| The Mountain Goats – Hebrews 11:40 Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| This is the most metal-ass song I've ever heard. | |
| Sufjan Stevens – Abraham Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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The story of Abraham and Isaac is summarized fairly bluntly here without so much as a stanza of reflection. Judging by the wildly varying opinions on Abraham's character on this site, I'd say this particular narrative of father and son and obligation hits us humans in the guts for some reason. I wouldn't be surprised if Sufjan kept it straightforward simply because the bare essence of the story is one hell of a thing to wrestle with. The spare accompaniment, the simple plain-song like melody, and the erie female-voiced chorus all speak to me. It sounds like a priest singing "the mystery of faith" or an imam's throaty chants. It's just like "hey before you react let these words sink in a second." I would also add, it can't be an accident that Mr Stevens is singing TO Abraham... I would share my own opinion on the story of Abraham, myself, but I cannot put it any better than Soren Kierkegaard did back when he wrote Fear and Trembling. Read it if that brilliant asshole Abraham really haunts you like he does me. |
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| Sufjan Stevens – Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in His Hair Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Well I'll preface this saying that there's a lot of personal meaning anyone can draw, with or without a "correct" interpretation of the actual narrative. This is after all an amazing heartfelt and hard-hitting song emotionally. But to my sense of the story, aside from what it means personally, it goes something like this: Our narrator works a wage job at an airport "in the bags" for Capitol Air. He is financially troubled, has a gambling habit, and finds his father's life choices embarrassing and weak (I read this as joining the military... a cynical view of that being suicide for limited financial security.. though this detail could be off) and what he failed to recognize in his gambling was the great risk he was willing to undertake to strike it rich by any means possible. Add to this a troubled marriage on the verge of divorce and you have a desperate man with a weak sense of risk and enough frustration to take the next big windfall and escape that comes his way, legal or not. A woman, seeing his position working behind airport security, offers him a lot of money to become a mule--that is, to transport illicit materials. Drugs? Documents? Priceless artifacts? Exotic plant seeds? Who knows? (Probably drugs. I mean come on.) We do know that though this transaction is the formal pretense of their relationship, there may well be a sexual element, and even something beyond mere exploitation. "Bobby, don't look back." At last, we realize how short lived his scheme was. Among his personal belongings is a bottle of aftershave, filled, of course, with not-even-close-to-aftershave. "I can explain," he pleads in futility to the TSA personnel, as he considers the life cycle of the shadfly. He is running from them; from the truth that like theirs, his was but a day-long last-ditch effort at life, doomed from the start to be tumultuous, risky, chaotic, and ending in certain death (figuratively for our Bobby). Bobby got a shadfly caught in his hair. Yes he did. Sex is almost certainly a part of the narrative, but I think it's mostly a part of the shadfly metaphor; of the lust-unto-death drive of their final hours. -bg |
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