Whenever I see someone post about the artist telling the backstory, I think of the quote by Rick Riordan: "You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search." That is the one problem I have with this site: that there is always someone who did just that.
What this song always brought to mind for me was Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." It conjures up imagery of DDT spreading across the landscape -- "acid blown to cornfields and mountains of rice, all over the suburbs, across the great lawns, cropdusting gardens all over this town" -- and the people all oblivious that they are poisoning themselves as well as the birds -- "it gets in the food that they buy and prepare, but nobody cares when it gets in their hair." It spearks to the shortsightedness of humans in what we do to our environment for what we perceive as short-term benefit (after all, DDT was originally presented as a wonderful thing) -- "Don't speak about the cycles of life" because it's too uncomfortable to have to question what we are doing to the world.
Chickens aren't flightless.
Whenever I see someone post about the artist telling the backstory, I think of the quote by Rick Riordan: "You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search." That is the one problem I have with this site: that there is always someone who did just that.
What this song always brought to mind for me was Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." It conjures up imagery of DDT spreading across the landscape -- "acid blown to cornfields and mountains of rice, all over the suburbs, across the great lawns, cropdusting gardens all over this town" -- and the people all oblivious that they are poisoning themselves as well as the birds -- "it gets in the food that they buy and prepare, but nobody cares when it gets in their hair." It spearks to the shortsightedness of humans in what we do to our environment for what we perceive as short-term benefit (after all, DDT was originally presented as a wonderful thing) -- "Don't speak about the cycles of life" because it's too uncomfortable to have to question what we are doing to the world.