When I was young, I knew lyrics of my favourite songs by heart. I bought CDs and then spent days and days with the booklet in hand, listening to the songs and figuring out, deciphering, memorizing and analyzing their lyrics. Suede (my first serious obsessive musical love), the Cure, Radiohead were all so important to me.
Now it's different: I listen to songs but I don't pay an attention to the lyrics as I used to. Fewer and fewer songs make me want to write something about them (with the notable exception of Antony and the Johnson's amazing album, Fistful of love being the brightest jewel on its crown. But to analyze this song, one needs a post by itself, so until another time...).
This morning I was going to work with my ipod, listening to music and two songs' lyrics hit me on the head.
"Let's make love and listen death from above'
Amazing line. It could also work as a pick-up line methinks. But what does the poet mean? Does she mean: let's make love here and listen to death who is above us (all)? Or does she mean: let's make love here and listen to death from above, us being above of death? Isn't ambiguity the best?
"I'm gonna get you out of your cave. I'm gonna get you out of your cage, man, and set you free."
(Hallo Kitty's favourite song for 2007 everyone.) Amazing again. The duality of human nature, rational man vs. primitive animal, expressed by the rhyme of cave with cage. Are all our cages caves and vice versa?
Back to the future, then, back to adolescence and analyzing lyrics...
Searching for our (my) lost inspiration...
1 comment:
I don't analyse lyrics anymore, funnily enough. I used to and learned a lot of new English words by dissecting every single Beatles lyrics. But not now anymore. I guess now I'm more interested in the music itself and in the general mood it conveys, unless we're talking about El Cohen (with him, it's lyrics all the way).
Analysing lyrics to death does remind me of adolescence and I don't want to get back to being an adolescent. I don't think we should analyse lyrics. I think we must realise our time is limited and pop artists are not poets - not even the Beatles, as much as it pains me to say this.
So, because our time is so limited, we must analyse what matters. Poets. The ones that, like Plato said (albeit in a derogatory manner) were in touch with the gods. Let's read the Wasteland and analyse that. Let's analyse what Lorca wrote. Let's dissect Crime and Punishment and The Idiot.
Poets are the ones that are going to teach us something and make our life a bit better and put our lands in order, it seems to me ( and by the way right now I'm listening to Smooth Criminal and thinking 'these are cool lyrics').
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