Philomel is clearly the first key in unlocking meaning in this thing, so thank you so much to Skubic448 15 years ago for a good start!). But obviously it is so symbolically dense, everyone is going to impose some deep personal interpretations upon it, which is fine and lovely as well, and is the beautiful nature of rich symbolic work. (A theme which itself this song acts in some part as a treatise on!).
The most puzzling thing is how we get from someone who was raped, silenced, and told her story via vivid imagery and found freedom as a bird... to Guy Debord "never work"ing and our culture's impossible impulse to work anyway. The nearest, best connection as I see it is Philomela is the yin principle, the passive, being state, even the mother earth. We have raped her and silenced her with an ultra-yang overboard masculine principle of doing and taking and action by way of capitalism, which instills the need to work via individualism, isolation, fear, building that need into our very identity: you're a rabbit on the run. Still her images haunt our dreams, and forever come back no matter how many words or laws or ideals we speak about. The elusive mystery always escapes rationalization. Further, in our hypocrisy, we often rationalize and use the very ideals we propound to cover sins of the very nature we are railing against. (nicegoodguy97 may be right on in Ted Leo including himself in this). This seems to me the central conflict of the song.
And the Situationists insisted: "The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical society which banished it" -Vaneigem (http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/214).
So what is the place of art that would go seriously against work? A kind of work against itself, an inescapable paradox, that indeed binds us all up as hypocrites within it. A Gordian knot our society has gotten itself into that we don't know how to untie now: Never work; but don't stop working! And yet, as any paradox, it serves as a kind of black-hole into white-hole that exits on the other side; not merely destructive, but generative, of a whole new level of play and thought and creativity (see https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858490497/ for more!)
And still, within and from out of my own personal circular analysis, comes the nagging swallow/nightingale thought that entertaining myself and no one else (save some sad soul who may visit this in another 15 years?!) isn't helping/serving/saving any of the quite real and very serious suffering in the world. "Hey look at me, I've got it all figured out!" -said the jerk who is complicit in abusing the earth to type this on a keyboard/screen.
Still, in the midst of all the confusion of being thrust -- willingly or not -- into the depth of the teeth of universal mystery, though we may be coming undone, now both is and is NOT the time for decadence. So raise a glass and drink to at least knowing your role!
Philomel is clearly the first key in unlocking meaning in this thing, so thank you so much to Skubic448 15 years ago for a good start!). But obviously it is so symbolically dense, everyone is going to impose some deep personal interpretations upon it, which is fine and lovely as well, and is the beautiful nature of rich symbolic work. (A theme which itself this song acts in some part as a treatise on!).
The most puzzling thing is how we get from someone who was raped, silenced, and told her story via vivid imagery and found freedom as a bird... to Guy Debord "never work"ing and our culture's impossible impulse to work anyway. The nearest, best connection as I see it is Philomela is the yin principle, the passive, being state, even the mother earth. We have raped her and silenced her with an ultra-yang overboard masculine principle of doing and taking and action by way of capitalism, which instills the need to work via individualism, isolation, fear, building that need into our very identity: you're a rabbit on the run. Still her images haunt our dreams, and forever come back no matter how many words or laws or ideals we speak about. The elusive mystery always escapes rationalization. Further, in our hypocrisy, we often rationalize and use the very ideals we propound to cover sins of the very nature we are railing against. (nicegoodguy97 may be right on in Ted Leo including himself in this). This seems to me the central conflict of the song.
And the Situationists insisted: "The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical society which banished it" -Vaneigem (http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/214). So what is the place of art that would go seriously against work? A kind of work against itself, an inescapable paradox, that indeed binds us all up as hypocrites within it. A Gordian knot our society has gotten itself into that we don't know how to untie now: Never work; but don't stop working! And yet, as any paradox, it serves as a kind of black-hole into white-hole that exits on the other side; not merely destructive, but generative, of a whole new level of play and thought and creativity (see https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858490497/ for more!)
And still, within and from out of my own personal circular analysis, comes the nagging swallow/nightingale thought that entertaining myself and no one else (save some sad soul who may visit this in another 15 years?!) isn't helping/serving/saving any of the quite real and very serious suffering in the world. "Hey look at me, I've got it all figured out!" -said the jerk who is complicit in abusing the earth to type this on a keyboard/screen.
Still, in the midst of all the confusion of being thrust -- willingly or not -- into the depth of the teeth of universal mystery, though we may be coming undone, now both is and is NOT the time for decadence. So raise a glass and drink to at least knowing your role!