| Arctic Monkeys – Balaclava Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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I don't think it's sex, not unprotected/protected sex anyway. Balaclava might be slang for condom, but the way that he says the cofidence is the balaclava twice leads me to believe that it is more than an oblique dirty reference. I think it has more to do with the guy in the story pretending to be something he's not, or at least pretending to be something more than he is, in terms of acting confident so that she'll see him as the cool confident type that girls find attractive. At the same time, the lines like "tied to the tracks" and "pulling her from a burning building" lead me to think to the wilting-violet damsel-in-distress archetype that is the episcopate to this other masculine ideal. So they are both playing the part, in someones back garden, more for the feeling of the part than from actual fun in playing it. In the end after the parts have been played, she asks to see the real him, the him apart from the confidence trick mask, and he refuses to take off the mask, to lose the bravado attitude. There is no real human connection, just the connection of the parts they play, parts designed to fit together and both synergistic-ly supportive of the other. Both are guilty for this crime of distance and falsity, so who really is the criminal? |
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| Warren Zevon – Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| I like this song, It's another genius work of a genius musician. Most of the things that they talk about did happen, but I’m not sure if the years on the Congo war or the timeline in general works out. The events do, the mercenaries being hired to fight and bring about political action through fighting. The cia being in it's most whacked-out "do anything to stop the commies" phase, which led it to do at least a little just about everywhere in the world. so on the first level it is about politcal change via violent revolutions. That would be the "Palestine” and so on. On the second level I think that the song owes something to the "headless horseman.” I think that this is intentional because the Thompson fires a .45 acp round, which has a lot of head hurting potential, but not enough to blow your head all the way off. So in “the headless horseman” the horseman was a hessian mercenary fighting against people that weren't his enemies, and fighting for a country that wasn't his. Besides that I think it stops though. The mercenary of Roland and van Owen just about all do what they do for profit. "They fought to earn their living" and van Owen presumably didn't just do the cia a favor in killing Roland. So if it's money that they are fightin for, what fight does Roland carry on? The fight to get rich in war? Or just the fight of soldiers and mercanaries fighting because they can and they can help themselves by doing it? They fight to bring about political change, that is true, but really they just fight for the pay. And that patty hurst, the most notorious picture of her on the public record is her robbing a bank. Sure, robbing a bank for an organization that was trying to bring about violent change, but in robbing a bank she is still just trying to get rich while fighting the political battle. | |
| The Offspring – You're Gonna Go Far, Kid Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| My opinion is that this is the bands way of saying "fuck you" to emo bands and acts, the ones that come to mind are fallout boy, and panic at the disco. Especially since this song sounds so different than the bands other stuff, and the opening sounds like a virtual impression of patd. "turning all against one," that lyric I suppose to be that feeling of everyone against you, that emo music official emotion. "Another clever word/ Sets off an unsuspecting herd" the lyrics of fallout boy are chalked full of clever little wordplays that make all the fanboys herd around. "Man you never had a chance" that is again that "everybody hates me" teen angst thing. "it was really only you." That is the repudiation of the emo ideal, "you think that it's everyone else that makes you suck, but it was really only you." the whole "it's a scene about me" is about how self centered it all is, being so wrap up in your own issues that you define your way of dress and your music by it, and since the emo kids call the music "the scence" and i think fallout boy did in one song, I think it is applicable. All the "lies" and i see to be about the hypocracy of a label band with bungloads of radio air time and sex drugs and rock and roll singing songs about teenage angst and not getting laid and showing off their indie heritage, and the disguise I see to be the freaking ridiculous shit certain bands wear just to fit that certain little aesthetic that they have. Like how kiss dressed up with makeup, except instead of portraying a space alien or a kitty cat, bands like my chemical romance are portraying kids who got into their mothers eyeliner. My absolute favorite part of the song is the brdge/breakdown part, when there is only a dance beat going on, and they sing "dance fucker dance." Like the band \ are calling the people dancing fuckers, while they give them the beat to dance to. Genius. | |
| Warren Zevon – Play It All Night Long Lyrics | 15 years ago |
| I don't know if this song is really supposed to make a grand statement for or against "country living" and rednecks, I think it's more of a piece of dark humor, not a social critique. Humorous in the way 'Ware wolves of London' is, or excitable boy is, not like 'the envoy' or any of his "I’ve got cancer, listen to me" stuff. The topics are funny, but there funny in a way you don't want to laugh at. At least they are funny in a thirteen year old boy, slapstick humor, kind of way. A guy pissing himself? Funny. A senile old man doing it? Not. A redneck with guns, funny. A guy with ptsd, not. Incest, funny (in rednecks at least). Cancer, not. Alcoholism, not funny, saying the word "jizz" funny. And like all his other dark humor songs he has this way of making it catchy, catchy enough that you want to sing along before you realize what exactly it is your singing. And by sampling a song that, as one of the above posts said, is the drunken southerners anthem, he made it super sing able to a particular audience, the audience that he is aiming his jokes at. Which brings to them more of that pairing of opposites in "sweet home alabama", awesome, "dead man's song" not awesome. It’s a joke. Ha. | |
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