| PJ Harvey – White Chalk Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I think that's beautiful Indiaa | |
| PJ Harvey – When Under Ether Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| I think you're right. | |
| Tricky – Broken Homes Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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There's something hypnotic about those lines Those Men will break your bones Don't know how to build stable homes There's a few things going on here in my opinion. Tricky's connecting violence with social dislocation. In this very strangely hypnotic way. PJ Harvey's singing with his speaking underneath it has a similarly hypnotic effect. |
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| Björk – Visur Vatnsenda-rosu Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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This is the most intensely sad song I have ever heard. The first time I heard it; I remember the hairs prickling on the back of my neck and my eyes stung with tears. It is only today that I have read the English translation. Its apparently a song of grief about a man who was lost at sea ('I mourn for you above all others') It is so, so very sad. Its not a song that can be listened to many times. Bjork's voice is incredibly moving and intense and suitable for this lyric. She is alternately vulnerable and grief-stricken and gentle and fierce. I have to say; its one of the best things she's ever done. |
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| Björk – Cosmogony Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I find this song very moving. Next to the vastness of the universe our explanations for it seem so small and fragile. |
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| Lana Del Rey – Ride Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Again I don't know what to make of the lyrics, except to say, I love to see a beautiful chanteuse, a girl who could have easily allowed herself to be pimped ala a hundred disposable pop princesses instead develop her own retro/lolita/ironic hip hop and hard rock aesthetic all while singing angsty lyrics "I have a war in my mind" and "I'm f_ck_en crazy." Lana Del Rey - respect. | |
| Lana Del Rey – National Anthem Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I have no idea about the meaning - I do however LOVE the video This amalgam of John F Kennedy and Rap Superstar. Lana as this rappified Jacqueline Bouvier. I think she's making a point about the attraction to and tragedies that course through the stories of the rich and powerful.. "Money is the reason we exist" Sure ain't sugarcoating the gold-digger persona here... Which is a persona - 'blurring the lines between real and fake.' The ambiguity of the song is discomforting... |
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| PJ Harvey – On Battleship Hill Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I defy anyone to listen to this song and not cry. To me it defines the true meaning of memorial days such as ANZAC day here in Australia - beyond all the flag toting and children too young to understand marching in their forebears medals. My great-grandfather who raised my mother was the only male survivor of his siblings of the first world war. He had four brothers. The only reason he didn't die was because he was too young to go. It really brings home the message of the slaughter that was world war one - when I heard this song I thought of him and how he would have reacted. He was a farmer - a scottish crofter. He would have understood the references to nature at a deep level. It seems all the more sad to me that the generation who went through that will never hear this song. Never hear that we still remember them. |
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| Underworld – Two Months Off Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| And it does it REALLY well. | |
| Underworld – Two Months Off Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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This is a song about spiritual experience/ falling in love/ taking drugs all at the same time. It encorporates chant and repeated rhythms and high tech. Its doing what music has been doing for thousands of years - getting you to escape your individual head and bond in an ecstatic group experience. Its a hard thing to do well. |
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| M.I.A. – Paper Planes Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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This song reminds me of lots of tourist friends who go to India and come back and complain they felt like cash cows. Accept it - to people who don't earn in 10 years what you paid for your cheap flight to india - you ARE massively wealthy. You are a cash cow. Get over it. BTW I love the home-made feel of all of MIAs stuff. |
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| Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I was 17 when this song came out. I went to a private girls school in Australia - and it spoke to me. Finally, I thought, a loud anarchic, driving, strangely ambiguous music that seems to resonate with me. Me. Not a punk from 20 years ago. Not a cool person who understands the convoluted rules of the hipster class. Remember - this was the days of Bon Jovi (I had a dorm-mate who played slippery when wet every morning for an entire school year - she was a queen bee so no saying no to her but imagine my joy when discovering nirvana after this) and similarly sappy paint by numbers pop (or soft cock rock - whichever you prefer). 'Alternative' included ratcat and baby animals. We had house and techno - but that could only ever be fun or spacey or psychedelic or dreamy it couldn't be angry and self-pitying and hapless and confused like this. I don't think it was nirvana's 'sell-out' song. I agree I don't think its their best, but I don't think ranking songs from nevermind makes any sense; the album should be regarded as a whole. To me teen spirit is angry and sarcastic and self-aware and wanting to escape that self-awareness all at once... ie a pretty good reflection of what is in fact 'teen spirit.' I think these contradictions and polarities are reflected by the random "mulatto, albino, mosquito, libido," at the end. It basically encapsulates post-modern adolescence....we become adults physically, we are never more healthy or beautiful and we realise...there's no point, we are at a stage in a life cycle that has certain tendencies, we enact these tendencies and we are entertained as per the peculiar requirements of out economy. Its basically existential crisis...common in adolescence and early adulthood and the very reason why this song spoke to me when I was 17. I wish Kurt had hung around for a few more years to have got over it... He was a thoughtful young man - with great artistic gifts - able to translate his thoughts and feelings in what seems an almost instinctive way into visceral, resonant art and music. What a waste, I think, 20 years later. |
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| Gossip – Heavy Cross Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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God I love this song. I think I love everything about Beth Ditto. The punk attitude, the confidence, the rebel girl X with Dolly Parton singing (like Dolly - Beth has great range, great projection and knows how to evoke the emotional content of a song). |
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| PJ Harvey – The Last Living Rose Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| I really appreciate that explanation - very knowledgable, thoughtful and well-put. | |
| The Presidents of the United States of America – Kitty Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| precisely!! | |
| Beck – End Of The Day Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| You know, I always thought 'like the prison dogs' was 'like depression dogs.' Anyhow the imagery of the verse is a perfect encapsulation of depression - the sentence served is indeed 'only' in the mind. | |
| Beck – Little One Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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Yes kickstand13 - that free fall of the first chorus - so gorgeous... In my opinion, Sea Change is about some deeper crisis than a breakup would normally entail. This beautiful song comes at the end of a cycle - its just about the only song that allows for any hope on the entire album. Its interesting to me that the only hope and self-kindness on the album can only be achieved by the author addressing an imaginary child, by engaging in the act of nurturing he cannot normally extend to himself he must sing of hopeful things 'all our dreams are waking,' and by doing so - this hopeful song becomes the song he sings... (if that makes sense - clumsily put). The taut imagery of the sea change as described in this song is also a spot on description of the travails of a major crisis and the deformations of mood called major depression that arise in its wake. And also how we must fight it 'just a little way, today' step by arduous step. |
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| Beck – Nausea Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| Definitely - existential angst is just about the strongest theme you can find in Beck's music. I love it that he's so playful about quoting Sartre and pop music in a song about meaninglessness... yeah its all pointless, he seems to be saying, but that doesn't mean you can't laugh at it. | |
| Beck – Nobody's Fault But My Own Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| 'when the road is full of nails, garbage pails and darkened gaols' what an utterly brilliant lyric... i've never heard a line that so sums up the hardship and hopelessness and sinister nature of depression. | |
| Beck – Bottle Of Blues Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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This song is a cry of existential depression, its a theme that pervades 'mutations' generally in my opinion. It starts like a traditional blues song but then mutates into something else - a lament on the pointlessness of musical expression in an era where everything is a copy of a copy, and music is an industry like any other. 'holding hands with an impotent dream' ie my dream was some kind of self-expression, to find a way to express meaning, but in reality it feels lame and unreal, lacking in meaning and a grotesque charicature of my original ambition (like prostitution is a grostesque charicature of love). 'in a brothel full of of fake energy' ie the world of commercial music 'put a nickel in the graveyard machine' ie we are simply copying previous, meaningful texts and all it does is remind us of our own lack. 'I get higher and lower' My moods shift, my music has peaks and troughs, but it is without meaning or consequence and thus remains stagnant. 'Like a tired soldier with nothing to shoot' again lack of meaning 'And nowhere to lose this bottle of blues' ie lack of meaning snd stagnation is frustrating... He makes this meaning even clearer in the verse 'tell my momma i'm a hundred years late...' What saves this song, and in my mind, what makes it sublime is that Beck is so adept at using the blues musical form as well as a dry and playful sense of humour to get close to expressing the unexpressible - he really could have called this song 'existential blues' if he wanted to... its absolutely brilliant. |
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| Beck – Tropicalia Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| fabulous song - its like he's totally absorbed a latin style but given it his own mutation - evocative of a post-industrial tourist resort in central america where a hapless musician has been drawn by a paycheck and where he absorbs the ennui. and the lyrics span everything from post-colonial tourist economies to their effect on the individual as one of purposelessness and deflation. Beck has always skated close to a depressive's outlook; but the humour and intelligence of his music and lyrics rescue him from that and make the disappointment and failure so much more interesting. viva la beck. | |
| The Smiths – The Headmaster Ritual Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| my brother attended a birmingham school in the seventies; abuse was rife. he'd come home with tales i can tell you. the one that sticks in my mind is of the 1st form (grade 7) history teacher with a man's size 13 shoe that he called 'the persuader.' | |
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