submissions
| Ween – Did You See Me? Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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This song is simply a succinct recapitulation of Humanity's "trip" out of the arboreal forest into the sandy savannahs of Africa, to it's eastern coastal regions and thence up into Eurasia, spreading out from there. Some rogue anthropologists have even theorized that somewhere along the way, modern hominids may have had a semi-aquatic phase, from the upright posture, relative hairlessness, the diving syncope - a physiological reaction to entering deep water involving the slowing of the heart rate, which conserves oxygen, shared by whales, dolphins and other aquatic mammals. The part about flying through the galaxy, of course, has not yet happened, in this universe. Damn burning of Alexandria. The warbling synth noise is so cray. |
submissions
| They Might Be Giants – A Self Called Nowhere Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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It is "a thing called it." You are all a bunch of pseudo-intellectual posers who have probably never read a single page of Freud. :D I know it's TMBG, but do you really have to seize upon every miniscule opportunity to prance around in nothing but a mortarboard installed at some impossibly jaunty angle like it was the last M.C. Escher dormroom wall decoration in the Alpha Quadrant? "Id" may be implied, but subtly. It is not literal. It is called poetry. It is one of those unnerving things against which a slide-rule avails naught. |
submissions
| Ariel Pink – Every Night I Die At Miyagis Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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Ok, "adjust"... that gives it an interestingly pop-sociological timbre... I heard 'the girls adjourn" and sometimes "the girl's a joke" or a "jerk" I wonder if he sings it the same every time? It's hard to tell when he insists on recording under a rusty old sheet-metal bathtub with a tribe of heat-addled rodentia for sound managers and latte-gophers.
This song may also have the interesting distinction of being the first in the pop genre to self-consciously blaspheme against Rastafarianism. Notice I said "self-consciously" so that leaves out Clapton's cover of "I Shot the Sheriff." |
submissions
| David Bowie – Black Country Rock Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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Art is always susceptible of a multitude of interpretations, but "black" music (as soul, gospel, blues, jazz, r&b, etc. were once referred to), "country", and "rock" were, roughly, the categorical divisions of English-speaking popular music at the time Bowie was writing this song. They also represented divisions in society that sorely needed, and arguably still need bridging. On one level, then, I have always taken it to be an ode to pop music and it's place in the culture, which, although not as formal or sophisticated as some other types of discourse, still offers a more or less level playing field for people to come together to experience and appreciate each other's creativity |
submissions
| Elvis Costello – (I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea Lyrics
| 17 years ago
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Chelsea is/has been at various times an entertainment and sometime red-light district of London. With this bit of knowledge in hand the rest of the song's meaning falls out fairly easily. Truly enough, another of Elvis' misogynistic, or at least feminambivalent tracks, disappointed by the tawdriness of the everyday dressed up flimsily as the exotic and so on. Around the time this song made the hit parade in England, according to Elvis in an interview somewhere, he got into a cab and asked to be driven, where else, to Chelsea, on some business or other. Supposedly the driver turned around with a sneer and a "Ha, Ha, bloody Ha!" |
submissions
| Bob Dylan – It's All Over Now, Baby Blue Lyrics
| 18 years ago
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Poetic Jeremiad, lyrically apocolyptic imagery. Like a sequel to Desolation Row, in a way. The earth is baby blue, from the distance of the poet's eye, or from space.
I can't stand eschatology in art usually. It's hard to stand far enough away to catch the beauty of it. A rare exception that proves the rule, imho. |
submissions
| Laurie Anderson – O Superman (For Massenet) Lyrics
| 18 years ago
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I believe the cliche is "eerily prescient."
There are ghosts of future planes in this song, recorded in 1990, part of her Live in America concent/performence art tour a couple of years earlier than even that.
Also, the foreshadowing of the first stirrings of the rough beast of techno-militaristic fascism, and the seemingly inexorable logic of its ascendency.
And cool vocorder sounds. |
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