submissions
| The Cramps – Bikini Girls With Machine Guns Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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It refers to an ad that evidently used to run in 'Soldier of Fortune' magazine, with the title as its only title---presumably the rhythmic recoil made the women's parts jiggle as they fired, and a lot of the readers of the magazine probably needed to see a gun to get turned on anyway. |
submissions
| The Cramps – Fissure Of Rolando Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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The "Fissure of Rolando" is an area of the brain that plays an important part in the John Agar film "Brain from Planet Arous" (some might have seen a clip from that movie used in the opening credits of the American TV show 'Malcom in the Middle').
This seems pretty unpleasant, but then again I've never heard it---maybe some live album, I'm not a completist. |
submissions
| The Cramps – How Far Can Too Far Go? Lyrics
| 14 years ago
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References:
"Stick 'em up, baby"---American English term used by a robber, telling the victim to stick their [sic] hands up, "'em" is most probably the breasts here, because Lux was Lux.
"I know a place that's far from here
where the squares they won't come near"---this sounds like it's from some juvenile delinquency or beatnik exploitation song---not the sort of thing a delinquent or beat would actually ever say, but good for a cheap lyric.
"Training gear"---some S&M people refer to what they do as "training", so this is probably some assemblage of leather straps.
"Giddyup baby . . . ooh la la"---what else to say when one is riding?, likely with the aid of leather straps as above.
"If I had a hammer"---refers to a pre-hippy peace 'n' love song made popular by Pete Seeger and then Peter, Paul, and Mary; the dissonance between the folky \"uber-niceness and Lux' dark threat is beautiful.
"A smell of honey, a swallow of brine"---old adage against being seduced by something that seems good, but turns out not to be so; also the title of a Dave Friedman[?] or Herschel Gordon Lewis[?] "Southern squalor" movie.
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submissions
| David Bowie – Life on Mars? Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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'Look at that caveman go!' is the refrain of the '60s novelty song 'Alley Oop', based in turn on a much older ('20's?) comic strip of that name. |
submissions
| Jonathan Coulton – Over There Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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The 'place in France' verse is taken from a schoolyard rhyme; the 'The men don't care/Cos they chew their underwear' comes from the American tendency, inherited from the English, of seeing all non-British Europeans as degenerate not-quite-men, 'filthy preverts' to quote Col. Batguano. |
submissions
| They Might Be Giants – Purple Toupee Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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I never thought of it as being a burnt-out guy, more like a gent getting on in years, sitting in a retirement home c. 2025...maybe he's trying to use the toupee as a way of flying his freak-flag long after he's lost his hair.
I agree with the "Chinese people were fighting in the park"'s referring to Vietnam.... |
submissions
| They Might Be Giants – Lucky Ball & Chain Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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The song references the Phil Spector-produced Darlene Love song "The Boy I'm Gonna Marry"'s lines:
He smiled at me and the music started playing
'Here Comes the Bride' when he walked through the door
Let's all pretend that Phil Spector died in 1970, or at worst right after that Ramones record. |
submissions
| Steeleye Span – Hunting the Wren Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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It was a tradition in some parts of England for a party of men and boys to bring around a dead wrn in a box to the door-steps of every house they could find; they would charge for opening the box for a look, and expected at the least a drink...things might go badly were they not obliged, especially after they all each had had a few.
The song is also called 'Cutty Wren' and 'Please to See the King'. |
submissions
| Steeleye Span – Gaudete Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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Somehow works great with its Latin pronounced with _heavy_ English and Scottish accents...reminds me that England was once a _very_ Catholic country. |
submissions
| Jonathan Coulton – Kenesaw Mountain Landis Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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It's also about how history gets quickly turned into stories; it always makes me think of a scened in Futurama in which a 30th Century theme park centred about the 20th Century features Hammurabbi partying with Albert Einstein in an hot-air balloon whilst cowboys and Mongols hunt mastodons.
(Note: buckled shoes were popular around 1750; 19th Century American artists portrayed the 17th Century Pilgrims's wearing them because they looked 'old-fashioned', never mind that they were off by a cnetury...so why not believe that Shoeless Joe sang 'Is she really gonna take him home tonight?'?, that's just off by 50 years.) |
submissions
| Jonathan Coulton – Re: Your Brains Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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They're good examples of the concessions made by management that involve their not giving up things, and compromises that work out to their getting exactly what they wanted in the first place.
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submissions
| They Might Be Giants – For Science Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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It always reminds me of the Frank Zappa song Cheepness which is also inspired by '50s sci-fi movies---and both make me think especially of It Conquered the World, which when seen destroys the brain cells you would have used to believe that you had seen such a thing. |
submissions
| Iggy Pop – Lust For Life Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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Yes, very funny---particularly because it's also about hustling to raise funds for dope, so it's partially about one wort of whoredom and now employed in another. Bill Burroughs claimed that heroin was the ultimate consumer product, and that there was never any need to improve it because it was easier to degrade the consumers than to upgrade the product.
(That last might not be strictly true: I've heard that there's a lot of heroin about pure enough to smoke, now that injecting is even more obviously a bad idea than it was in former times, and customers demanded better...but on the other hand, prohibition always increases drugs strength---it was very hard to find beer in America in the 1920s, but very easy to find high-proof liquor, sometimes with blinding or paralysing agents added gratis.) |
submissions
| David Bowie – The Man Who Sold the World Lyrics
| 15 years ago
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The song name-checks (to use a term decades in its future) the Robert Heinlein story The Man Who Sold the Moon about a business man, one Harriman, who puts together the financing for the first lunar expedition. In a subsequent story, the old Harriman has never got to the Moon, and bribes a barnstorming rocket jockey who flies people to orbit and back (this is by analogy with '20s- and '30s-era pilots who would do something similar at county fairs and the like) to bring him there---he's too old and in too bad shape to be allowed an official trip. I think of this when I hear 'I thought you died alone, a long long time ago'---Harriman is never depicted as a particularly nice or warm man, just one who got things done and didn't crave the limelight, and so I can easily image the pilot's believing that he (Harriman) had died alone awhile back.
I'm a bit sceptical about all the heaven and hell stuff, for the simple reason that Bowie never seemed to care about that sort of thing that much...you need remember that back a few decades, when Bowie was coming up, the more rationalist among us, of whom D.B. is one, really believed that we had superstition on the run. Growing up, if you had told me that in the U.S. people would be fighting over teaching standard biology in our classrooms unto this day, I would have thought you were crazy. Admittedly, Heinlein might have bought that, as he grew up around Bible-thumpers even though he never was one, and understood the deep American need to be conned....we'll fall for anyone who claims he can sell us a ticket to heaven, or the Moon, or the World. |
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