This song is about the bathos of modern life. Notice how he juxtaposes the transcendent with the temporal. The first verse is about a holy man walking along the shores of the Ganges river, which is considered sacred to Hindus, hearing magic music because of the great reverence that he has for the site. Along the way, he's being gawked at by fat westerners in a bus, wearing tracksuits and slurping down corn-syrup and chemicals.
That being the case, I have to agree with some of the other comments here: the lyrics on this page are wrong. The real lyrics to the chorus are:
So take me home, don't leave me alone
I'm not that good, but I'm not that bad
Not a psycho-killer, hooligan guerrilla
I drink to write, oh you should try it
I'll read Thoreau, get gold-card soul
The joy of life is on a roll
And we'll all be the same, in the end.
The bathos, the "high" versus the "low", is also evident in the chorus lyric. The narrator of the song is talking about transcendence, and also about how good it is to be inebriated. He drinks to write, and he also claims that the joy of life is on a roll, rolling is slang for taking MDMA (aka Ecstasy).
This makes perfect sense as the second verse is about people having the same kind of transcendent experience in a dance club, taking psychotropic drugs.
So, there you have it. The song doesn't have a point or a meaning, it's an observation of the ways that people find transcendence of their surroundings and give meanings to their lives; through religion, through philosophy, through substances, and in whatever other ways they find.
But, like the song says, we'll all be the same in the end: we'll all be dead.
This song is about the bathos of modern life. Notice how he juxtaposes the transcendent with the temporal. The first verse is about a holy man walking along the shores of the Ganges river, which is considered sacred to Hindus, hearing magic music because of the great reverence that he has for the site. Along the way, he's being gawked at by fat westerners in a bus, wearing tracksuits and slurping down corn-syrup and chemicals.
That being the case, I have to agree with some of the other comments here: the lyrics on this page are wrong. The real lyrics to the chorus are:
So take me home, don't leave me alone I'm not that good, but I'm not that bad Not a psycho-killer, hooligan guerrilla I drink to write, oh you should try it I'll read Thoreau, get gold-card soul The joy of life is on a roll And we'll all be the same, in the end.
The bathos, the "high" versus the "low", is also evident in the chorus lyric. The narrator of the song is talking about transcendence, and also about how good it is to be inebriated. He drinks to write, and he also claims that the joy of life is on a roll, rolling is slang for taking MDMA (aka Ecstasy).
This makes perfect sense as the second verse is about people having the same kind of transcendent experience in a dance club, taking psychotropic drugs.
So, there you have it. The song doesn't have a point or a meaning, it's an observation of the ways that people find transcendence of their surroundings and give meanings to their lives; through religion, through philosophy, through substances, and in whatever other ways they find.
But, like the song says, we'll all be the same in the end: we'll all be dead.