| Elle Milano – Juliette's Dead Lyrics | 16 years ago |
|
“but I knew that you would go and break our hearts”, “Wake with stomach ache and bruising to the back”? ‘There’s too many teenage sob-stories’ ‘Never a thought for teenage abortion’ ‘and each rhyme doesn’t get far from your high-school sweetheart’ |
|
| Elle Milano – My Brother, the Astronaut Lyrics | 16 years ago |
| Oh, I forgot, I think “This cabin fever” refers to the band recording the album in a remote cottage in Kent, and going slightly mad as a result. | |
| Elle Milano – My Brother, the Astronaut Lyrics | 16 years ago |
|
“I searched ‘psychiatry’ and surveyed the facts $83 billion say Americans can’t relax”: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=psychiatry+%2483billion (Annual cost of depression in US estimated at $83 billion) and also, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget, : “The costs associated with the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rockets amounted to about $83-billion in 2005 Dollars”. Now, this second one could just be some kind of massive coincidence but, well, it’s nice either way. Like many of the songs on the album, this song is about the experience of being in a band, trying to ‘make it big’, and the inherent rather extreme mental state required or suffered by those who attempt to do so. You have to put yourself into the public eye, full of self-belief, either genuine or assumed, that you as a person, as a mind, an entity, have something to offer that will enrich the lives of other people. “Well Getchoo!”, thinking you’re superior to everyone else. It’s obviously a prepostorously narcissistic yet wholly necessary thing to believe, in other words you have to be a bit of a ‘space cadet’ to even stand a chance of being successful, yet as everyone knows, the chances of actually ‘making it’ are miniscule, hence we have “acres of dead space cadets” – all the people from bands who never made it. Also, putting all yours hopes into becoming successful, where so many people have failed, is an extremely long shot, a “40-yard pass through the graveyard”. “What I can’t catch is all you get” is presumeably a comment on having to ‘look out for #1’, i.e. other people will only benefit if you make a mistake, or from the surpluses that you can’t handle; altruism is not a quality compatible with ‘big success’. Yet to a sensitive, aware person, as great artists must surely be, this forced pattern of thinking and behaviour would cause great mental strain (“they’re gonna need therapy”). The song explores the contrast between the restrained, stiff-upper lip ‘English’ way of dealing with such things - “I understand completely, but I’d rather not ask”; “You’re English, you’ll be fine”, and its consequences, i.e. the contemporary binge-drinking culture that arises as a result of people being unable to process their emotions in a healthy way: “intoxicant rivers through binge-drinkers’ livers”, contrasted with the over-analytical therapeutic culture of America: “$83 billion say Americans can’t relax”, and then perhaps the author’s own suggestion, which is to ‘repress’, as they say, or perhaps simply ignore, anything that isn’t having a disablingly negative effect. “Thanks for memory, but it was getting in the way lately. Here’s to the memory, but if it’s not killing me, it doesn’t bother me”. This is clearly intended as an ironic statement, in the sense of it being a self-consciously ridiculous statement which is at the same time delivered with complete sincerity. It, interestingly, reminds me very much of The Strokes: “So I turned around, oh babe it’s gonna be alright, it was a great big lie, ’cause I left that night. Yeah”. Well I think that about covers it. “I honestly don’t have a clue what I’m talking about”. |
|
| Elle Milano – b-b-burn the bigger picture Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| Too many too many teenage sob-stories too many sob-stories | |
| Help She Can't Swim – are you feeling fashionable? Lyrics | 17 years ago |
|
you might have my wardrobe you don't have my style ha ha ha ha |
|
| Death Cab for Cutie – No Joy in Mudville Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| "Bullets and Silvertones" - two types of guitar (Bullets are made by Fender); Silvertone also made guitar amps, so it could refer to that. The liner notes to "We have the facts" list Ben as playing "Bullets", meaning the guitars. | |
| Help She Can't Swim – are you feeling fashionable? Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| you see that is called irony because the strokes actually are the best. | |
| Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – Where Have All The Rudeboys Gone Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| Yes, that would be a picture of Joe Strummer; "Roots Rock Rebel" is a line from "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" by The Clash, the first song to mix Jamaican reggae/ska with punk rock. But yes, it seems everyone's worked out most of the references in here. | |
| Thursday – M. Shepard Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| Okay, everyone who has posted so far is partly right. Geoff is combining the stories of M. Butterfly (hence the 'M.'), Matthew Shepard, and his friend. | |
| The Smiths – Rubber Ring Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| "Is that clever" and "Everybody's clever nowadays" is from an EMI Music for Pleasure audio recording of "The Importance Of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde (the actor spraking is John Gielgud). The "You are sleeping, you do not want to believe" is the voice of an interpreter on a record called "Breakthrough: An amazing experiment in electronic communication with the dead", apparently the dead person said "Du sovas, willst nicht glaube", which is half Swedish, half German. Another interesting note is that Morrissey overdubbed a 'lift-shaft' sound, made by him making the noise into a microphone, which can be heard just before the third chorus. | |
| Further Seems Forever – How To Start A Fire Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| This song is about God. All the members of Further Seems Forever are Christians, and viewed from that perspective the meaning of all the lyrics becomes quite clear | |
| R.E.M. – Monty Got A Raw Deal Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| Yes, this song is about Montgomery Clift's homosexuality, that's what the 'nonsense' refers to; "heroes don't come easy" and "this nonsense isn't new to me, I know my head I know my feet" refers to Stipe's own sexuality, and "they tried to bust you in a sting, but virtue isn't everything" could be a reference to an attempted outing by one of those Confidential-style gossip magazines, but I don't know much about the history of it so I'm not sure. | |
| Link 80 – For The Crown Lyrics | 21 years ago |
| is there any way of correcting the lyrics? The second verse is pretty much all wrong, it's "she yielded to me from my poetry" and "but the world's drying up now" as well. Anyway, this is a great song, available on the capdown (kickass band)/Link 80 split EP, and the "rumours, ridicule and the profit motive" sampler, both on Household name records, both of which I would recommend | |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.