submissions
| Manic Street Preachers – The View From Stow Hill Lyrics
| 9 years ago
|
This song starts off being about Newport, but after one verse about its geographical and spiritual location and another about the Chartist uprising, it comes to the realisation that Newport is far too boring a place to sing about and resorts to a Wildean stance of lying in the gutter but looking at the stars.
(Which is a lovely thought, but would be lovelier if it wasn't always fucking raining.) |
submissions
| Joanna Newsom – Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie Lyrics
| 9 years ago
|
If you put full-fat milk into your tea, sometimes a 'skin' will form on the surface as the milk reacts to the heat. I always used to fish it out with a teaspoon, because eew, but my parents would stir it back into the tea. It had a puckered look, and depending on how strong you like your tea could certainly resemble human skin.
(Fortunately I switched to semi-skimmed years ago and haven't seen it since.)
|
submissions
| Manic Street Preachers – P.C.P. Lyrics
| 9 years ago
|
@[my:1391] nothing It's anti-PC from a working-class socialist point of view. Like the dig at 'bilingual signs'; most working-class people in the part of Wales where the Manics are from are monolingual, and some see Welsh signage as a waste of taxpayers money (particularly since these are also areas of high unemployment and social deprivation). And political correctness, with its emphasis on learning and keeping up to date with 'acceptable' language, is in some respects just another way of shoring up the privilege of the educated middle-classes and silencing everybody else.
|
submissions
| Manic Street Preachers – P.C.P. Lyrics
| 9 years ago
|
|
@[Ad_Nauseam:1390] I think the point of the Lear reference is that once you've witnessed the death and destruction at the end of the play (when there are, like, only two people left alive) it's not surprising if you then fail to recall the court gossip and empty politicking at the beginning. |
submissions
| Manic Street Preachers – Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky Lyrics
| 10 years ago
|
|
I read somewhere at the time that this was inspired by a polar bear at Bristol zoo. Anyone who grew up in south Wales in the 70s and early 80s would have visited the zoo at some point (I went on a school trip when I was about six) and seen this poor mad polar bear pacing endlessly up and down his small enclosure. The visitors would be looking down into what was basically a concrete pit, and I've always assumed the 'small black flowers' were the people coming and going above. Polar bears don't have great eyesight. |
submissions
| The Cranberries – Yeat's Grave Lyrics
| 10 years ago
|
|
MacBride was Maud Gonne's husband, who got executed by the British for his role in the Easter Rising of 1916. Gonne was the great love of W.B. Yeats's life and inspired a lot of his poetry. (She was also kind of crazy and pretty much a terrorist, which is where the 'ignorant men' and 'violent ways' bit comes from.) |
submissions
| Saint Etienne – Lose That Girl Lyrics
| 10 years ago
|
|
She should have told her friend that his girlfriend was not a good person because a) you can't trust anyone who doesn't like disco and b) nobody looks good in purple jeans. And these are RULES TO LIVE BY, yo. |
submissions
| Rachel Stevens – Some Girls Lyrics
| 11 years ago
|
|
She is with this selfish guy who demands oral sex but won't return the favour. She is jealous of the girls who get to be on top but fortunately the champagne makes the act somewhat less repulsive to her. |
submissions
| Rachel Stevens – Sweet Dreams My LA Ex Lyrics
| 11 years ago
|
This was offered to Britney as a response to 'Cry Me A River' and she turned it down (presumably her people just wanted her to move on from that story, and didn't want her running around proclaiming her innocence if she had in fact cheated on Justin). So it ended up with Rachel Stevens, the Cheryl Cole of her day, and every time I hear it I wish it was Britney.
Still a decent pop song, though. |
submissions
| Ellie Goulding – I Know You Care Lyrics
| 11 years ago
|
|
This interview suggests that it's about her father (her parents divorced when she was a young child and she has no contact with him). The speaker is looking at photographs taken of the two of them when she was little and living in a street she no longer remembers. She's looking for reassurance that he did love her, even though there was 'trouble ahead' and he ended up leaving. The pictures are an image of 'how things ought to have been' and she still dreams of getting that back, somehow. |
submissions
| Katy Perry – The One That Got Away (feat. B.o.B.) Lyrics
| 12 years ago
|
That's the story of the VIDEO, not the song. It's a nice video but it doesn't have a lot to do with these lyrics.
The song itself is quite clear that he's still alive (singing the blues and getting his tattoo removed). Also, if they were making out to Radiohead when she was a teenager, the oldest she could be would be mid-thirties. |
submissions
| Laura Marling – Hope In The Air Lyrics
| 12 years ago
|
|
The last verse could also be a reference to when Cordelia returns home and leads an army into battle against her sisters to become her father's 'saviour'. And 'judgment day' is the day he announces his stupid decision to divide his kingdom into three and abdicate. Cordelia assumes that he must be dying ('he'd already lost the fight / And there was no hope') and is struck dumb by her despair, but then she comes to terms with her fears ('why fear death?') and sees that there is hope, even if she herself won't necessarily be around to witness Goneril and Regan's fall and the reunification of the kingdom. |
submissions
| Florence + the Machine – Breaking Down Lyrics
| 12 years ago
|
Yes, this is about depression. That feeling of foreboding that it is always following you around, waiting in the shadows, and one day it will step forward and claim you again.
I think this one sounds a lot like Arcade Fire. |
submissions
| Joanna Newsom – Peach, Plum, Pear Lyrics
| 13 years ago
|
When I was at school, 'each peach pear plum' was a picking rhyme, an alternative to 'eeny-meeny-myah-mo' and 'one potato two potato.' (The fruits are ordered differently in order to play on the 'pear/pair' homonym and pointedly leave out the 'pair' at the end.)
Adults, here, pick partners in the same arbitrary way that children might pick playmates. If the 'floozies' can 'afford to be choosy' the implication is that the narrator can't; instead, she hopes to be chosen, but is metaphorically 'knocked down' by her love interest and withdraws. The 'golden' rush of their initial connection is replaced by 'gray' and 'blue'. The image of blood running from meat in 'Do I run rare?' echoes that of water running from snow, but the fact that it's a question means she's not admitting to having been heartbroken... maybe she was and doesn't want to admit it because to the guy and the 'floozies' the whole dating process is just a picking game, where people are selected or discarded at random. She might have blood where they only have water. |
submissions
| Joanna Newsom – No Provenance Lyrics
| 13 years ago
|
|
When I read 'Big Return' I thought of her Saturn return, since she's coming up to the age that's meant to happen (twenty-nine-ish). |
submissions
| Catatonia – Dead From the Waist Down Lyrics
| 14 years ago
|
|
To me this song is about selling your soul, and how focusing on success and material things at the extent of your emotional life ends up killing that part of you. |
submissions
| Bat for Lashes – I Saw A Light Lyrics
| 14 years ago
|
|
I think this song is about a woman who is living a boring life in the suburbs (with its 'freshly cut lawns'), but she doesn't 'see the light' until she discovers the bodies of the couple in the suicide pact. It makes her realise that she doesn't want to die in her husband's arms, she doesn't want to give up her life for him, so she packs her things and walks out. The light at the end of the song is her home receding into the distance. |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.
