| Soundgarden – Burden in My Hand Lyrics | 14 years ago |
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The cool thing about great lyrics is that each person can find their own meaning. But it looks like we are all getting pretty much the same thing from it. It's a murder song that also has a freedom metaphor in it. If you are into Chris's lyrical work there is a theme of being trapped vs. liberation in a number of his songs. "Rusty cage" "Pretty Noose" "Blow up the Outside World" come to mind as being similiar in this sense to "Burden in my Hand". The path to spiritual liberation is lonely and painful. You have to face difficult truths and deny yourself certain comforts which you may have used to stave it off. "Follow me into the desert, as thirsty as you are" The desert is desolate, hot and barren. The Christ story has Jesus walking into the desert alone. Many a man has found that a woman can help dull his pain with her affections, yet this is only temporary and the woman, although deeply in love with him, ends up keeping him from the work he needs to do to become free. She is happy and in love, she is "out in the sunshine" that he provides her but he is not happy because she has no sunshine of her own to bring to him. "Sun is mine" It is a one-sided relationship that is unsatisfying to him and it drags him down so she's got to go. Also many men feel that if they only had a woman, the right woman, then they would finally be happy. But this is a very dangerous notion because no such woman exists. Happiness has to be found within oneself for it to be truly satisfying and permanent. Searching for something "out there" to bring it to you is a fool's errand which can waste years of a man's life. Again, this mythical, perfect "she" has got to go. "She" is a burden. Shoot her. Leave her in the sand. Be a man in possession of himself and quit looking for mommy. "Kill your health, kill yourself, kill everything you love" is another way of freeing your mind. Killing your health sets you free from fearing pain in your body. Killing yourself sets you free from your ego, your false self, your whiny, useless rebellious spirit. Killing everything you love sets you free from emotional attachments or prideful notions that are dear to you and to which you cling in fear. "and if you live you can fall to pieces and suffer with my ghost" If you survive all this "Killing" you are doing, then what you will be left with is pure, free spirit, the "ghost", which is pure consciousness unfettered by the illusions of physical matter, or one's own body. Chris Cornell, as do a lot of other heavy rock artists, writes in brutal metaphors when he speaks of matters of the spirit. This enables him to connect with people who have suffered horribly in their life and are contending with staggering amounts of unrelenting emotional pain. These people need to be comforted and talked to in a language they can understand and Chris hits the mark dead on. "I don't know why I love these songs and I don't understand the lyrics but they make feel less alone because I can feel the emotion in the music and the screaming singer is screaming for me. Someone out there knows how I feel and look what he has done with his life so there must be hope for me." Lines like "I shot my love today" "I lost my head again" connects with people whose pain is so bad it causes them to be violent and lose their cool. "I need some sympathy" The more a person does crazy things the more he is ostracized when what he needs most is to be understood, cared for and listened to. Chris Cornell is a beautiful man writing beautiful songs that help heal those among us whose wounds run deep and wide. We are lucky to have him around. As with a lot of lyrics in pop music, the meaning of this song deepens when a person makes a conscious choice to root out his inner demons and starts down the path of the spirit. There is a way we can live with our pain yet still live happy productive lives. The best pop music artists do nothing else but sing to illuminate this path. Their words and music ring bells inside us that can give us hope and steer us toward a life we love, or at least tolerate, if we have the ears to hear them and the courage to follow their sound. Heroin itself is also a way to achieve the end result of the path of the spirit, but that is cheating isn't it? That is why using the drug as a permanent way to live is a sure fire way to die. But then, maybe that's what you want. It can be liberating to not care about dying. That is why a certain percentage of heroin users are also powerful artists. Lots of songs have inadvertent heroin metaphors in them and my feeling is that is what we have here with "I shot my love today" because the metaphor fails with "would you cry for me/lie for me" These lines follow a murder scene better than a shot of junk. To me the song is not depressing at all. I find it exhilarating with a bittersweet edge. Leaving the burden was a good thing and I'm glad I did it but it was a messy, violent affair wasn't it? |
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