| The Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I agree, this is absolutely reinforced in Just as every cop is a criminal And all the sinners saints As heads is tails Just call me Lucifer 'Cause I'm in need of some restraint and the constant calls to 'guess my name'. When he says 'Just call me lucifer' there is the suggestion in it's casual manner (just) that he's really saying, sure, go ahead, call me lucifer, it doesn't make a difference to what I really am. Then the term devil or lucifer is further danced around by asking to 'guess my name'. Furthermore, on the flashpoint live recording I'm pretty sure I can make out him saying True Believers instead of tell me baby, but that might just be my imagination. I'll take your devil blaming one step further though. It feels like he's talking about the tendency for people to shut down understanding of difficult and damaging events and instead trying to put a label like, evil, or the devil on it. If you tacitly accept that The Nazi's were just evil you don't have to look any closer, you don't have to try to understand why they did the things they did, they were just evil people and not like me at all. It's not just that humanity is to blame but that there is this great capacity for cruelty within all humanity which can't be dealt with by reducing to a simple notion of evil, or the devil. |
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| Josh Ritter – Thin Blue Flame Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I think many are underplaying the poker references. It's like he's looking for a royal flush, a perfect hand, something completely unbeatable. This is paralleled to the idea of heaven, a perfect hand for a perfect place. Royal blue religious overtones in a king arriving, he sees himself wrapped up in it, seemingly a messenger of god's will on earth, as the king come to complete the royal flush. When he talks about looking over the curtain it makes me think of peering behind the curtain of a show to see the inner workings. Then he becomes a thin blue wire, referencing religion's self professed morality, that the church teaches people morality, that it saves them. He however sees again behind the curtain to understand how cold and hollow the religious rules are as they are based on some heaven/hell punishment reward system. This can be seen in referencing Heaven as a thin blue line(referring to the police), also the thin blue line could be referring to the line in the earth's atmosphere which plays strongly in the song. This would serve to further remove holy mysticism and god from religion and is strengthened by referring to nitrogen where neither seraphim nor raindrops go. Essentially what he's saying is there is no city in the sky just the stratosphere, troposphere, and various gasses. He also sees god as being removed from our lives (he made the world in seven days, ever since he's been walking away). Third stanza is the biggest but in the first half (before the laurel and hardy interlude) it seems to be a straightforward affair about religious extremist violence. Then in referring to Laurel and Hardy he uses the line 'halcyon, laudanum and opium' which strongly evokes, for me at least, the 3 gifts of the wise men, gold, frankincense and myrrh. But these three gifts, where two are narcotics and one references the idea of nostalgia, thinking back to an ideal, earlier time which works nicely into looking for the light that has died. The last part seems to build on that narcotic bliss with heroes that could almost exist, and gardens like a lithium dream suggesting the unreality of this depiction. After seeing the horrible things being done in the world, and in the name of religion, he retreats to this fantasy. Finally he wakes from the dream, essentially waking up from the search for a mystical heaven and sees that it's all around him, wrapped in royal blue and full of angels. More card references here and he decides that he's done trying to search out this heaven in the sky, done looking for a royal flush. What he needs is a full house, an earthly hand with connotations of human connection. |
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