| AJJ – Truckers Are The Blood Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I want "eleven past eleven" to be a Defiance, Ohio reference! | |
| Radiohead – Pyramid Song Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| Actually in You And Whose Army he refers to the Holy Roman Empire, which was a totally different empire geographically and politically. | |
| Neutral Milk Hotel – Pree Sisters Swallowing a Donkey's Eye Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Francis Ford Coppola's subsequent Apocalypse Now, Kurtz talks about death. Now, he talks a lot about death, about what comes afterwards particularly, where war comes in, inevitability, certainty, honor, life. Where this gets interesting - his dying words. "The horror." That's how I hear the song. "The horror." Over and over. "The horror. The horror." The neverending horror. The perpetual torture. "The horror. The horror." |
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| Neutral Milk Hotel – Holland, 1945 Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I really enjoy the sense of scale in this song. It's about one girl, one girl among millions killed, yet Mangum uses her so poetically that it can't help but be a metaphor for everyone who was killed in the Holocaust. Innocent people cruelly slaughtered for no apparent reason, with great irony in the guns which rained down on everyone and more specifically their late timing. As the song progresses, we're reminded more and more of the cosmic significance of this - to keep a long story short, it's zero. "The Earth looks better from a star That's right above from where you are" The whole genocide is much more tolerable when you don't connect, or empathise, but just look at it from afar. Possibly a metaphor for the Allied powers who chose to do very little about the Holocaust until they actually had to (it's so sad to see... filled with flies) |
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| Neutral Milk Hotel – Ghost Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I think the "until we tore in two" is an extension of the metaphor in Two-Headed Boy - Mangum's brother who killed himself. He was very close to his brother, and his suicide would have been devastating. (In case you're wondering, he was the dark brother wrapped in white.) | |
| Neutral Milk Hotel – Where You'll Find Me Now Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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This song is about a relationship surrounded in lies. The singer (whether the persona here is Mangum's himself or adopted) has lied, and he feels shameful about it. A 'silver tongue' is traditionally a metaphor for someone who is good at lying - as is all the other references to silver for the same of conciseness. However, his girlfriend discovered his lie (possibly become angry - 'your teeth... for tearing'), and now he feels ashamed and 'swollen and small'. He doesn't want to talk again, because to talk again might be to lie. There is also much mistrust (All I perceive, is wasted and broken,) as in he does not see anything as truthful anymore. I don't know who lied first, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the relationship was intertwined with, and possibly even based on, a lie, and the singer doesn't want to get committed again just to be found out. |
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| Neutral Milk Hotel – Two-Headed Boy Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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1. The first stanza draws parallels to the kind of things you'd see preserved in formaldehyde (a literal two-headed boy) in jars in a carnival or a medical museum. The two-headed boy may be a reference to Mangum's brother who killed himself (if you're wondering, he's the dark brother wrapped in white) Mangum's close connection to his brother shown as an unbreakable physical connection - typically, when one siamese twin dies, the other one does too. The rest of the song until the last stanza is pretty much an idealist view of life - love, drugs, peace. Of course, the irony here is evident - the two-headed boy will never see any of this again. The last stanza is one of acceptance; one boy is leaving the other, to die or whether he's already dead, and he knows there is nothing he can do. Overall, the song is about brothers, and loss, and grief. Or vinyl. |
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