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Alone, listless, breakfast table in an otherwise empty room
Young girl, violence, center of her own attention
The mother reads aloud child tries to understand it
Tries to make her proud
The shades go down it's in her head
Painted room, can't deny there's something wrong
Don't call me daughter not fit to
The picture kept will remind me
Don't call me daughter not fit to
The picture kept will remind me
Don't call me,
She holds the hand that holds her down
She will, rise above
Don't call me daughter, not fit to
The picture kept will remind me
Don't call me daughter, not fit to be
The picture kept will remind me
Don't call me daughters
The shades go down
The shades go, go, go
Young girl, violence, center of her own attention
The mother reads aloud child tries to understand it
Tries to make her proud
The shades go down it's in her head
Painted room, can't deny there's something wrong
Don't call me daughter not fit to
The picture kept will remind me
Don't call me daughter not fit to
The picture kept will remind me
Don't call me,
She holds the hand that holds her down
She will, rise above
Don't call me daughter, not fit to
The picture kept will remind me
Don't call me daughter, not fit to be
The picture kept will remind me
Don't call me daughters
The shades go down
The shades go, go, go
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I take that the girl is saying "Don't call me daughter, not fit to be" like she's sad/hurt/ashamed that she's not everything her parents built her up to be. I think she realizes that she can just be herself and move on, grow up, and "rise above" the feelings of her own handicap of not feeling like she's good enough.
I think it's supposed to be both things - violins (probably something the parents wanted her to learn) and violence (not necessarily physical abuse, it could be psychological abuse too).
She's the only daughter of this couple and they put too much pressure on her. Apparently she has the perfect life and she wants to make the parents proud, but there's something in her mind that says that what their parents want is not what she want. In the chorus she's basically "breaking up" with her parents and she will "rise above", which means she decided not to do what they want her to do.
In the chorus the child says "Don't call me daughter/not fit to". She's telling her parents they don't deserve to be her parents because they ruined her life, and used it as a tool for their own will. She says "The picture kept will remind me", the 'picture' being a metaphor for her memories of her time with the parents. The memories will remind her how her parents were and she will not raise her children like that. She will have a better life on her own.
The child in that song obviously has a learning difficulty. And it's only in the last few years that they've actually been able to diagnose these learning disabilities that before were looked at as misbehavior, as just outright rebelliousness. But no one knew what it was. And these kids, because they seemed unable or reluctant to learn, they'd end up getting the shit beaten outta them. The song ends, you know, with this idea of the shades going down—so that the neighbors can't see what happens next. What hurts about shit like that is that it ends up defining peoples' lives. They have to live with that abuse for the rest of their lives. Good, creative people are just fucking destroyed.[4]
This song was originally called Brother, and had different lyrics. You can hear that version from Bridge School '92 (acoustic) and the Live at the Academy '92 bootleg (played totally electricly), as well as the acoustic version played on the tour bus in PJ20, also in 1992, which is on Youtube and on the Kids Are Twenty DVD. In these versions, they start out about the girl and her mother, just like the album version. But it also talks about the girl's relationship with her brother, and his relationship with their mother. That is the first verse, but then it goes "the shades go down, it's in my head..." and then it goes first person, from Eddie. The chorus varies between "dont call me daughter" and "dont call me brother". It's as if Eddie was using the daughter part as a metaphor for his own childhood, and through that, struggles with it in the first person.
Eddie saying a word similarly pronounced to violence in a song has emphasis on the 'ence' with a prominent 'e'.
That, and it makes sense, violence in that line doesn't make sense