Orchid – Tigers

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I kiss the girls that speak Marcuse.
I kiss the boys that speak Foucault.
I love the kids that know Adorno
and snub their nose at kids who don't.
I make love in theory and touch myself in practise.
What's good for the posture is good for the pose.
Who let the Tigers out to kill all the lovers?

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  • 0
    My Interpretation:The greatest irony, actually, is this: Adorno was a trained musicologist and composer who studied under Alban Berg, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century classical music. Adorno hated jazz; I can only imagine what dyspepsia this song would arouse in him. Even the tongue-in-cheek or satire of pseudo-intellectuals that Orchid seems to be attempting comes across as puerile and false. Adorno was one of the sharpest ever, and would have rejected this trash immediately. Quoting his and Benjamin's mutual friend, he would say: "It [in this case, Orchid] abhors stench because it stinks - because, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit." Marcuse and Foucault would probably agree.
    Flag TheLogicOfDisintegrationon October 14, 2009   Link
    • 3 Replies
  • 0
    General Comment:There is no such person as a pseudo-intellectual, only pretentiousness, since logics are the method, not the way to new true insights.
    All three philosophers critisize western society. Society is everywhere, so they are metaphysically rejecting life. Emotions are what makes life important and vital, not knowledge. Life is life.

    To select the people based on knowledge is thus preposterous at best. And this song is hopelessly ironic in nature.

    Read some Wittgenstein, you filthy thinker ;).
    Flag Kazinskyon September 22, 2009   Link
  • 0
    General Comment:Aesthetic contemplation is a consumerist activity. Conscious depictions of reality are entertaining, but forgettable, and not art. Intellectuals are just as indoctrinated by industrial consumerist society as everyone else, but what makes them perhaps worse is that they willingly create a crowded marketplace of ideology by participating in the technological apparatus and its mass-production of art and information. They willingly pound dissent into obscurity. This makes dissent more difficult, and the pseudointellectual profit from it. They talk about indoctrination, but do nothing to resist it. They choose to be slaves when they could choose to be free, while others are never offered a choice at all. It is hard to blame people for their small beliefs when a vast industrialized market encourages them to have such things, but I find no difficulty in criticizing a sector of people that recognize the suppression of their individuality and resign to doing nothing about it, but just to contemplate it.

    orchidorchidorchid, let's not be nihilistic, either, which is what "truly, everything means nothing" suggests to me. Something may be devoid of a single, clear meaning, but who's to say that its meaning is nothing? Couldn't it have many meanings?
    Flag Axaxaxason April 03, 2009   Link
  • 0
    General Comment:My anecdote is potentially the saddest...

    I'm an undergrad philosophy major, and the pseudo-intellectuals I run into aren't even sophisticated enough to have heard of people like Adorno, Foucault, or Marcuse. Hell, there are actual Ph.D. candidates around here that know nothing about these people.

    The important thing to remember is that as long as we engage in this kind of questioning- that we question our being at all- we can avoid the problems that arise when the line between false intellectuals and actual thinkers becomes obscure. Our ideas aren't a commodity if we don't treat them that way.
    Flag ^Debaseron March 24, 2009   Link
  • 0
    General Comment:I love this song. And I also love the irony of it, critiquing the intellectualism they themselves engage in so heavily. As someone who is in my final year of undergrad studies in anthropology (with a lot of women's studies stuff too) I can really relate to this. I mean, I have a definite love/hate relationship with the academy and the overly-intellectual bent my studies are taking. I've come so close to dropping out, but at other times think about going to graduate school too (which probably isn't happening anytime soon). Oh, and this song plays in my head all the time while in class whenever Foucault or Adorno or anyone else of that bent is mentioned during lectures. It's distracting. Oh, and I'll admit, I, and probably most everyone else in my classes only has the most basic understanding of any of these people's ideas, so we really are just posing as intellectuals I feel. It's all so true.
    Flag anarcho_atlatlon February 05, 2009   Link
  • +1
    General Comment:Come on guys...think...
    "I make love, in theory. And, touch myself in practice"
    "What's good for the posture is good for the pose"

    I make criticisms and espouse lofty ideas about my intellect.... but, I am a paper made plastic... a true to form hypocrite, book read but, failing to understand. Yet, I put down others for their lack of "worldly" learnings. (All I can say to explain this is that he went to Amherst...and for anyone who knows Amherst...it's pretty self-explanitory).

    The song criticises snobbery amongst intellectuals (distinctly in the hardcore/screamo scene of the North East (They did go to Amherst...only the snobbiest ultra left wing Liberal Arts College on the planet).
    It's telling kids to get over themselves and their own snobbery....to make love not war- because, truly.....everything means nothing.
    Flag orchidorchidorchidon December 28, 2007   Link
  • 0
    General Comment:the real irony is how pathetically cliched this song has made these three philosophers amongst pseudo intellectual.

    I think what he was trying to say is that people say things they don't mean or really understand just to look hip or intelligent but infact there's no difference between them and the people who really do know about it, it's all just hair splitting elitist patheticism.
    Flag Wilf_xon September 12, 2007   Link
  • 0
    General Comment:Sometimes the contradictions can be astounding with this band.

    The commentary on the scene they perpetuate.

    The critiqué of intellectualism, juxtaposed to songs full of references to obscure modernist composers and the horribly acedemic (I say this with all the love in my heart for debord and vaneigem) situationist rhetoric.

    (And I am well aware that these ironies are intended.)
    Flag attack art!on May 28, 2006   Link
  • 0
    General Comment:marcuse
    foucault
    adorno

    all philosiphers
    Flag MrClean03on April 30, 2006   Link
  • 0
    General Comment:From the 12":

    "It's a fine line between being an "intellectual" and intellectual posturing, some might say that there is no line at all."
    Flag RecoveringPainon December 12, 2005   Link

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