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[microsoft!stevesc@uunet.uu.net]

Subject: the sky is falling (was Re: "Suspended in Gaffa" et al)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gaffa
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA

berns@lti2.lti.com (Brian Berns x26) wrote:
>What *exactly* does it mean?  Who cares, it just sounds cool when you sing it.
>Whatever associations and implications it brings to mind (for me, alot) are
>yours.  Whatever Michael Stipe was thinking when he wrote it is of only mild
>interest to me.

I'd agree with this for appreciation of a song on a musical level.  But some
music can also be appreciated on an intellectual level too (and some on an
intellectal level but not a musical level, like a lot of humor music).  The
fact that something is wonderful musically doesn't negate the possibility of
it being fascinating intellectually.

So, I don't agree with you in saying, "who cares?"  But I would agree with
you in saying that it isn't something so important to justify the angry tone
of some of the disagreements in interpretations we read here.

>                 When I heard that the amazingly beautiful poetic wonderful
>song "Fall on Me" was about acid rain, I was really pissed off.  I try not to
>think about that when I hear:
>
>   Buy the sky and sell the sky
>   Lift your arms up to the sky
>   And ask the sky
>   Don't fall on me
>
>I use R.E.M. becuase it's clear that their lyrics are *intentionally* without
>obvious exact meaning.

I disagree strongly with you that this song exerpt is intentionally without
obvious exact meaning.  I'd be inclined to make precisely the exact opposite
claim, that it intentionally has an obvious exact meaning.  Unless your choice
of an excerpt distorts the song greatly, this clearly has precisely the meaning
that pisses you off.  "Buy the sky and sell the sky" followed by "And ask the
sky / Don't fall on me" is _clearly_ a reference to acid rain.  The buy and
sell bit is a reference to profiting by using the sky, by implication through
polluting it, and the don't fall on me bit clarifies it to mean pollution that
includes things that contaminate rainfall.  I can't imagine any other meaning,
or even that this could be unintentional.

Of course, it is possible (though I think unlikely) that it looks that way
because it's quoted out of context.  If there's anything to contradict that
interpretation in the lyrics, or even to make it questionable, I'll eat my
words here when I hear the full song (which I may own; my CDs were in movers'
storage so long I can't remember what I own).  I won't even claim it was a
typo.*

There's nothing wrong with you getting upset with that interpretation.  But
be upset for the right reason, that the pollution is around to be written
about, not that they wrote about it or that people choose to point out to
you that they wrote about it.  The songwriter would probably be pleased to
know that people are upset by the idea of a beautiful song about pollution.

>                        I hope the same is true of Kate, because if she is
>really trying to communicate precise ideas in "Suspended in Gaffa", she isn't
>doing a very good job.  But feel free to continue digging.

In Kate's case, for this song, I agree that she's very likely writing either
vague metaphors about vague mental images, or intentionally obscure things,
possibly even some of those we've discussed in trying to "figure out" the
song.  We'll never know.  If she was writing vague metaphors about vague
images, she could tell us that and we wouldn't know if she was telling us
the truth or just trying to be mysterious.  If she wrote intionally obscure
metaphors, she's not going to explain them because that would spoil the fun
of being obscure.  Generally when interviewers have tried to pin her down on
specific interpretations of things with multiple implications, she simply
says something like, "no, the song just sounded pretty that way."  That's
the truth of course, but not the _whole_ truth.

-- 
	Steve Schonberger	microsoft!stevesc@uunet.uu.net
	"Working under pressure is the sugar that we crave" --A. Lamb

This is at the end so people who've heard enough about "Nice to Swallow"
can skip it more easily:

*  I think Andrew is wrong on the "Nice to Swallow" matter.  Regardless of
whether it was a typesetting error or a Kate joke, Doug found the quotation. 
Doug's terms were that Andrew eat words if the quotation existed, and he
explicitly said the deal counted whether the words were Kate's or a typo. 
I tend toward the view that it was a typo (but not an error of the writer,
since the rest of the article was right, and not an error of the editors,
since the sloppiness of rest of the magazine implies that there wasn't any
editing that could introduce the error).  I think it possible that it's
Kate's words, but more likely typesetting error.  But Andrew owes us a word
eating, since the deal included typos.