Shadowfiend23 @ Wrocław

I’m feeling rough, I’m feeling raw, I’m in the prime of my life.
Let’s make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.
I’ll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.
You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.

This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute.

Forget about our mothers and our friends
We’re fated to pretend
To pretend
We’re fated to pretend
To pretend

I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I’ll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.

There’s really nothing, nothing we can do
Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew.
The models will have children, we’ll get a divorce
We’ll find some more models, everything must run its course.

We’ll choke on our vomit and that will be the end
We were fated to pretend
To pretend
We’re fated to pretend
To pretend

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah

Comments:

I feel that this song has a pretty obvious message: living fast and dying young is an attractive prospect, but it carries with it grave consequences. This message is prevalent in many party songs, so it is not intrinsically interesting. What I feel saves this song for me is the melancholic, nostalgic bridge:

I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I’ll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.

As a person on the cusp of outgrowing childhood, this part of the song always gets me. It conveys a twinge of sadness that scares me. This, combined with the endless drudgery of it all :

There’s really nothing, nothing we can do
Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew.
The models will have children, we’ll get a divorce
We’ll find some more models, everything must run its course.

On a bad day, it makes me feel like I was fated to pretend…

“Come Downstairs And Say Hello”

Comments:

I love this song for many reasons.

First, I think the first two lines brilliantly summarize the main problem of the narrator of the song (and the problem I have felt many times when listening to this song):

Dorothy moves to click her ruby shoes
Right in tune with “Dark Side of the Moon.

A person is applying the: “turn on, tune in, drop out” mentality to escape from their problems. Dorothy is escaping from her nightmarish Oz by clicking her shoes in tune with “Dark Side of the Moon”, an album by Pink Floyd. The song progresses by proposing what I always hoped to hear when I was in one of these moods “Be calm…be brave…it’ll be ok”. But the song acknowledges that it doesn’t happen, that it could have happened:

Someone, someone could tell me:
Where I belong;
‘Be calm, be brave, it’ll be okay…”

The song continues to drive home the point that media provides a point of solace by saying that the voices on MTV have lips moving, saying “It’ll be ok…” The way this line is delivered has always echoed the superficiality that condolences have carried in my opinion. The singer delivers this line so ephemerally that I believe it parallels perfectly the short-lasting effects “It will be ok” has on my psyche.

The first “chorus” is very interesting and very, very, profound in understanding the meaning of the song:

To tell you the truth, I’ve said it before
“Tomorrow I start in a new direction”
One last time these words from me
I’m never saying them again
and I shut the light
and listen as my watch unwinds…

The first three lines are especially important, because the narrator makes a vow to change soon, he says that he will change starting tomorrow. He echoes the call to action in the beginning of the song “no more…living underground on New Year’s resolutions”. And he says that this is the last time he will say these words. Then, he describes the act of shutting off the light, a night time prelude to sleep, a symbol of what is done each and every day. Then, he listens as “his watch unwinds”, that is, he is a passerby to his life passing before his eyes while nothing changes. The pace of the song changes here significantly – it picks up to show the passage of time.

The next stanza confirms the foreshadowing in the chorus, as the narrator repeats what he said he would never say again. But there is an added thought, something new to the mix. He states:

Every night as I’m falling asleep
These words repeating in my head:

And then we receive the climax of the song, the take-away message:

“Voices calling from a yellow road
To come downstairs and say, ‘hello.’
Don’t be shy, just say ‘hello.'”

We are told that the narrator can still break free from his escapist mentality, we see that he can choose to rejoin reality and just “come downstairs and say hello”. And this message is delivered with an homage to the imagery in the beginning of the song, to the image of Dorothy trying to come home.

The song ends by repeating the chorus again, cluing the listeners in on the fact that the narrator is still working on living in reality, on not tuning out the world. (There is also a subtle change from “these words” to “those words”, indicating a change of tense) We are left with a beautiful, peaceful, image (which is close to my heart since dreams hold such value to me):

Every night as I’m falling asleep
Those words repeated in my head.

“I Think Ur A Contra”

“Sillyworld”

Konstantine

I can’t imagine all the people that you know
And the places that you go
When the lights are turned down low
And I don’t understand all the things you’ve seen
But I’m slipping in between
You and your big dreams
It’s always you
In my big dreams

And you tell me that it’s over
Wake up lying in a patch of four leaf clover
And you’re restless, and I’m naked
You’ve got to get out
You can’t stand to see me shaking, no
Could you let me go?
I didn’t think so

And you don’t want to be here in the future
So you say the present’s just a pleasant
Interruption to the past
And you don’t want to look much closer
Because you’re afraid to find out all this hope
You had sent into the sky by now had crashed
And it did
Because of me

And then you bring me home
Afraid to find out that you’re alone
And I’m sleeping in your living room
But we don’t have much room to live

I had these dreams in them I learned to play guitar
Maybe cross the country
Become a rock star
And there was hope in me that I could take you there
But damnit, you’re so young
Well, I don’t think I care
And if I hurt you
Then I’m sorry
Please don’t think that this was easy

Then you’d bring me home
Because we both know what it’s like to be alone
And I’m dreaming in your living room
But we don’t have much room to live

And Konstantine is walking down the stairs
Doesn’t she look good
Standing in her underwear?
And I was thinking
What I was thinking
We’ve been drinking and it doesn’t get me anywhere

My Konstantine came walking down the stairs
And all that I could do is touch her long blonde hair
And I’ve been thinking
It hurts me thinking that these nights when we were drinking
No, they never got us anywhere, no

This is because I can spell confusion with a ‘k’
And I can like it
It’s to dying in another’s arms and why I had to try it
It’s to Jimmy Eat World and those nights in my car
When the first star you see may not be a star
I’m not your star
Isn’t that what you said
What you thought this song meant

And if this is what it takes
Just to lie with my mistakes
And live with what I did to you
All the hell I put you through
I always catch the clock
It’s 11:11
And now you want to talk
It’s not hard to dream
You’ll always be my Konstantine

My Konstantine, they’ll never hurt you like I do
No, they’ll never hurt you like I do
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

This is to a girl who got into my head
With all the pretty things she did
Hey, you know
You keep me up in bed
This is to a girl who got into my head
With all these fucked up things I did
Hey, maybe, baby
You could keep me up in bed
My Konstantine
You spin around me like a dream
We played out on this movie screen
And I said
Did you know I missed you?
Did you know I missed you?
Did you know I missed you?
Did you know I missed you?
Did you know I missed you?
Did you know I missed you?
Did you know I missed you?
I miss you

And then you bring me home
And we’ll go to sleep, but this time not alone, no, no
And you’ll kiss me in your living room
I know
You’ll miss me in your living room
Because these nights I think maybe that
I’ll miss you in my living room
We don’t have much room
I said does anybody need that room?
Because we all need a little more room
To live

My Konstantine

“Spitting Games”

“The Dirt Whispered”

“Comfortably Numb”

One of My Turns

“Oh my God! What a fabulous room! Are all these your guitars?
[Film in background: “I’m sorry sir, I didn’t mean to startle you!]
“This place is bigger than our apartment!
[Film: “Let me know when you’re entering a room”
“Yes sir!”]
“erm, Can I get a drink of water?
[Film: “I was wondering about …”]
“You want some, huh?”
[Film: “Yes”]
“Oh wow, look at this tub? Do you wanna take baaaath?”
[Film: “I’ll have to find out from Mrs. Bancroft what time she wants to meet us, for her main …”]
“What are watching?”
[Film: “If you’ll just let me know as soon as you can … Mrs Bancroft” “Mrs Bancroft …”]
“Hello?”
[Film: “I don’t understand …”]
“Are you feeling okay?…”

Day after day, love turns grey
Like the skin of a dying man.
Night after night, we pretend its all right
But I have grown older and
You have grown colder and
Nothing is very much fun any more.
And I can feel one of my turns coming on.
I feel cold as a razor blade,
Tight as a tourniquet,
Dry as a funeral drum.

Run to the bedroom,
In the suitcase on the left
You’ll find my favorite axe.
Don’t look so frightened
This is just a passing phase,
One of my bad days.
Would you like to watch T.V.?
Or get between the sheets?
Or contemplate the silent freeway?
Would you like something to eat?
Would you like to learn to fly?
Would’ya?
Would you like to see me try?

Would you like to call the cops?
Do you think it’s time I stopped?
Why are you running away?

“Feel Like Rain”