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I will
Lay me down
In a bunker
Under the ground
I won't let this happen to my children
Meet the real world coming out of your shell
With white elephants
Sitting ducks
I will
Rise up
Little babies' eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes
Little babies' eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes
Little babies' eyes, eyes, eyes
Lay me down
In a bunker
Under the ground
I won't let this happen to my children
Meet the real world coming out of your shell
With white elephants
Sitting ducks
I will
Rise up
Little babies' eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes
Little babies' eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes
Little babies' eyes, eyes, eyes
Lyrics submitted by ruben
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From Thom:
"You said it’s the angriest thing you’ve ever written." Thom: "Yes. Well yeah, I guess it is. I mean… It’s quite simple really, I had an extremely unhealthy obsession, that ran through the ‘Kid A’ thing, about the first Gulf War. When they started it up they did that lovely thing of putting the camera on the end of the missile, and you got to see the wonders of modern military technology blow up this bunker. And then sometime afterwards in the back pages it was announced, that that bunker was not full of weapons at all, but women and children. And it was actually a bomb shelter. And so everybody… we all got to witness the wonders of modern technology. And it ran through so much stuff for so long for me. I just could not get it out of my head. It was so sick. And so that’s where the anger comes from. We did the most dreadful version of it. It was all that programmed… just a disaster. But interestingly something good came out, because we turned the tape over and it became ‘Spinning Plates’." (XFM, spring 2003)
Later, perhaps years later, the family emerges again from the shelter/shell to rejoin the real world. They are met by the sight of white elephants and sitting ducks, which can be interpreted literally, as the living things that survived the war, and figuratively as targets, thus emphasizing the vulnerability of all living things to the threat of war. The family is willing to give up its shell to join the vulnerable living things that live outside the bunker.
Finally, because the children have spent some considerable time, growing up in the bunker, the sight of these living things is new to them. They are seeing the living world through a little baby's eyes, because everything is new to them, as if they themselves are babies. Their emergence from the bunker is a symbolic birth.
I think it is inspired, at least in part, by the Amiriyah shelter bombing, which, although happened about a year before I was born so I can only go on history archives, was the 'accidental' bombing of a refugee bunker in the gulf war by American pilots. The US claimed to have received intelligence that the bunker was a military base. Hundreds of civilians were killed.
The lyrics are really quite painful; this depressed Thom Yorke a lot at the time, apparently, and although published 12 years after the event, encapsulates the horror of it, IMO.
The first part is the Idea of protecting your family during war time;
"I will lay me down in a bunker underground. I won't let this happen to my children."
"Meet the real world coming out of your shell" may well be a criticism of the US military; ie, these are people with ordinary lives that you have killed; shell referring to the bomb/missile here.
"White Elephants" Could be how Yorke thinks the Americans are seen by the Iraqi civillians, or another name for the bombs/missiles.
"Sitting ducks" Is the most powerful line for me. It has less of a stress than the previous line, which portrays the hopelessness of it. It makes me think of how all those people went to the shelter for safety and ended being bombed anyway, in contrast to the protection of the first line.
"I will rise up" Could be how Yorke felt at the time, or the next logical step after such a tragedy, but then is stalled, the voice falls back and is lower here, it could be Yorke or the parent of the bombed remembering a horrific image of a dead child.
activistsreader.org/articles%20folder/…
Line-by-line analysis is difficult in a couple places. We might ask regarding, "I will lay me down in a bunker underground," if he is referring to what Iraqi civilians did to think they'd be safe and sheltered in the first place. But I think the lyrically and musically parallel structure of "I will rise up" indicates that the line is more about protesting by lying down to remember, honor, and empathize with those who perished there unjustly. "I won't let this happen to my children," seems to support this interpretation by supplying a reason to protest. It also sets up, "Meet the real world coming out of your (my) shell," which describes the act of pulling the wool out from over our eyes to look at the kinds of atrocities that are commonplace in war. This truth is like, "White elephants," seemingly there to set us free but very difficult to live with as it renders us--like the women and children of Amiriyah--"sitting ducks." But in the song we are making a statement: because of the horror one can imagine of looking at a "little baby's eyes" as (s)he is boiled alive, "I will rise up."
It is plausible to say, "out of your/my shell" is not really well understood in the above reading, or that "with white elephants, sitting ducks" Yorke more generally means that the world is a place full of false treasures where the innocent are never safe. The title "No Man's Land" may refer to the fact that the bunker was filled overwhelmingly with women and children, and/or it may allude to this general vulnerability of innocents out in the real world.
and when i hear "white elephants
Sitting ducks" i think of a baby looking up from out of the crib looking at one of thos things that hangs over the crib with the little animals dangling in front of the babys face.