i'm not bagging on australia again, i promise. but just what is going on here?
a few nights ago, the ARIAs are on: the Australian Record Industry Awards. a band called silverchair were the belles of the ball: they took single of the year, album of the year, highest-selling single of the year, best band and best rock album. this was their flagship single.
"straight lines"
Breathing from a hole in my lung
I had no one
With faces in front of me
Racing through the void in my head
To find traces
Of a good luck academy
Ooh Ooh Ooh
Sparks ignite and trade them for thought
About no one
And nothing in particular
Washed the sickened socket and drove
Resent nothing
There's good will inside of me
Ooh Ooh Ooh
Wake me up lower the fever
Walking in a straight line
Set me on fire in the evening
Everything will be fine
Wake me up strong in the morning
Walking in a straight line
Lately I'm a desperate believer
But walking in a straight line
Something I will never forget
I felt desperate
And stuck to the marrow
Invisible to everyone else
I'm a sex-change
And a damsel with no heroine
Ooh Ooh Ooh
Wake me up lower the fever
Walking in a straight line
Set me on fire in the evening
Everything will be fine
Wake me up strong in the morning
Walking in a straight line
Lately I'm a desperate believer
But walking in a straight line
I don't need no time to say
There's no changing yesterday
If we keep talking and
I keep walking in straight lines
Wake me up lower the fever
Walking in a straight line
Set me on fire in the evening
Everything will be fine
Wake me up strong in the morning
Walking in a straight line
Lately I'm a desperate believer
But walking in a straight line
okay. the song is catchy as all get out, but seriously, can anyone tell me what it's about? no, really. i'm dying for someone to tell me.
i'm not saying pop songs need to have depth to be good. we all know we've bobbed along to enough diddies about puppy love or whatever. but to garner this many awards with this kind of following, can't you give me something to go on? so, if anyone wants to break this down for me, i'd be more than happy to listen contently.
1 comment:
Okay, this song is making me feel a little sick. (or that could possibly be the large volume of sweet tarts I'm consuming)
This song suffers from an overload of inconsistent images. "Breathing from a hole in my lung" is incredibly evocative. I read/listened to that and couldn't wait to hear how they would continue that image... but they didn't. Instead they harp on some extremely cliché phrases ending with a random mention of "a good luck acadamy"... What? That last line could have been saved if they hadn't gone on some random tangent (which, like the lung imagery goes absolutely no where). That whole thing could have been a great set of verses if they brought some breathing imagery back into it, but no.... They let it drop, roll under the bed, and die from disuse. Now it's rotting there, stinking up the whole song.
The second verse is a string of barely consistent thoughts. At least when Bob Dylan does it, his images are interesting and sound fantastic (well, most of the time... we will avoid the line, "The sun isn't yellow, it's chicken").
They should have expanded the fever imagery in the chorus, which they almost did with the line "set me on fire in the evening", but again these people abandon it to keep the lungs company under the bed.
"I'm a sex-change / And a damsel with no heroine" Wait..... what??
Too many images were piled under the bed forming a mass of inconsistency peeking out at you like a monster waiting for it's time to strike a child after the lights are turned out (what the heck did I just write?).
Err... anyway. Please tell me this is not the pinnacle of pop music in Australia.
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