| Yeasayer – 2080 Lyrics | 14 years ago |
| Dammityouaresmarterthanme. I like your analysis. | |
| Yeasayer – 2080 Lyrics | 14 years ago |
|
Orwell actually wrote Nineteen Eighty Four in 1947 and finished in 1948 before getting it published (barely) in 1949. So being in an exact year isn't important. I think cleanshark is right to draw that parallel. Fascism = Yokelism. heh. Maybe Yeasayer will come out with a song alluding to Animal Farm, about netocracy or something. Internet Farm. I often jump back and forth in desires for simpler lifestyle. Sometimes I look at my computer and think, yeah I could do without you. Always needing your hard drive upgraded. Stupid computer, can't believe I need you to comment on songmeanings.net. Then I think about how nice it would be to know where my food came from. Are my strawberries and lettuce being crapped on by a migrant worker being paid a dollar an hour? Is that beef from a cow that was awake when it was slit through the throat by ridiculous halal slaughters? So some things are better simpler, most things are not (computers? I'll take a PC over an abacus any day). But "going back" to it is not a good idea. Capitalism and industry gave us better lifestyles than agrarianism ever did. Any ills that came of it were, in my opinion, products of constants in human behavior anyway. Avarice, apathy, idiocy. They were rampant before any type of civilization. In fact, larger cities and the "rat race" has increased our capacity for compassion. Maybe not our tendency to act on it. But it's a start. Life on a farm doesn't afford one much chance to improve life for the rest of the human race, only your own children. And not even then if they get smallpox or dysentery and you like the simple life-- without vaccination and antibiotics. I maintain this song is a parody of knee jerk nostalgia. |
|
| Yeasayer – 2080 Lyrics | 14 years ago |
|
The bridge is the reason I fell in love with this song. Apart from its unbelievably harmonious sound, it takes two stances on a oft suggested solution to industrialization and consumerism in modern society. On one side the allure of a romantic life in the county being a farmer, living off the land, and being totally homegrown is immense. Who wouldn't want that unless you're some dumb, overindulged pissant-robot that's obviously brainwashed by commercial america? But on the other hand, there's something cliche suggested in each of these lines, as if it's ridiculous to want to be so rural and think its possible to attain it. I mean, "handsome farmers"? Is everyone who returns to agriculture really gonna become magically hot? No but we grab at the chance to get that fantasy. Then "21 sons" and "marry my daughters" hints at a creepy incestuousness that is unavoidable in small communal societies. If we all had 50 people per town and lived on 100 acres, it's unlikely that we'll diversify our genes like we can in current huge cities. The utopia is beginning to break down in our minds: "pain...in a jar behind us" is a direct jab at the silly notion that all our flaws are somehow objectified and embodied in huge building and 30-second tv ads. We CAN'T leave that behind by moving to the country. (Maybe for Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" but not for the whole world. Not en masse.) And again in "pick the pain into blue ribbon winners" doesn't that sound ludicrous? Perhaps the songwriter thinks we can observe our imperfections and city-based disease from afar, like a specimen in a jar. And whoever has the most road rage and alcoholism separated from themselves wins! I'm doubtful. This could be a commentary on art itself, while mocking the artists' attempts to improve themselves by turning their ex-lovers, bad fathers, Oedipally attractive mothers into songs and literature and painting. But who will care about them if and when they sort out their issues? Will you listen to Britney Spears when she sees the light and stops being a voracious slut? Would Kurt Cobain be popular if he gave up the weed and smack and became a well-adjusted young man? Hell no. We. Want. The. Pain. Maybe I'm off topic. No, I am off topic. Point being, solving our problems is never as simple as identifying the source. And this song seems to suggest that we don't even have the source right. The problem is us. We're programmed to be stupid and spiteful and greedy. Think some dirt road scenery and a vegetable garden out front a stone cottage will make that all go away? Think again. |
|
| The Decemberists – Annan Water Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| I think the recurring preciousness of bones in this song (and in Hazards IV Drowned) make a nice allegory (?) to money. Being as bones slang for money nowadays, the real currency of a man in love is his very core, his skeleton. To give his precious bones on his return he gives up his life and thus his love, the most valuable thing to him. | |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.