| Jefferson Airplane – Eskimo Blue Day Lyrics | 13 years ago |
|
Love this song. The comments above are pretty much dead on with respect to the song's environmentalist themes. I think one additional dimension to the human-trees dynamic is that trees (and other species) don't even comprehend us because they're utterly alien to us. Just as we humans can't fathom how (or if) they think or dream, they can't understand or care about our ideas, values, etc. I've always liked that the bridge of the song is about the bridge of a guitar or other stringed instrument: "Change the strings and the notes slide/Change the bridge and the strings shift down/Shift the notes and the bridge sings". A connection between these lines and the verses first made sense to me after I tried to adjust the intonation on my guitar -- a procedure that includes making adjustments to the height and angle of its bridge. Unlike tuning the guitar, in which you focus on the pitch of each string individually, intonation affects all strings at once. A small mistake to correct one string can put ALL strings out of adjustment; shift the bridge to bring one string into proper position and you may put the others out of whack. Everything's interrelated, like tundra snows, the African sea, icicles and sulphur springs. |
|
| Wilco – Blasting Fonda Lyrics | 17 years ago |
|
The previous poster's right about the last line, and the second-to-last line, it should be spelled "prima donna," as in the sense of someone with an overblown sense of entitlement. This is a great example of Tweedy's open-ended lyrics. The verses include words that suggest at least two Jane Fonda movie titles (Coming Home and On Golden Pond). The song winds up with the narrator "blasting Fonda on the news" -- a phrase that could mean turning up the TV to amplify her message, or railing at what she's saying on the screen. Which is it? Who knows, but both senses ring true -- and whichever way you read it, the act fuels the narrator's self-loathing (as a "prima donna stuck in a trailer"). Two opposite meanings that both provide true, detailed, bleak portraits. Amazing. |
|
| The Clash – London Calling Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| Correction to preceding post: Since Chernobyl didn't happen until 1986, my association of London Calling with Chernobyl was obviously grafted on after the fact! I got London Calling back in early 1980; chalk my personal "nuclear error" up to the way the album gained relevance for me in the Reagan/Thatcher era. | |
| The Clash – London Calling Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| This tune is great. Simonon migh sure milked those few bass notes for all they're worth! I've always thought of this as a companion to Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime," which was recorded at roughly the same time. (The Heads' "Fear of Music" was issued a few months before "London Calling," at least in the US, but I'm in no way suggesting Strummer ripped it off; I have no idea if he'd even heard LDW before writing/recording London Calling, which is in any case obviously based on his personal experiences.) Both tunes reflect anxiety about society being destroyed by human stupidity, and the meaninglessness of pop culture (phony Beatlemania, Mudd Club, CBGB) in struggle for survival. FWIW, while Three Mile Island definitely contributed to late-70s nuclear-power anxiety, I think the song addresses Chernobyl more specifically: "The wheat is growing thin" seems a direct reference to the grain fields of Ukraine (site of Chernobyl), and its then-status as the "bread basket of the Soviet Union." | |
| Yes – I've Seen All Good People: Your Move/All Good People Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
By coincidence, in the last week I got reacquainted with this song via "The Ultimate Yes" 35th-Anniversary CD set (having not heard it since retiring my turntable and "The Yes Album" on vinyl decades ago), and also received Sarah Silverman's "Jesus Is Magic" standup DVD from Netflix. To avoid spoilers, I'll say only that Silverman's act culminates with an unforgettable (and hilarious) nod to this song. She claims in the DVD extras that she had to pay Yes $15,000 for the performance rights, and I think it was worth it. Anyone else? P.S. I always heard the line as "Send an instant karma to me," echoing the Lennon tune, but have never heard any line resembling "give peace a chance" in this song. And I always thought the line was "make the White queen run so fast, she hasn't got time to make you White." I understood this in the sense that the singer is coaching the Black side in a (metaphorical) chess match, and advising a strong offense that prevents the opponent (White) from capturing his piece with his/her queen -- making it her own, or making it White. |
|
| Yes – Siberian Khatru Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
I agree with the notion that the lyrics to Siberian Khatru are impressionistic and not literal. (IMHO, Jon Anderson's lyrics are almost always that way -- and range from gorgeous gibberish to self-indulgent babble -- or worse; I find it generally best to think of his voice as an instrument, and his words as tones and musical phrases, rather than language. I also agree that it's unfortunate when some Christians (or atheists, Freemasons, Paul-is-dead freaks, etc. ...) ind contrived "evidence" of sympathy for their beliefs/lifestyles/theories in works of art , music, poetry, or literature. (There's plenty of art that IS sympathetic to particular beliefs/constituencies, and that's great; I'm referring only to efforts to conjure sensibilities that don't, or couldn't, exist. (A nonmusical example is the notion that Superman, the creation of two first-generation Jewish immigrants, is a Christ figure.) Unfortunately, opaque poetry like Anderson's, lacking as it is in intrinsic meaning, leaves itself wide open to projected interpretations of all stripes. Having said all that, however, it's hard to dispute some kind of Christian spin in Siberian Khatru, particularly since it contains the word "Christian," along with "Luther" and "saviour". I don't think it translates into a literal parable, but Christ (or Christianity) must have been among the ideas bobbing along Anderson's stream of consciousness when he worked out the lyrics to "Siberian Khatru." |
|
| The Beatles – Back in the U.S.S.R. Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| This is Paul's song all the way, and unquestionably a spoof of the Beach Boys -- specifically of the Beach Boys covering Chuck Berry's "Back in the USA." (It winks at Hoagy Carmichael's "Georgia On My Mind" for good measure.) To me, this is one of several songs that prove Paul's songwriting could be just as clever as John's -- musically and lyrically -- when the mood took him. This is a really sharp (but affectionate) spoof, but unlike most parodies, it also measures up as a fine tune in its own right. Personally, I don't think there's any pro- or anti- U.S. or U.S.S.R. message intended here. The closest it gets to a political statement is to suggest (indirectly) that home is always the place you love best, no matter what country you're from. | |
| Led Zeppelin – The Ocean Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I think k-mattie may be on too something concerning the count-in's syllables mapping to the song's compound time signature. "We've done four already" might originally have referred to albums or studio takes, of course, but if that's ALL the words referred to, it seems unlikely they would have been incorporated into the "official" lyrics of The Ocean, as they evidently were, based on Bonzo's repetition of them in the live version on the DVD. | |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.