| The Pogues – The Body of an American Lyrics | 10 years ago |
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Unlike most of the other comments, I never imagined the narrator as "Irish American". I think of him as a 12/13 year old boy who is living in and grew up in Ireland. A relative of his who left for America before he was born has died, and his body has been sent back to Ireland for the funeral. In the first verse, it's him and a group of other boys looking in on the coffin and Jim Dwyer's American friends who have come over for the funeral. None of them knew the man, so they're more bothered about trying to nick the fancy car without any of the "yanks" noticing. "Fifteen minutes later" the whole family is together and having one of those drunken family gatherings where everyone reminisces, gets drunk, then starts playing stupid games. People start talking about Jim Dwyer, and telling stories about him. It seems he emigrated to America. Once there, he found people were kind of dicks about immigrants, so he tried to be as "American" as possible. As part of this (or possibly due to conscription) he joins the army and "they sent him to the war", where he dies, hence causing the funeral described at the beginning. I'm not so sure about the last two verses, though it's possibly the narrator, who becomes enamoured with America after the funeral, leaving to go to America himself, not realising that it was not all that great and in fact the cause of Jim Dwyer's death. |
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