global-dominance is something with a racial tinge; a new and popularly “mandated” Manifest Destiny?; a new kind of White Man’s Burden, where the new “white man” is the one who fully understands the possibilities—nay, the necessities—of power, privilege, and control?
Well, I guess that sums it up for me. I think I hit all the key expressions. Hope this helps someone!