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Making sense of Cedric Bixler-Zavala's lyrics
Sam
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There with them is error
We are sacrosanct
A taunting of ravens to you
My swarms have fit the holster
My faith burnt every house
Like no other manger
I am emptier with doubt
Bare them
Sevens
Three to a pall
Marks the
Venom
Lush and terminal
When I became your larvae
You fed me from your plates
Now my slouch is nervous
Sinking by the face
Wrinkled by this gravel
Skinless trace of time
Wear your cobwebs proudly
In your cheap and brittle sight
My glands emit this carnage
These pews bend back your knees
That uniform it wears you
When the ultimatum pleads
Bare them
Sevens
Three to a pall
Marks the
Venom
Lush and terminal
That cesspool it becomes you
Just north of the eyebrows
Squat the hole for a pucker
When the rations go blonde
The salted stitch is patient
Waiting to engulf
There is plasma from this hoax
Pretending to be us
Embalming all the fluids I must I must
I prefer to burn it I must I must
All I can glean thus far is that some worms have a shitty day in front of them...
We are sacrosanct
A taunting of ravens to you
My swarms have fit the holster
My faith burnt every house
Like no other manger
I am emptier with doubt
Bare them
Sevens
Three to a pall
Marks the
Venom
Lush and terminal
When I became your larvae
You fed me from your plates
Now my slouch is nervous
Sinking by the face
Wrinkled by this gravel
Skinless trace of time
Wear your cobwebs proudly
In your cheap and brittle sight
My glands emit this carnage
These pews bend back your knees
That uniform it wears you
When the ultimatum pleads
Bare them
Sevens
Three to a pall
Marks the
Venom
Lush and terminal
That cesspool it becomes you
Just north of the eyebrows
Squat the hole for a pucker
When the rations go blonde
The salted stitch is patient
Waiting to engulf
There is plasma from this hoax
Pretending to be us
Embalming all the fluids I must I must
I prefer to burn it I must I must
All I can glean thus far is that some worms have a shitty day in front of them...
Sam on
0
Posts
Like I am 95% sure that "A necklace of follicles with sabertooth monocles" and "the kiosk in my temporal lobe is shaped like Rosalyn Carter" don't mean anything.
Sometimes he purposely says things in a convoluted way. Instead of "eavesdropping" he will say "dropping on the eve".
Ever since De-Loused, their lyrics have gotten sillier and sillier. Some of them were pretty cool in a weird way (I particularly like "One day this chalk outline will circle this city"), but by now they are just completely ridiculous.
First, however, we'd have to claim that he wrote letters to gay lovers, and killed himself over booze crying about his abusive father.
Amputechtures lyrics, while he tried to make sensical lyrics to fit the music, he says he failed alot (Perfect example on Tetragammaton with "Just you wait till I get my hands on you, I can't Eeee-errrgh-aaah") and Vermicide is another example. While there is an underlying meaning of contrasting a sort of Mass to Religion related wars, it would be impossible to go through all of Amputechture line by line and find literal meanings. This could be done with De-Loused or Frances.
I am way too much of a Mars Volta nerd.
"What the hell did that mean?"
"I... I dunno man, but it seemed really deep!"
Dude, that hasn't been the "trend" in poetry since the 1970s.
Also, DITC and FTM make more sense because they have a story to be about, and therefore have forced direction. Amputechture doesn't really have a unifying narrative, so a lot of it is just made up. The kiosk in my temporal lobe is shaped like Rosayln Carter.
Agreed.
"Trick ourselves in portable stanzas.
Black russian throated on this guillotine cancer."
"Black and white TV with the sound turned down.
Like breathing blood through the lungs of a czar's child."
W- ...what?
The czar's child thing is probably some kind of bizarre reference to Nikolai II's son, who had hemophilia, although as far as I know, hemophilia doesn't make you breathe blood.
Anyways, even if the lyrics for, say, Frances the Mute, can be made sense of because they are telling a story, I still think it is pretty stupid to say "dropping on the eve" instead of "eavesdropping". What the hell is the point in intentionally convoluting meaning?
The creepy speech from Cassanda Gemini is my favorite:
There was a frail syrup dripping off
His lap danced lapel, punctuated by her
Decrepit prowl she washed down the hatching
Gizzard soft as a mane of needles
His orifice icicles hemmoraged
By combing her torso to a pile
Perspired the trophy shelves made room for his collapse
She was a mink handjob in sarcophagus heels
What's the point of writing a poem instead of an essay? What's the point of writing Heart of Darkness instead of a treatise on imperialism?
I don't actually have a good answer to my own question, even though I'm an english major. :P
What? Poetry doesn't intentionally convolute and obfuscate meaning. Well, some of it does, and that is bad poetry. Some of the greatest poets speak in conversational, straightforward tones (like William Carlos Williams).
Or take T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". It's a pretty difficult poem about, among other things, the decline of civilization and Eliot's apocalyptic vision. However, Eliot didn't just sit down and say "Hmm...how can I take my thoughts about the downfall of civilization and make them more confusing?"
On the other hand, when Cedric writes "I never knew how to talk without walls dropping on the eve" instead of "I never knew how to talk without the walls eavesdropping" I get the feeling that he is just purposely trying to making it more confusing than it has to be.
That is not what poetry does, and it astounds me that you think it is.
Eliot deliberately obfuscates meaning. His footnotes for The Waste Land are deliberately arcane in order to force the reader to investigate the anthropological and literary fragments he assembled in writing the poem. His references and allusions are there to force that act of assembly. The whole point of The Waste Land is, among other things, that meaning is not a solid, fixed element; the poem is an expression of longing for a time when meaning was (supposedly) still whole, instead of in its current fragmented state. The diffusion of meaning through convolution or abstraction is a pretty strong theme in Eliot's poetry and a lot of modern poetry overall.
I like the line "dropping on the eve." It disassembles a word and makes you synthesize the meaning again yourself from its constituent parts, instead of taking the word for granted as a whole. I think the song itself is, as a whole, meaningless and pretentious, but I do like that line.
You are absolutely right that there is a great sense of fragmentation in The Waste Land created in a large part by all the different sources and traditions that Eliot pulls from, but I don't think Eliot ever thought of it in terms of "I'm going to write this next stanza in German, just to confuse the fuck out of people and force them to piece it together". Of course we can never know for sure, but I think that the sense of fragmentation was going on in Eliot's own mind, and he was pulling from all these different myths, texts, languages, and other sources to try and convey that fragmentation, but not to purposely confuse the reader.
Besides, there is a difference between making something fragmented and confusing to make a point, and doing it just for the hell of it.
(incidentally, if you want to talk about a Modernist poet who intentionally obfuscates meaning, I would probably talk about Wallace Stevens, a poet who I sometimes enjoy, but also sometimes have issues with)
Another example would be Nabokov. A lot of Nabokov's prose kind of wanders around in a daze: sentences that start in one place start to get complicated and they end up somewhere you didn't expect. Time frames are jumbled around, and the progression of events is vague. A character can be on a plateau with his friends, then on a ship in the ocean, then in a hotel room in Greece, then walking on the beach, and the transition between these events is blurry. But Nabokov doesn't do this just to make you confused, it reflects the mental state of the character, or the overall confusion of a situation.
What you call disassembling and re-synthesizing, I call busywork, because it serves no purpose. I don't think it illuminates anything or reflects on anything, it's just confusing for no reason. It all reminds me of Gertrude Stein- I can't fucking stand Gertrude Stein because her poetry is total nonsense, but some people love the shit out of her because she forces you to disassemble and reassemble and reconsider and re-evaluate and re-synthesize and all that fun stuff. Fuck that shit, I don't like poetry that creates busywork for the reader. Hey, you removed meaning from a word and forced me to consider it sonically. Whoop de fucking doo, now write something that makes me feel.
Now, I don't think there is necessarily something wrong with nonsensical or abstract or surrealistic lyrics. It can be done well, and like I said, sometimes The Mars Volta stumble upon some pretty interesting imagery This happened mostly on De-Loused where it made SENSE because it was about someone's drug-addled coma fantasy, so somehow it was appropriate to tell the story in a bizarre, ambiguous way. However, Frances the Mute is, from what I've read, about a person searching for their mother, and somehow the Catholic church and prostitutes are involved. The story gains nothing from being told through surrealistic imagery.
I guess the point is that ever since Frances the Mute, I haven't liked Cedric's lyrics because, much like Gertrude Stein's poetry, they feel cold and calculated, emotionless, more like a math equation than a poem.
What you're talking about is probably Language Poetry (eschewing meaning in favor of sonic valuation), which was huge during the 70s but hasn't really been popular since. Poetry that favors a visual evaluation has been around since the 20s and Cummings, and I wouldn't say it's necessarily more popular now than it was then.
I mean, I am sure there are poets out there who are still doing that type of stuff, but I wouldn't say that's "the trend" nowadays. People are doing all sorts of different stuff.
Serialist pattering I can't comment on since I don't even know what serialism is. Some kind of music theory?
I am so sorry.
I think L'via L'viaquez is my favourite song that I don't understand, at all.
Exactly.
Edit: And no, I didn't get it. I read on some TMV forum that that's what it meant. When I first heard it I figured it was just Cedric talking nonsense as usual. I didn't even try to pull meaning out of it.
Gandalf and Sam said that same shit back in Fellowship. Cedric ain't nothing.
"I wasn't dropping no eaves, sir!"
PErsonally I love The Mars Volta I think they're really talented musicians whole happen to shine during improv jam sessions(of which they did an hour long one when I saw them). To me, the cryptic lyrics are part of their appeal, thogu I admit in previous albums it was easier to get some semblance of what he was talknig about, if anything at all. I dont know, I love the way their music sounds, but thats just my opinion.