The song's not simply about an ordinary 'master and slave,' but I can't figure out what it's about. There's Biblical references: wine and lamb's blood, Abraham (who was a prolific father), the prodigal son, walking on water.
But there's also a lot of American references and iconography: the pursuit of happiness (an inalienable right, according to the Declaration of Independence), and carpetbaggers (after the American Civil War, some Northerners moved into the weakened South in order to exploit it for personal and political gain; they were called 'carpetbaggers' because they supposedly packed all their stuff into a cheap bag made of carpet and rushed South to take advantage of what they could), purple mountain majesties (from the song 'America the Beautiful'), stars and red, white (and blue) bars.
I almost want to interpret it as a condemnation of those who dismiss the poor as lazy when they themselves never had to struggle with being poor--it's a poor man telling a middle-class one that it's easy to look down your nose at me because "You've never known hunger, you've never took a risk/If the boss asked you to jump , you know you'd find the nearest cliff": you're as much a slave to your meager job as I am to poverty.
I'm not totally sure what it's about, though. For a band whose bread and butter were songs about sex, drugs, and violence, this is a pretty deep song.
The song's not simply about an ordinary 'master and slave,' but I can't figure out what it's about. There's Biblical references: wine and lamb's blood, Abraham (who was a prolific father), the prodigal son, walking on water.
But there's also a lot of American references and iconography: the pursuit of happiness (an inalienable right, according to the Declaration of Independence), and carpetbaggers (after the American Civil War, some Northerners moved into the weakened South in order to exploit it for personal and political gain; they were called 'carpetbaggers' because they supposedly packed all their stuff into a cheap bag made of carpet and rushed South to take advantage of what they could), purple mountain majesties (from the song 'America the Beautiful'), stars and red, white (and blue) bars.
I almost want to interpret it as a condemnation of those who dismiss the poor as lazy when they themselves never had to struggle with being poor--it's a poor man telling a middle-class one that it's easy to look down your nose at me because "You've never known hunger, you've never took a risk/If the boss asked you to jump , you know you'd find the nearest cliff": you're as much a slave to your meager job as I am to poverty.
I'm not totally sure what it's about, though. For a band whose bread and butter were songs about sex, drugs, and violence, this is a pretty deep song.