| Dredg – Gathering Pebbles Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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It's a reference to a fable about a crow cleverly dropping rocks into a vessel to raise the water level until it became able to drink, the moral being the familiar "Necessity is the mother of invention." Interestingly, recent research has confirmed that corvidae *do* do that; they're really terrifyingly intelligent: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1204770/Rook-gets-worm-using-pebbles-water-raise-reach.html |
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| Kansas – Carry on Wayward Son Lyrics | 17 years ago |
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It's pretty clearly about Socrates just before he delivers the Apology. The chorus is an interlocutor telling him not to beg for mercy, but to further piss off the dikastes. The line about "if I claim to be a wise man, then it surely means that I don't know" is an over-confusing of an oft-corrupted story about Socrates, in which he receives an oracular statement late in life (~70/ "Now your life's no longer empty") that he is the wisest of mortal men, and decides that clearly he isn't. He goes and tests his wiles against all the wisest men in the world, who identify themselves as wise, and he bests them, but decides, rather than saying that he is the wisest man in the world, that his interlocutors clearly aren't. Thus his own cognizance of his ignorance is the reason that he is the wisest man alive. Also the line "clearly heaven waits for you" is a direct paraphrase of an argument in The Apology. To say nothing of "once I rose above the noise and confusion / just to get a glimpse beyond this illusion" and its perfect summation of Platonic cosmology. |
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| The Decemberists – I Was Meant for the Stage Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Actually, if you look at the language of the song, you end up with a much different interpretation. It's made primarily of feminine rhymes ("curtain"/"certain" "shouting"/"about me") in relatively forced context ("of this much, I am certain"), which are, in English, pretty awkward. Furthermore, the lines are delivered a repetitive, plodding tone, and even the bridge (such as it is) is just an instrumental repetition of the verses until it becomes a cacophony. Finally, the entire album is full examples of slow verses that lead into moving choruses (put to much better use in “Shanty for the Arethusa” and “The Gymnast, High Above the Ground”) but all of the other songs that use this basic formula manage to do so without becoming tedious, while these lyrics are plodding and self-indulgent. Taken together, they sort of indicate that the speaker isn't really someone to be revered. He's a poor lyricist, an unimaginative songwriter and audacious enough to declare that he's a child of destiny without really showing anything for it. Maybe it's just because I know so many, but it seems as though it's a self-indulgent art student waiting for his comeuppance, which arrives in the cacophony at the end, unlike Shanty, which ends with a continuation of the baseline, indicating that the corsairs have returned to sea (or something similar), and Gymnast, which ends with a repetition in utter calm, indicating that the performance has ended and the excitement of the choruses is over. | |
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