I'm tired of idiots saying Beck's songs are just rambling nonsense, just because you're not artistic enough to understand them doesn't mean they don't mean anything, like the beatles' I am the Walrus.
I ripped this off wikipedia because I decided to do some research on it instead of pulling random opinions from my own ass.
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The song is dotted with references to the wandering disorientation that comes with touring, such as "coming to town with the briefcase blues".
Beck himself has talked about the meaning of "Devils Haircut" on a few occasions. In one interview, he claimed that it was "a really simplistic metaphor for the evil of vanity". He said of the song:
“ I don't know if I ever had any youthful purity, but I can understand that you might be tempted to make commercial shit and compromise to do it. I try not to compromise on anything. I think we associate becoming an adult with compromise. Maybe that's what the devil is. In "Devils Haircut", that was the scenario. I imagined Stagger Lee... I thought, what if this guy showed up now in 1996... I thought of using him as a Rumpelstiltskin figure, this Lazarus figure to comment on where we've ended up as people. What would he make of materialism and greed and ideals of beauty and perfection? His reaction would be, "Whoa, this is disturbing shit".
@B0NG They're not rambling nonsense, but they're not straightforwardly sensible, either. They're about something in that they came out of a certain state, and listening to them can lead you to understand and experience a bit of that state.
@B0NG They're not rambling nonsense, but they're not straightforwardly sensible, either. They're about something in that they came out of a certain state, and listening to them can lead you to understand and experience a bit of that state.
So, he wrote this song thinking about the disorientation of being a touring musician, and the disorientation of unexpectedly being a minor star (as he said elsewhere), and the disorientation of traveling in general, and also thinking about compromise, and the line between growing up and selling out, and how drawing that line in the wrong place has affected our...
So, he wrote this song thinking about the disorientation of being a touring musician, and the disorientation of unexpectedly being a minor star (as he said elsewhere), and the disorientation of traveling in general, and also thinking about compromise, and the line between growing up and selling out, and how drawing that line in the wrong place has affected our society, and how it's made even your own city disorienting, and the evil of vanity, and so on.
Most of that is there to find in the song if you look hard enough, and, maybe even more importantly, it's also there to affect you if you just listen. But Beck isn't even thinking about "How do I get these ideas into my listeners' minds", he's just thinking about the ideas themselves, and writing what flows from them into the restrictive structure of song lyrics, and the result is something that gets the ideas into his listeners' minds.
I'm tired of idiots saying Beck's songs are just rambling nonsense, just because you're not artistic enough to understand them doesn't mean they don't mean anything, like the beatles' I am the Walrus.
I ripped this off wikipedia because I decided to do some research on it instead of pulling random opinions from my own ass.
-
The song is dotted with references to the wandering disorientation that comes with touring, such as "coming to town with the briefcase blues".
Beck himself has talked about the meaning of "Devils Haircut" on a few occasions. In one interview, he claimed that it was "a really simplistic metaphor for the evil of vanity". He said of the song: “ I don't know if I ever had any youthful purity, but I can understand that you might be tempted to make commercial shit and compromise to do it. I try not to compromise on anything. I think we associate becoming an adult with compromise. Maybe that's what the devil is. In "Devils Haircut", that was the scenario. I imagined Stagger Lee... I thought, what if this guy showed up now in 1996... I thought of using him as a Rumpelstiltskin figure, this Lazarus figure to comment on where we've ended up as people. What would he make of materialism and greed and ideals of beauty and perfection? His reaction would be, "Whoa, this is disturbing shit".
@B0NG They're not rambling nonsense, but they're not straightforwardly sensible, either. They're about something in that they came out of a certain state, and listening to them can lead you to understand and experience a bit of that state.
@B0NG They're not rambling nonsense, but they're not straightforwardly sensible, either. They're about something in that they came out of a certain state, and listening to them can lead you to understand and experience a bit of that state.
So, he wrote this song thinking about the disorientation of being a touring musician, and the disorientation of unexpectedly being a minor star (as he said elsewhere), and the disorientation of traveling in general, and also thinking about compromise, and the line between growing up and selling out, and how drawing that line in the wrong place has affected our...
So, he wrote this song thinking about the disorientation of being a touring musician, and the disorientation of unexpectedly being a minor star (as he said elsewhere), and the disorientation of traveling in general, and also thinking about compromise, and the line between growing up and selling out, and how drawing that line in the wrong place has affected our society, and how it's made even your own city disorienting, and the evil of vanity, and so on.
Most of that is there to find in the song if you look hard enough, and, maybe even more importantly, it's also there to affect you if you just listen. But Beck isn't even thinking about "How do I get these ideas into my listeners' minds", he's just thinking about the ideas themselves, and writing what flows from them into the restrictive structure of song lyrics, and the result is something that gets the ideas into his listeners' minds.
No, but they sound like rambling nonsense, while not being which just adds to the experience
No, but they sound like rambling nonsense, while not being which just adds to the experience