submissions
| Cream – Tales Of Brave Ulysses Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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People keep citing Homer and The odyssey but I don't think anyone has actually read it. Odysseus is headed home to Greece after the Trojan War -- which in the song is more England of the winter -- and the story is his adventures almost not making it, what he encounters -- like the Cyclops or Circe and the Sirens, the last referenced in the song. When they sing beguiling him to drown himself in the sea, white laced lips and girls brown body etc. in the song, he has to be tied to the mast and his (naked) ears covered up. I forget how Aphrodite is involved here directly but she is one of the cause of The Trojan War (when Helen beats her for Paris's acclaim as the most beautiful) and she is born on foam out of the sea in a shell -- see Boticelli's Birth of Venus -- she's the goddess of love and foam is semen, fertility, the sea is life here -- tiny fishes -- as well as drowning and death, temptation and orgasm, since also the sirens and Circe are other than Penelope, the whole frame tale Odysseus going home to his wife (a whole other story once he gets there). Anyway, I think the song great, the imagary right and not overdone, great song. |
submissions
| Neil Young – Cortez The Killer Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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Ugh, the comments above are too PC, every one of them. I like Neil Young and like his politics but sometimes they far too sentimental and simplistic, clownish. Cortez was an asshole, no argument, but to say Montezuma and the Aztecs -- no one above mentions them or maybe knows two-cents about them -- are somehow wonderful is complete nonsense. There WERE constant wars, who do you think Cortez alied himself with but the Aztec enemies, there was slavery, human sacrifice, and Young makes this somehow GOOD, which is ridiculous, and all those huge rocks that were made into pyramids, these too are GREAT??? Nope. Crock of propaganda preaching to the congregation here. |
submissions
| Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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She doesn't recognize him because this is poetry, she's been degraded, everyone is stoned, etc. Dante wrote love lyrics like Petrarch, also an Italian from the 13th Century. |
submissions
| Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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Not Verlaine but Rimbaud did. Maybe the French connection of NO suggests it. There is a Montague Street in NYC, I think, but also one in NO? |
submissions
| Bob Dylan – Mr. Tambourine Man Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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I could read on and maybe someone later mentions it, but I'm reading a biography of Dylan that says the Tamborine Man was an actual person who had this huge tamborine, and that Dylan played with him at this time, the guy a Village fixture. No one, anyway, needs to say a poem or song is exactly about his or that and nothing else -- though I wouldn't go so far as deconstructed reader response stuff that says art is about anything you want to see in it (and Dylan will play this game often). The song can easily be about both drugs and art, the two completely overlapped in the 60's for Dylan and many others. What should also be mentioned is that none of this is remotely like automatic writing, every line Dylan wrote then was completely made up of alliteration -- really as old as poetry -- and one major reason you have strangeness is simply the technique, what one word would suggest automatically would not be suggested if you needed an alliterative twin. Aside from a general plot to his songs through time or busting time, the songs are generated first by sound more than meaning, alliterative (and rhyming sound too) sound mainly. And if you string one word to another and then another to another by way of alliteration -- I guarantee you will get some strange lyrics that sound also like free association, however things are carefully constructed. Again, none of this happened in some drug dream. |
submissions
| Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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I'm sure if I read through all the posts, someone will come up with this, but I just looked Bismillah up and it does mean "the name of god" and preceeds suras in the Koran. And, interestingly, the mullahs in Iran let the song in because of this reference, but I think there's a good chance it's mockery (whether at all Mercury was a practicing Muslim would count here), but of the over-the-top opera. It could be also that a religious court won't let the poor guy go, and there is some sympathy for the poor murderer -- and class antagonism. That Galileo comes in can only mean an attack on Christianity, but also probably it's an attack on Islam as well, and the mullahs didn't understand. I'm not sure what Magnifico means here -- it is Italian, the language of opera, it probably means that Galileo is a wizard, I think it's a title given to Volpone in Jonson's comedy. All of this, again, is COMIC and parody and camp, the tone is off-the-wall. Bohemian is a cliche, of course, "bohemians" were big in the 50's. The song has no relationship to the Czech Republic unless you want to interpret it through Kafka. |
submissions
| Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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Reading through this stuff is amazing, you guys won't let the AIDS interpretation go, but it's like saying Hamlet is really about the Hubble telescope. If you want to be postmodern (which you are not, you are merely retarded) then anacronistic interpretations are fine, but I think the guy who -- much too long -- spelled out the narrative about the lower class (and there is class mockery all over this, it is an OPERA and mocked, of course) guy who killed a guy and is going through a trial and imprisoned and has various takes and excuses on his guilt ... is right on. I'm still not too certain where Bismillah (if it is the Koran?) or Scaramouche fits, but they sound great and operatic. But Scaramouche was also, by the way, a swishy swash-buckling Stuart Granger movie from around 1950, so the reference is not merely operatic and class irony, but gay camp. Again, most of you people here are really dumb. |
submissions
| Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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In 1975 there was no AIDS epidemic, which started more or less in the early 80's. There is no way the song is about AIDS at all. |
submissions
| The Crystals – He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss) Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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true, prisoner. also, that spector withdrew it because of the violence against women -- imagine the storm it would have gotten ten years later. Either Darlene Love or La la Brooks sang the lead. |
submissions
| Amy Winehouse – To Know Him Is To Love Him Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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Spector's father who gassed himself in a suicide has a gravestone which reads, To know his was to love him. Spector changed the tense and made it into a love song, but the poster who says there's some element of the supernatural here is right. And remember all the love songs about dead teens, the whole James Dean kind of thing -- there is that element in it, not just passing youth and the evanescence of love, but also death. |
submissions
| Fontella Bass – Rescue Me Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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I always thought Fontana Bass was the name of a group. She's cool though, see her on UTube, though they have her all dressed like Ross and she is, incredily, missing a tooth on TV. |
submissions
| Cream – Politician Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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This is one of my favorits songs. I didn't know Bruce did the guitar part that's so haunting, thought it was Clapton -- I don't really know music, just like what I like. It's hypnotic.
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