Red Mosquito

McParadigm wrote:I'm not pushing the "Ed didnt think this much" line, either. Just, at some point it seems like a song is direct and transparent enough not to need the full dig.

If at one end you have something like Desolation Row, and at the other you have Liar by Rollins Band...one of these could have a book written about it. The other could be adequately summed up in two sentences. And you COULD write a book about both, sure...but one would be mostly repeating to people stuff they already grabbed before the start of chorus one, listen one.

There's not a lot of abstraction, subtle request for reflection, or mysterious pursuit in the last 13 years of this band's work. It may be good sometimes...but it's almost never willing to risk letting you have your own interpretation.

I understand what you mean, I've just found myself repeatedly surprised over the years by the kinds of songs that have managed to inspire compelling observations from people -- and have also frequented enough Dylan forums to know that that book on "Desolation Row" would be equally likely to devolve into inane philosophizing, unsubstantiated connections to Shakespeare and the Bible, and crackpot theories about which '60's pop figure each character in the song represents as it would be to be anything you'd actually want to read. Sometimes unlimited avenues of interpretation ultimately mean no avenues of interpretation, as each one is as speculative and baseless as the next, where songs with more concrete writing can provide steadier anchors for navigating the work's more ambiguous elements. In the end I'm open to the idea that there's an engaging way to process any song, to reflect back what you hear in a way that can illuminate the listening experience for someone else (though admittedly I'm curious to see how "Let the Records Play" will hold up to this kind of analysis).

Kevin Davis wrote:and have also frequented enough Dylan forums to know that that book on "Desolation Row" would be equally likely to devolve into inane philosophizing, unsubstantiated connections to Shakespeare and the Bible, and crackpot theories about which '60's pop figure each character in the song represents as it would be to be anything you'd actually want to read.

Yeah. But I've never yet figured out why 33 1/3 doesn't invite Charles Manson to do a write up on the White Album.

Mind Your Manners

Getaway evolves from a conversational suggestion to a frantic plea, and Mind Your Manners picks up with a pretty much identical theme and a similar emotional state. Similar, but not identical. While MYM captures the urgency at the end of Getaway, there’s a confidence and control to the overall performance (music and vocals) that isn’t there in Getaway. There’s frustration and anger, but with an epihanal clarity that comes from finally pulling back the curtain and seeing what’s really there.

Like Getaway, Mind Your Manners is not an attack on religion. It’s an attack on passivity—whether it comes from a smug confidence in the rightness of the world, a loss of personal agency, or simply no longer caring about what happens to the people around you. It’s not hard to make the argument that our civilization is failing. Pick almost any yardstick and it’s easy to drown in bad news. Yet most of these are problems of our own creation, and we know what to do to fix them (or adapt to them). An asteroid is not about to collide with the Earth, and even if it was Bruce Willis is still making movies. So why don’t we do anything about everything?

There are three typical answers to that question. One is that the forces that are arrayed against dramatic social, economic, and political change are too strong—that resistance is futile. That’s certainly not the position of Mind Your Manners, or of the band’s catalog in general—which has always celebrated struggle as an end in itself. So we’ve got two other possibilities. No one is willing to seriously call attention to our problems, or people don’t’ think they can/should do anything about. And it’s these later two that Mind Your Manners is grappling with.

The music starts off heavy, throbbing—like a tension headache after a long day of bad news, but it lifts quickly—as soon as the singer is willing to openly confront the problem. That’s where the lyrics begin. Recognizing that things are going to hell, and that he’s prepared to admit and confront it. Eddie’s performance reflects that. It’s angry but measured, controlled, confident in a way that we haven’t seen in many of the post Riot Act fast songs, where he’s typically more unhinged and unfocused—a ball of careening energy. The music is similarly clipped and focused. It’s a punk song, and it has that punk energy, but there’s a precision to it that you don’t find in a similar song like Comatose.

This confrontation is simply something you don’t do in polite society. The front page of every major newspaper in the country should be screaming with headlines about impending environmental problems, but it isn’t. Today’s lead story in the NY Times is a horse race piece about the money candidates have raised (‘Who is Winning the Money Race’) complete with helpful infographics, but no mention of a slew of recent studies that conclusively demonstrated what we all figured was the case anyway—that candidates listen to (and their voting patterns reflect) those of their primary donors. Money buys democracy, but the world oligarchy is never going to appear in one of these articles. Rising inequality has been a problem for decades, but no one would talk about it until Occupy Wall Street. It’s liberating to finally be able to just say that everything is fucked right now, and I’m going to call a spade a spade (provided we don’t stop there—more on that in a minute)

I got an unfortunate feeling
I been beaten down
I feel that I'm done believing
Now the truth is coming out

What they're taking is
More than a vow
They're taking young innocents
And then they throw em on a burning pile

The focus on the ‘young innocents’ is significant. Not just because the young are innocent—trapped by a world they didn’t make (something Eddie was railing about as far back as Ten, when he WAS the young innocent. Now he has to confront the fact that his generation is guilty of the very crimes they protested). There’s also the concern about the kind of world that children (his and everyone else’s)are going to inherit (a perspective that comes into much sharper focus once you have kids of your own). He comes back to it with a marvelous lyric in the 4th verse.
This world's a long love letter
That makes me want to cry
There’s so much to love, so much to protect, so much of value, to the point that we’re overcome (overwhelmed in Sirens)—both by the intensity of joy and feeling, and by our failures to sufficiently protect it.

This brings us to ‘mind your manners’ chorus—the response from the status quo to anyone calling it into question. Don’t speak out. Don’t draw attention to these problems. Don’t disrupt the way things are. Don’t force me to confront ugly truths I don’t want to think about. Doing so would only make this worse (remember, politics and religion are taboo conversation topics in polite society). This refrain has been on repeat throughout history—shoved in the face of anyone who understood that the real world has to be revealed before it can be changed.

The mind your manners phrasing is particularly inspired (I think this is one of Eddie’s more clever lyrics) because of the way it downplays the substance of the critique by turning an attempt to redress a grievance into a violation of social norms and etiquette (and crams so much into a very simple lyric). Although the political critique of Occupy Wall Street has now become somewhat mainstream (to the point that all candidates have to pay at least superficial lip service to it) the coverage of the movement itself largely centered on the inconvenience of disruption and the ways in which the protestors were strange and unusual—the way they didn’t (wait for it!) mind their manners. And as Eddie reminds us in the second chorus ‘That's all they're saying’. The defense of the status quo due to a fear of change doesn’t offer very much to the aggrieved—and doesn’t solve any problems.

The second verse moves into religious territory, but again I think it’s important to realize that this isn’t a critique about religion in the way we normally think about it (the verses would read differently if it was). It’s a criticism of learned helplessness utilizing religious imagery since it’s such a useful shared symbolic vocabulary.

I caught myself believing
That I needed God
And if it's out there somewhere
We sure could use hymn now

That’s hardly an anti-religious screed. It’s a comment on how wonderful it would be if someone bigger than ourselves could just come along, snap their fingers, and save the world. But that person’s not coming, and we cannot afford to wait. We’re going to have to do it ourselves.

That’s the central message of the song and the second chorus.

Self-realized and metaphysically redeemed
May not live another life
May not solve our mystery

Right round the corner
Could be bigger than ourselves
We could will it to the sky
Or we could something else

It’s not enough to simply be right by yourself (self-realized and metaphysically redeemed) and not care about what happens to others. It’s not enough to waste all of our potential by hoping someone else will come along and save us (a god figure, a political figure—recall the massive deflation of energy after the election of Obama in 2008. Millions of people working to elect this improbable candidate on this inchoate platform of hope and change, and then wiping their hands of the whole thing and assuming their job was done. We elected Obama—he’ll do the rest. Not my problem anymore). It’s not enough to wait until we have all the answers (may not solve our mystery). We have one shot at this, and only one world in which to get it right (may not live another life). The potential is there (right around the corner could be bigger than ourselves) if we do this together and realize what we can do with shared vision (or we could something else—some other alternative, something other than this). And unlike Getaway, which is predominately you and I, Mind Your Manners is a we.

The music backs the message. The music becomes less intense and takes on a questing coloration—asking important questions/seeking significant answers. Eddie’s vocals become double tracked in places (or certainly feel that way), implying the WE that makes this a collective project. And there’s a second guitar under the main riff that’s there from the beginning but becomes more prominent as the chorus progresses—rising, optimistic, promising if not an answer, at least a lifeline. It’s followed by an excellent information overload solo by Mike, a mixture of new ideas, insights, and maybe even answers. It’s not clear yet how they all fit together, but something’s there—we just need the time and the will to make sense of it.

The full chorus (the mind your manners and the response) is repeated before doubling down on the consequences of failure . The opening ominious guitar is sped up, reminding us that time is running out. The slight choral effect of the second chorus is magnified with a call and response section that brings to mind a larger audience and larger stakes (this isn’t just a personal journey). And we’re left with a final warning about what happens if we fail. Eddie is once again using religious language, but again I think this is more because it is useful as a shared symbolic vocabulary. If this was a religious critique it would be way more heavy handed and contain more potshots than it does.

Go to heaven
That's swell
How you like your living (in) Hell?

The ‘go to heaven’ lyric is about assuming our problems are going to be okay—the justification for doing nothing (whether your belief in an afterlife is so strong as to warrant doing nothing, believing that god/history/science has a plan, believing you can just live your life because someone else is going to solve the problem/this is already the best of all possible worlds—in all these cases heaven represents the avoidance of responsibility for the here and now (and wouldn’t that be heaven—to be able to look at a wounded imperfect world and feel totally absolved). And as the last lyric in the song makes perfectly clear, we can see where this attitude gets us.

Lightning Bolt moves away from this theme after Mind Your Manners (though it returns to it later), but the fear and frustration about the world we’re leaving behind, what it’s going to mean for the people living in it, and the responsibility we have to take for creating it is going to travel into the next sequence of songs.

Obviously I think MYM is a bit under appreciated.

I bet McParadigm is going to be rethinking his comment on the uninterpretability of these songs after reading this wealth of hypotheses concerning Eddie's references to herpatological romance.

that's an untapped thematic gold mine to be sure

tragabigzanda wrote:

darth_vedder wrote:

Kevin Davis wrote:

Kaius wrote:I really wanted stip to touch on that verse, but he didn't. What does not mean, huh?! WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!!

I thought I had written about this before, and sure enough:

Kevin Davis wrote:

harmless wrote:"Science says that we're making love like the lizards.

This is such a strange lyric--lizards are hardly the member of the animal kingdom that come to mind when you think of mindless, rapid-fire procreating.

Perhaps Ed is trying to bring a new elegance to the purely biological side of reproduction, trying to move it away from the skittish, almost aggressive pleasure-pounding suggested by the far cruder "fucking like rabbits" and towards the more curvacious, almost dancelike motions affiliated with the reproduction of certain reptiles, from whose leisure we can reasonably assume do not merely "fuck" but rather "make love."

I wonder if this is a throwback to "Faithfull," where he says "like geckos, that nobody hears"--perhaps he's implying the quiet, private manner in which these creatures repopulate the world with their own kind, the whole circle of life regenerating itself in private while we "upstairs" remain oblivious, distracted by "all of this noise."

Eddie really likes mentioning reptiles in songs about religion.

"Like geckos"

I'd wager the "...like the lizards" line is a reference to the so-called "lizard brain" or "reptilian brain," a neuro-psychological theory that states our brains developed in three distinct stages:

1. Reptilian, which dictates eating/sleeping/procreating/etc

2. Limbic, which controls feelings

3. Neocortex, which controls more high-level thoughts, like mathematics and grocery lists.

"Trying to say that fossils ain't profound," I think is a reference to stories of human fossils found dead in each other's arms. I think Ed is just trying to juxtapose the science that says our sexual behaviors are essentially emotionless with evidence that prehistoric man had some semblance of monogamy.

that's way more interesting than my read.

tragabigzanda wrote:

darth_vedder wrote:

Kevin Davis wrote:

Kaius wrote:I really wanted stip to touch on that verse, but he didn't. What does not mean, huh?! WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!!

I thought I had written about this before, and sure enough:

Kevin Davis wrote:

harmless wrote:"Science says that we're making love like the lizards.

This is such a strange lyric--lizards are hardly the member of the animal kingdom that come to mind when you think of mindless, rapid-fire procreating.

Perhaps Ed is trying to bring a new elegance to the purely biological side of reproduction, trying to move it away from the skittish, almost aggressive pleasure-pounding suggested by the far cruder "fucking like rabbits" and towards the more curvacious, almost dancelike motions affiliated with the reproduction of certain reptiles, from whose leisure we can reasonably assume do not merely "fuck" but rather "make love."

I wonder if this is a throwback to "Faithfull," where he says "like geckos, that nobody hears"--perhaps he's implying the quiet, private manner in which these creatures repopulate the world with their own kind, the whole circle of life regenerating itself in private while we "upstairs" remain oblivious, distracted by "all of this noise."

Eddie really likes mentioning reptiles in songs about religion.

"Like geckos"

I'd wager the "...like the lizards" line is a reference to the so-called "lizard brain" or "reptilian brain," a neuro-psychological theory that states our brains developed in three distinct stages:

1. Reptilian, which dictates eating/sleeping/procreating/etc

2. Limbic, which controls feelings

3. Neocortex, which controls more high-level thoughts, like mathematics and grocery lists.

"Trying to say that fossils ain't profound," I think is a reference to stories of human fossils found dead in each other's arms. I think Ed is just trying to juxtapose the science that says our sexual behaviors are essentially emotionless with evidence that prehistoric man had some semblance of monogamy.

this is awesome, great post

wait, is pearl jam about godzilla?

LoathedVermin72 wrote:wait, is pearl jam about godzilla?

LoathedVermin72 wrote:wait, is pearl jam about godzilla?

Spoiler: show

as much as I like this album, there's no way around the fact that the sterile production isn't doing it any favors

I appreciate the write-up, Stip, and you make a pretty airtight case for your position. We have had a discussion on this song before here: http://forums.theskyiscrape.com/viewtop ... start=1000 -- and I feel like I would just be repeating myself to go into it again, but suffice it to say, I read the song differently than you do -- though reading your post above, I wonder if it isn't primarily due to my familiarity with Ed's general capcity for tactfulness with people who disagree with him. He's big on the love boat captain thing until someone crosses him, then it's "make your getaway."

The fact that it starts and finishes so poorly is a lot of what keeps "LB" from working as an album for me -- a lot of the middle songs on the record have opened up to me in one way or another, but these just haven't.

One of the reasons why I don't think MYM is an anti religion song in the way you're describing is precisely that Eddie has the subtly of a brick with that kind of stuff. And there's no shortage of broad targets for him to mine.

Although, running through recent albums in my mind, the last place he was really terrible about this (on a studio record) was riot act. Bushleaguer, the horrendous G-R-E-E-D beginning to Green Disease (ruining for me what would have otherwise been a pretty fun song), the corporations rule the day clunker from Undone (one of my all time favorites).

stip wrote:One of the reasons why I don't think MYM is an anti religion song in the way you're describing is precisely that Eddie has the subtly of a brick with that kind of stuff. And there's no shortage of broad targets for him to mine.

Although, running through recent albums in my mind, the last place he was really terrible about this (on a studio record) was riot act. Bushleaguer, the horrendous G-R-E-E-D beginning to Green Disease (ruining for me what would have otherwise been a pretty fun song), the corporations rule the day clunker from Undone (one of my all time favorites).

But corporations DO rule the day.

Kevin Davis wrote:
The fact that it starts and finishes so poorly is a lot of what keeps "LB" from working as an album for me -- a lot of the middle songs on the record have opened up to me in one way or another, but these just haven't.

So surprising. MYM has been great from my first listen.