I think there’s a message here deeper than our tactless treatment of great art. She’s lamenting our inability to understand/interpret it. That’s why she writes, “Hear them whispering, French and German/ Dutch, Italian and Latin.” It’s especially significant that she mentions Latin, which is considered a “dead language.” She later proceeds to say, “But the most special are the most lonely”: the deepest, most complicated artwork are the most misunderstood. Then, “God, I pity the violins/ In the glass ocffins, they keep coughin’/ They’ve forgotten, forgotten how to sing, how to sing.” Here she presents a picture of death. People’s failure to understand great art is causing its detrioration…we’ve reached the point where we can no longer produce anything artistic (“singing” is a metaphor for the creation of art).
BEAUTIFUL song. I’ve just discovered Regina Spektor and have been listening to her songs all day in addition to hanging around songmeanings.net (because I don’t understand a lot of them, ha). I should really get back to doing my humanities paper on Dostoevsky…Ugh, procrastination. But Regina’s music is a worthwhile distraction!
Well actually it makes more sense to say that the violins have "forgotten how to sing" because we've been neglecting them...We spend all our time on the other side of the glass, merely admiring what we don't understand, and have stopped creating...the violins could represent the artistic side of man. And it is that side of us that is dying.
Well actually it makes more sense to say that the violins have "forgotten how to sing" because we've been neglecting them...We spend all our time on the other side of the glass, merely admiring what we don't understand, and have stopped creating...the violins could represent the artistic side of man. And it is that side of us that is dying.
I think there’s a message here deeper than our tactless treatment of great art. She’s lamenting our inability to understand/interpret it. That’s why she writes, “Hear them whispering, French and German/ Dutch, Italian and Latin.” It’s especially significant that she mentions Latin, which is considered a “dead language.” She later proceeds to say, “But the most special are the most lonely”: the deepest, most complicated artwork are the most misunderstood. Then, “God, I pity the violins/ In the glass ocffins, they keep coughin’/ They’ve forgotten, forgotten how to sing, how to sing.” Here she presents a picture of death. People’s failure to understand great art is causing its detrioration…we’ve reached the point where we can no longer produce anything artistic (“singing” is a metaphor for the creation of art). BEAUTIFUL song. I’ve just discovered Regina Spektor and have been listening to her songs all day in addition to hanging around songmeanings.net (because I don’t understand a lot of them, ha). I should really get back to doing my humanities paper on Dostoevsky…Ugh, procrastination. But Regina’s music is a worthwhile distraction!
Well actually it makes more sense to say that the violins have "forgotten how to sing" because we've been neglecting them...We spend all our time on the other side of the glass, merely admiring what we don't understand, and have stopped creating...the violins could represent the artistic side of man. And it is that side of us that is dying.
Well actually it makes more sense to say that the violins have "forgotten how to sing" because we've been neglecting them...We spend all our time on the other side of the glass, merely admiring what we don't understand, and have stopped creating...the violins could represent the artistic side of man. And it is that side of us that is dying.