I've always gotten just a slightly different meaning out of this song. Not vastly different, just slightly.
I always get the feeling that this is some colonization era friendly advice to the local population. The lyrics seem to imply that it's necessary to become more tense and seriuos "to straighten your posture and suck in your gut" and to drop tradition (eg "find some new feathers and buy some new clothes ... get rid of the antlers") in order to amount to anything. "If you want to have cities, you've got to build roads". I've always felt that this song points out in a tounge in cheek manner the idea that the value of a civilization is directly related to how much they can built, how big they can become, even at the expense, in this case, of tradition and the environment.
I've always gotten just a slightly different meaning out of this song. Not vastly different, just slightly.
I always get the feeling that this is some colonization era friendly advice to the local population. The lyrics seem to imply that it's necessary to become more tense and seriuos "to straighten your posture and suck in your gut" and to drop tradition (eg "find some new feathers and buy some new clothes ... get rid of the antlers") in order to amount to anything. "If you want to have cities, you've got to build roads". I've always felt that this song points out in a tounge in cheek manner the idea that the value of a civilization is directly related to how much they can built, how big they can become, even at the expense, in this case, of tradition and the environment.