I agree with the comments that many interpretations possible.
Never knew Gabriel had given his intended meaning as it being about jealousy, but the earlier comments have well described some interpretations along those lines, some of which work for me.
I like Isaac Asimovs comment (elsewhere) about interpretation of creative writing by the author not being sacrosanct. The words mean what they are read to mean, and that can be vastly different to what was intended when written. Although, I am pretty sure Gabriel would have been quite deliberately allowing himself many meanings along with his original personal focus for the song about jealousy.
Just a small correction about the lyrics - I think the song actually says "rat on the rat" - a familiar animal metaphor for some human behaviour, similar to the other adjacent ones, "fox the fox", "ape the ape" and "dont ... monkey with the monkey" - whereas its quoted above as "rat the rat" (which is meaningless without the preposition, unless you are introducing 3 animals a fox, a rat, and an ape, whose names are fox, rat, and ape, which is inconsistent with the monkey phrase shortly after, which correctly includes the preposition "with").
I read the song to be about coping with life in the world as it is, with lots of stuff going on that we would rather not be a party to, or not even aware of, nor to suffer the consequences ("cover me").
But just as the electro-shock experiments done on monkeys are a vile corruption of ANY serious concept of human decency, by scientists who are self absorbed and/or self serving, all sorts of things are continuing to happen (wheels keep turning) and no matter how painful it is for a decent person to absorb the influences of those things, eventually we realise, if we are sentient, that a lot of what goes on is important and is something we are part of ("too much at stake", "and the news is breaking") and those things make us realise we need to act to bring wrongs to an end ("shock the monkey to life").
Hard not to like a song that speaks so powerfully about ethics as the lyrics of this one can be interpreted to do, regardless of whether the main intention of the songwriter was about jealousy.
I agree with the comments that many interpretations possible. Never knew Gabriel had given his intended meaning as it being about jealousy, but the earlier comments have well described some interpretations along those lines, some of which work for me.
I like Isaac Asimovs comment (elsewhere) about interpretation of creative writing by the author not being sacrosanct. The words mean what they are read to mean, and that can be vastly different to what was intended when written. Although, I am pretty sure Gabriel would have been quite deliberately allowing himself many meanings along with his original personal focus for the song about jealousy.
Just a small correction about the lyrics - I think the song actually says "rat on the rat" - a familiar animal metaphor for some human behaviour, similar to the other adjacent ones, "fox the fox", "ape the ape" and "dont ... monkey with the monkey" - whereas its quoted above as "rat the rat" (which is meaningless without the preposition, unless you are introducing 3 animals a fox, a rat, and an ape, whose names are fox, rat, and ape, which is inconsistent with the monkey phrase shortly after, which correctly includes the preposition "with").
I read the song to be about coping with life in the world as it is, with lots of stuff going on that we would rather not be a party to, or not even aware of, nor to suffer the consequences ("cover me"). But just as the electro-shock experiments done on monkeys are a vile corruption of ANY serious concept of human decency, by scientists who are self absorbed and/or self serving, all sorts of things are continuing to happen (wheels keep turning) and no matter how painful it is for a decent person to absorb the influences of those things, eventually we realise, if we are sentient, that a lot of what goes on is important and is something we are part of ("too much at stake", "and the news is breaking") and those things make us realise we need to act to bring wrongs to an end ("shock the monkey to life").
Hard not to like a song that speaks so powerfully about ethics as the lyrics of this one can be interpreted to do, regardless of whether the main intention of the songwriter was about jealousy.