| Beth Waters – Slut Song Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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I think this is about someone who's using uncommitted sex as a way to avoid confronting their unhappy issues. The somber music combined with the lyrics makes me think the speaker is running from their depression by having sex with strangers. Bits like "shut up and turn out the light" hint that the speaker isn't screwing for personal reasons. They don't want to see this person. They just want that blessed moment of thought-hazing bliss brought on by intense sexual pleasure. "The silence" referred to throughout the song is the product of the speaker's anxieties fading away as they're lost in a haze of rhythmic breathing and pleasure. Parts like "Scatter it anywhere" mean that the speaker isn't even practicing safe sex, but the cavalier way it's said implies that the speaker is simply apathetic at this point. "that is what all the boys all say" just feels like a not so subtle dig at the way people judge the speaker for doing what she has to do to cope. I don't know what to make of the final lines. On the one hand, it could be a message to sexually active people: to hell with what the prudes think; you only live once, so make the most of it. That sort of thing. However, the really sad buildup throughout this song, combined with the rest of it hinting at someone using sex as a way to avoid the volume of their thoughts, makes me think it's something else. "Your story is all that it can be" is at once a declaration of unlimited potential, and a limiting notion. Your story might have unlimited potential if you're both into, say, a wealthy family and you can just keep trying new things. But what if you're not? What if you're both into a situation that doesn't allow for freedom or flexibility, or a life full of abuse and torment? "So make it your best before you die," to me, implies that maybe this speaker wasn't really born with a life capable of producing a grand story. Maybe circumstances forced them into a story that didn't have the potential to go very far, and so the result is this person who realizes they're stuck in a bad situation. Maybe even an unchangeable one. The thoughts gnaw away at her. But since there's nothing she can do, she shuts those thoughts up, turns off the lights, and basks in that temporary silence. In this way, she makes the best of her time before she dies. |
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| Blackfield – 1.000 People Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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To me, this song is about dealing with depression. Specifically, the way depression robs its victim of joy in things that most people would find meaningful or thrilling, and instills suicidal thoughts. For me, the most powerful moment of the song was "she will tell me she loves me, that she won't ever stop; but I wanna die in this moment, I wanna die." For anyone else, this moment would be one of elation, but for someone struggling with depression, the relationship becomes like.... another thing to deal with on top of everything else. It becomes impossible to see the good in it, only the difficulties. The tremendous downsides. The potential to hurt and be hurt. He fears that because of his mental illness, he might not be enough for his partner ("and if I stay with you, do you believe that I'll pull through?") and rather than deal with all of that, he would rather exit in a way that frees him from having to hurt her directly. Of course, she would still be terribly hurt if he vanished. WE the listeners understand that possibility. And that tension between the listener's expectations and the speaker's perception belie the difficulties of treating someone with a mental illness that tells them that people would be better off without them around. When you're beaten down by a disease that only lets you feel the negative side of even the most positive experiences, by the end of it the only thing you're able to desire is an end. I come back to this song more than I care to admit. |
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| Nine Inch Nails – Big Man with a Gun Lyrics | 4 years ago |
| I do agree that this song is a comment on hyper-masculine gun culture and the violence it brings about. But in the context of the album's ongoing theme, I feel like it's a great way to introduce the gun that will later round out the saga. | |
| Nine Inch Nails – I Do Not Want This Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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I love this song because it marks a distinctive shift from the narrator's frame of thinking as seen in "Heresy." Where "Heresy" had the narrator assuming "God is dead (and no one cares)" with the implication being that everyone was more or less on the same page about nihilism and the shitty state of the world, this song has the narrator admit, at last, that "I fear I'm the only one who thinks this way" about the state of things. In this way, "I do not want this" marks an important shift where the narrator realizes how isolated he's become. And he does not help matters; attempts to empathize with him are met with immediate rejection. "Don't you tell me how I feel. You don't know just how I feel." The whole song is the narrator feeling like he is alone, the only one feeling these horrible feelings, and lashing out at people who try to tell him that they've been there and understand. The end of the song is like the last dying gasp of the narrator's ego, begging for things to turn around, wanting to still accomplish something great even as the narrator can feel that possibility closing since he's shut everyone out and pushed the whole world away. |
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| Nine Inch Nails – Ruiner Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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I think with how open ended a lot of this song is, there's plenty of room to come to it with our own interpretations. This is very hard for me to write but it's just how I see the song and I can't unsee it. I wish I could. To me, this is a song about the narrator coming to terms with his own history of child sexual abuse and attempting to reclaim control in his life as an adult. It's really hard for me to listen to, because I get big child abuse vibes from it. It's even harder to write this analysis. If you're bothered by stuff like this, please turn away now and don't look back. The title, "ruiner," and later lines like "the raping of the innocent" implies the destruction of something that was once unspoiled. Many people have suggested it's about the narrator committing a crime, but I don't think the narrator sees society as unspoiled or innocent, as evidenced by previous songs in the album where he refers to society as pigs and dehumanizes them constantly. I believe this is about a rape that happened to him as a child. Lines like "Maybe it's a part of me you took to a place I hoped it would never go" call to the mental and physical trauma of being abused as a child; he didn't want to go to that place with someone he trusted, but he was taken there against his will and now he's left picking up the pieces of it. Parts like "you had to covet what was mine, didn't you?" call to the theft of innocence via rape. The repetitive "How did you get so big/strong/hard/long" part refers at first to the contrast between the child narrator and the towering abusive adult figure, who I believe is likely a parent. What started as a caring relationship turned into an abusive power struggle, and the narrator is left wondering "how did you get so big? how did you get so strong?" The rest of that part is not exactly difficult to figure out and I don't want to explain it. The "perfect ring of scars" is so explicit and horrible in this context and I don't even want to write it, but to me when viewed through this context it refers to the scarring and tearing that can happen during forced insertions. The final lines imply that this person is still out there. "You know I can see what you really are" imply that this guy still has people fooled but the narrator, now grown, knows exactly what he's done and isn't fooled like everyone else. Not to jump around but "Maybe that's fucked me up so much more than you'll ever know" also implies that this trauma has affected his adult life, which is important since the final lines "you didn't hurt me nothing can hurt me" and "you didn't hurt me nothing can stop me now" denote exactly HOW it affected him as an adult. He's cut himself off emotionally, opting to feel nothing rather than feel the pain of what he went through. He rationalizes this by deciding that the apathy makes him unstoppable. This is an idea we see expressed in "Piggy" as well, the notion of the unstoppable apathetic man. I hated writing this. I feel dirty and I want to throw up. I suspect that is the point of a song like this. "Ruiner" is a dark, dark song that successfully takes the listener "to a place I hoped it [I] would never go." The vagueness allows the reader/listener to fill in blanks with their own perspective, which only makes what we pull from it feel even worse, because it came from us. The song ruins the listener in that way as well. |
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| Nine Inch Nails – Closer Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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Well, others have already nailed what I would have said. It's about the narrator escaping his self-hate using sex as a medium. He sees his whole existence as flawed, and the only way he can get away from that and "become somebody else" is in those moments where he loses himself by fucking his partner. Of course, "you can have my isolation, you can have the hate that it brings" and "I drink the honey inside your hive" heavily imply that he is harming his partner in the process. The first line showing how he wears them down with his emotional baggage; the latter showing how he saps the sweetness from their life and doesn't give anything back. As a song about using sex to escape from negative emotions, it's brilliant. As a song about the damage a mentally ill person can inflict on their partner, it's elegant. |
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| Nine Inch Nails – March of the Pigs Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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This is one of my favorite songs on the album. For me, it's always been about individuality coming to terms with the machine called society. Everyone lining up, all of them dehumanized pigs. Pigs being a grim reminder of "a pig satisfied," humans enjoying the bare minimum and never knowing better. Getting little joys among the grind: "take the skin and peel it back, but doesn't it make you feel better?" has a great calming moment, a calm in the storm representative of the little tiny snippets of joy in the long neverending grind of day to day life. The "weekend" in a workweek. The momentary climax during sex. I always get big corporate vibes when I listen to this song. Like it's the narrator rejecting a traditional 9-5 lifestyle within society because he worries about how it would eat away at his individuality. Lines like "Bite, chew, suck (away the tender parts)" imply that the mob known as "society" literally eats away at everything human until there's nothing "tender" left, no beating heart, no human. Just a pig. |
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| Nine Inch Nails – Heresy Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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Well, in the immediate sense this song addresses the hypocritical and oppressive nature of organized religion. In the grander context of the album's overarching theme about a man's downward descent through suicidal depression, I believe this is the part where the narrator is confronted with religion as a possible cure for his nihilism, and soundly rejects it. Most importantly are lines like "no one cares [that God is dead]" and "If there is a hell, I'll see you there" because they create a link between the narrator and society. Even if he sees them as pigs or sheep and dehumanizes them, a part of him still believes (at this point in the album anyway) that they're not completely different from each other; society COULD be like him, if only they'd pull the blindfold off and see the truth. I believe this element speaks volumes about the nature of mental illness. It is very, very common for someone in a depressed state to think that everyone else feels the same way they do (after all, how could they not? Everything is so terrible! Surely they see it. They see it and they choose not to, or they pretend not to), but they're just hiding it better or burying it with alcohol or superficial things. "Heresy" taps into that belief and in doing so it becomes a song about the mentally ill narrator projecting his nihilism and his hopelessness onto others in a subconscious attempt to be less alone. Even the final lines, "if there is a hell, I'll see you there" implies that to the bitter end, the narrator ultimately does not want to be left alone. That much, so far at least, is certain. |
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| Nine Inch Nails – Piggy Lyrics | 4 years ago |
| To me, this song is about being depressed and hitting a point where you don't care about anything anymore. This song represents the very short lived euphoria before hopelessness and despair, where you realize that your inability to form strong feelings for things or people can make you feel temporarily unbound to reality. By releasing his attachments to other human beings (he even dehumanizes them by calling them pigs), the narrator gets a short lived and faulty sense of self worth. "I don't care about anything and that makes me stronger." It's about rationalizing mental illness. It's about the ego trying to find supremacy even while grappling with something terrible. | |
| The Antlers – Wake Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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On the surface this album tells the story of a hospice worker who falls in love with a patient dying of bone cancer. Beneath that, the album is an allegory for an emotionally abusive relationship. Since the album covers (at least) those two bases, I will look at it from those perspectives as well. In other words, this will contain first a base analysis and then a secondary deeper analysis. At the base level, a wake is a ceremony performed after someone has died, before the traditional funeral, and these lyrics appear to be about that, in a very broad and all encompassing sense. This is a song about the aftermath of death and what it does to those closest. The narrator is an emotional wreck; after everything's he's been through with her, he's reduced to "sleeping next to mousetraps in a bed of all our clothes." He's shutting people out, locking the doors and killing the phones. But in the end, ceremony calls for it and he has to deal with people, let them in, and confront the truth of the situation: that she's dead and isn't coming back. Someone earlier suggested that the "well you can come inside" part is referring to a single friend he's confiding in, and I'm inclined to agree. A lot of this song feels like it was written shortly after the wake, in those lonely moments where everyone's gone and the bereaved is alone again. However, there is so much more going on here than what we see at the base level, and I want to explore that in depth for the rest of this review. Because in addition to being about confronting death, and dealing with the wake, this is also a song about dealing with the aftermath of an abusive relationship. I would argue that the death we saw in Shiva represented the relationship's ending, and "Wake" is what happens to the victim after it's over and he or she is left alone. I believe when the speaker writes "the world shrinks," he is referring to the isolation typical of abusive relationships. He's been cut off from everyone, and now that it's over, it's really hard to suddenly try and reconnect with them again. I imagine perhaps her disposition pushed others away from him, and now he's stuck cleaning up the mess (someone has to sweep the floor, pick up her dirty clothes, that job's not mine) she's left and he's just not up for it. Maybe he's just emotionally exhausted and can't do it yet. I don't know. But the first chunk gives off the imagery of someone who's warded away their whole safety net of human beings. The phrasing "I don't blame them for their curtain calls / Because I pulled the rope / I want to call them back out for applause" is tricky. It's like those around him have assumed it's over (they're demanding the "curtain call," something usually done at the end of a performance) even though he isn't ready to move on himself. He can't be mad at them for feeling that way, since he's been the one to inform them that things are "over" on a surface level, (he's "pulled the rope") but emotionally he's still vulnerable and things feel unfinished. "So now I'm sleeping next to mousetraps / In a bed of all our clothes / While I hope that she won't come home" hits on multiple levels. On the first, it hits on caregiver fatigue; this speaker has spent so much time and emotional/physical energy caring for her, and now that she's gone... of course he's devastated and wishes it weren't so, but maybe a part of him is glad for the opportunity to finally move on and live for himself again. From the context of an emotionally abusive relationship, the lyrics became that much worse; although it's over, and she was abusive, he's alone now and part of him can't believe it and expects her to come sauntering back in -- and he's hoping she won't, while sleeping among her clothes because a twisted part of him still misses her. There is a lot of conflict wrapped up in this section and it works on multiple levels, but the image it produces is palpable: the speaker has pushed everyone out in favor of an abusive relationship that just imploded and left him with nothing, and now he's left to pick up the pieces alone, and he's terrified to cross the bridges that he's burned (as evidenced by the final lines of this second section). This idea is further evidenced by vivid segments like "when your helicopter came and tried to lift me out / I put its rope around my neck / And after that you didn't bother with the airlift or the rescue / You knew just what to expect." Basically the idea that others DID try to help the speaker get out of this abusive relationship, but he refused their help in traumatic ways that pushed others out. I like the ending of this song, because it's very hopeful unlike the rest of the album that leaves one with a sense of hopelessness and desolation at times. When the speaker says "I want to bust down the door / If you're willing to forgive / I've got the keys, I'm letting people in" it's apparent that he's gotten past his fear of letting others in and he's decided that, if they're willing to forgive him, he'll rejoin their lives. But what leads to that revelation? I believe it's where the speaker writes "with the door closed, shades drawn / we're dead enough / they don't open from outside." The opening stanzas of the speaker sleeping among the deceased patient's clothing (or in earlier songs of him in her bed shortly after death, a bed "clearly intended for you") have culminated in this revelation: that if the speaker cannot move on, then it is as though he died with her. In keeping with the abusive relationship allegory, the idea is similar; if one cannot move beyond the trauma and open up to others again, then their abusive partner has effectively finished them permanently. Unwilling to let himself become among the finished, he does what was hinted at initially; he "call[s] them back out for applause" and invites others into his life once more, "if [they're] willing to forgive." The final segments feel like a message to other victims of abuse listening in. "Don't speak with someone's tooth" was confusing to me. Whenever I looked it up, I only found references to this song. I think "speaking with someone's tooth" means speaking through someone else's perspective. Earlier in the song, it's written "And someone has to speak with their teeth behind their tongue / To never let that right be denied," and they're giving the impression that speech is passed past the teeth and over the tongue, so if you're speaking with someone else's tooth then you're effectively letting them form your thoughts. In other words, one shouldn't let others dictate how they feel about a situation. The musical crescendo after this is stated hints at this as well; it's like an awakening has happened, and only when the speaker stops speaking "with someone's tooth" is he free to realize his own limitations, and that the burden of his partner's well being isn't entirely his responsibility. He can move on and come to terms with the fact that he didn't deserve any of what happened to him. This is a beautiful multi-layered song. I love it so much. |
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| The Antlers – Shiva Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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@[goodwinter:32894] >it is sad because he realizes if he were in her shoes she would not do the same for him. A piercing interpretation. I would only add that perhaps, in keeping with the hospice metaphor, she *could* not do the same for him. She's physically (or emotionally) incapable of helping him in the ways he's helped her. Because of this, he can't even be mad because the situation can't be helped, but he still feels it and it hurts terribly. In that way, the situation is "too much to scream, so instead [he] just started to laugh." |
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