Monday 28 August 2017

Words are a Sawn Off Shotgun



I only really like music when I like the lyrics, but I only really like lyrics when they're confusing. I remember immediately falling in love with Dylan's Ballad of a Thin Man, which is a sort of paean to being an obscurantist arsehole who never gets to the point. My favourite stanza is this:


Now, you see this one-eyed midget shouting the word "Now"
And you say, "For what reason?" and he says, "How"
And you say, "What does this mean?" and he screams back, "You're a cow!
Give me some milk or else go home"
And you know something's happening but you don't know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?



For a good while I loved it because of how hilariously absurd and not even pretending to be about anything it was being. But then, one day, being bored in maths class and trying to write the lyrics from memory, it suddenly occurred to me that these lines totally did have a quite clear meaning. A dude who is short and half-blind and useless and pathetic is insisting on something. Mr. Jones demands a proper, coherent conversation, but pathetic-useless-face (hi, that's me) says fuck explanations, how do we get this done? What Mr. Jones neglects to consider is that he's a cow, and either he can contribute his milk to what is going on here or he is getting in the way.

Words can do pretty cool stuff sometimes, but not so much when they're being used to explain things. Explaining things means reducing them to something less than they are, and when you do that to a person, which happens a lot, you dehumanise them. But even in less dramatic circumstances, they make things stuffy and overbearing and quite a bit hostile. When you walk into a room with a pencil in your hand, you're not being open to the experience, hoping to encourage people to be more themselves, but have effectively appointed yourself micro-manager, assuming you'll be able to stifle the room into higher efficiency, but you are wrong.

In regular circumstances, you do not expect a sequence like "you say what does this mean and he screams back you're a cow! Give me some milk or else go home" to make sense. In regular circumstances you pare your talk down, using words to cut people's limbs off. The regular-circumstancey prototype of word-using is to say "What are you doing? That's weird." And all this leaves you very little manoeuvering space, in between people's reductions, to actually say or do something real. But when you actually manage to, there is never actually anything to explain. And anyway that's what I think this song is about:







Just as you take my hand
Just as you write my number down
Just as the drinks arrive
Just as they play your favorite song
As your blather disappears
No longer wound up like a spring
Before you’ve had too much
Come back in focus again

The walls are bending shape
You got a cheshire cat grin
All blurring into one
This place is on a mission

Before the night owl
Before the animal noises
Closed circuit cameras
Before you're comatose

Before you run away from me
Before you’re lost between the notes
The beat goes round and round
The beat goes round and round

I never really got there
I just pretended that I had
Words are blunt instruments
Words are a sawn off shotgun

Come on and let it out
Come on and let it out
Come on and let it out
Come on and let it out

Before you run away from me
Before you're lost between the notes
Just as you take the mic
Just as you dance, dance, dance

Jigsaw falling into place
There is nothing to explain
You eye each other as you pass
She looks back, you look back
Not just once
Not just twice
Wish away your nightmare
Wish away the nightmare
You got the light you can feel it on your back
[A light,] you can feel it on your back
Your jigsaw falling into place

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