Lyrics are hard

Bit different to my last megacolossothreadofreviewcompilation, this one's just stream-of-consciousness looks at some lyrics I've had a think about with lazy punctuation and political spleenventing which I'm not letting myself do in the politics threads because I get too angry to articulate things and if that doesn't sound appealing I don't know what does. I'm too embarrassed about the old reviews to write new ones so I thought I'd post this in case anyone cares to read it and feels they have too much free time for the internet to waste it all without my help

A couple of quick looks at lyrics with an actual theme and everything:

Hemispheres

I was letting Spotify roam wild yesterday after a perfunctory listen to Clockwork Angels and either the last early-phase or first early-middle phase (it's entirely to Rush's credit that they have so many phases) Rush album strolled like a carelessly invited vampire into the house of my ears (the metaphor's ironic so it's ok if it's awful and banal alright now keep reading and don't pay attention to how I have replaced my previous style of cluster-adjectives with basically nothing and am just doing a long sentence with no punctuation to throw you off that). Previously, it's always been the rather daft Cygnus X-I continuation that has embarrassed me into turning the damn thing off but I'm sitting through that for the second time in two days out of some misplaced sense of fair play. (fans who want to be offended, read on: same old Apollo and Dionysos rationality-pleasure-OHLOOKBALANCEISTHEANSWER drivel, and I don't really care for the music either to be honest). This time my embarrassment was instead directed at the suspicion I might have said something overly complimentary about the lyrics of The Trees in the past. The basic gist, far as I can tell, is that the maples are the poor unionising to get equality, oaks are our lofty Randian masterlords. Now, it feels to me like the characterisation of the two is vaguely sympathetic to the problem of the maples while the selfish preciousness of the oaks (i.e. that they are somehow inherently better and more deserving of light than the maples) is sent up. You can take the botanical metaphor's comment on the deserving of wealth in two ways, depending on whether you have the (incorrect) Randian some-people-are-just-better view or the TGMOrbian basic-perspective view. My hope is that the coda is the Bastille Day thing by another vehicle, and that the oaks' refusal to make concessions is what leads to the violent revolution that follows (I'm a pretty hardline and lazily misinformed communist, so that's not really enough for me but it'll do). On the other hand, you could see this as yer bog-standard socialism's-so-restrictive-so-the-maples-should-just-shut-up response.

Now, having actually written this and thought about it, I'm much less negative than I set out planning to be but the problem still kind of remains. The Trees has a pretty clear political narrative, whether that's the Bastille Day or the 'Orwellian' sort (I'd hesitate to directly name an Orwell book, because 1984 and Animal Farm are probably the two novels most commonly deliberately misunderstood by political commentators on the right – my personal favourite being the Tory MP Roger Gale speaking apparently from a pre-prepared piece of paper but nonetheless directly through his arse defining gay marriage measures as 'Alice In Wonderland territory, Orwellian almost' with one bigoted tit muttering 'hear hear' in the background before he goes off into the same weary comparison of homosexuality and incest oh for god's sake it's too stupid to even describe...). I suppose you can chart it as the 'the oaks should be nicer or it'll be their fault when things go wrong' but the weak having rights based only on the handouts of the strong isn't really my sort of politics. If you take it the other way and say 'the maples' rebellion just crushes all growth and creativity and they should put up with it to avoid that', then you just get into your agonisingly dull Clarksonian/Littlejohnic/Hitchensite/Philippsesque Soviet Russia is what all left-wing politics will lead to blahblahblah. If you leave it somewhere in the middle, you've got what I think the main argument that prog is somehow disconnected comes from, which is not the 'irrelevance' of the subject matter but rather that when it does acknowledge problems, it doesn't really offer any engagement with them or any ideological response.

Tales From Topographic Oceans

The seminal wishy-washy prog album has the same deal more acutely, in that it's actually peppered with 1970s social comment, which is to say:

Getting over overhanging trees
Let them rape the forest
Thoughts would send our fusion
Clearly to be home

Getting over wars we do not mean
Or so it seems so clearly
Sheltered with our passion
Clearly to be home

They move fast, they tell me,
But I just can't believe they really mean to
There's someone, to tell you,
And I just can't believe our song will leave you
Skyline teacher
Warland seeker
Send out poison
Cast iron leader

has some sort of anti-military and anti-aggregation-of-power dimension contrasted with wishy washy holisticism. Political problems treated as a philosophical non-issue. I mean, part of the reason Tales is so damn unorganisable into a coherent lyrical whole is that there are these hints of meaning interspersed with clouds of fluff. I mean, it's a great album even if, despite being twice as long it's still not half as good as Close To The Edge, but 'Relayer/Sail the futile wars they suffer' and 'School gates remind us of our class/Chase all confusion away with us/Stand on hills of long forgotten yesterdays/Pass amongst your memories told returning ways' are both a bit infuriating for me at least because pointless wars and our equally pointless and the class system and its corresponding differential in access to opportunities which is now cunningly re-entrenching itself in Britain should make people angry, or disappointed or should have some sort of emotional resonance within the context of the piece. They shouldn't just be brought up and dropped instantly. Is it hippie optimism that vague philosophical opposition would simply overwhelm such vested interests given time or just lazy emotional hooks sunk in the marshmallow texture of the album's lyrics? I don't even know and this has gotten to be dead incoherent because I'm really just venting rather than making the rational point I think I was planning to about how a lot of prog connects itself to a reality it which it just ignores and this is why Dark Side of the Moon is a really good album and stream of consciousness is really not my medium PRESS ON

Anyway, engaging with political subjects and not really saying anything about them is almost as bad as engaging in incongruous disquisitions on social credit without any real prompting (that, good folks, is a damning reference to my favourite writer ever – five points for the first person to identify the reference... points are not redeemable for anything).

Next time, if a next time there is, I'm going to offer an example of some things under the threadbare umbrella of prog which do offer coherent political worldviews or statemnents. And then we might even look at some lyrics which aren't basically thinly veiled justifications for me pushing my own soft-hearted anti-democratic communist perspective down your throats but probably not.

also I remembered my password I'm so impressed with myself am I coherent I don't even care thanks if you read this far you're the best whoever you are