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I'm Clifford Stumme, and I use literary analysis and research to explain the deeper meanings of pop songs. Feel free to leave a comment or to email me at clifford@popsongprofessor.com with questions or ideas!
I'm Clifford Stumme, and I use literary analysis and research to explain the deeper meanings of pop songs. Feel free to leave a comment or to email me at clifford@popsongprofessor.com with questions or ideas!
All tagged song interpretation
I don't know about you, but I've been excited for Katy Perry's new album for quite a while. I'm not a superfan of many female pop stars (or male pop stars for that matter). I prefer homegrown, sincere lyrics that the artists write themselves and that they truly mean. But something grabbed my attention about this new Witness album. I think it was on Twitter, but Katy Perry claimed that this songwriting era of hers was going to be more politically and socially minded. "Chained to the Rhythm" clearly followed that blueprint, but "Swish Swish" (a swagger track) and "Bon Appetit" (a shallow pop sex track) both seemed to contradict her new motivation.
Paramore dropped the music video for a new single just a few days ago, and it's been very interesting, between "Told You So" and the previously released "Hard Times" to try to predict the direction the band is taking. My impression of Paramore's earlier music was that it was fairly hardcore, but this new music seems to have Latin influence and seems lighter and easier to digest.
"Slow Life" is the seventh track from Beneath the Skin, and it's infuriatingly difficult to puzzle out. The lyrics are vague and HEAVILY symbolic of something. Even if one understands the basic storyline, the event or thing being symbolized may still be beyond reach until Of Monsters and Men spills their secrets on their own. In the meantime, listeners will have to do the best they can to understand what's going on here. While the title is "Slow Life," the music of the song only halfway manages to accomplish the adjectival half of it. The song isn't especially slow; it's fairly quick and is engaging for that quickness. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir is Of Monsters and Men's only singer on this track (apart from some punctuational background vocals), and her voice, as usual, is wonderfully eerie and haunting. Anything she sings takes on a whole new meaning and idea, giving a powerful mythos to "Slow Life" in particular.
The establishing process may take him a while, but he's dedicated: "As the hills turn into holes / I fill them with gold." A user on Genius suggests this means that when his efforts are flattened, he finds ways to turn failure into success. Whether true or no, putting gold in the holes instead of mining it out of them may seem odd. Perhaps he is trying to save his money and his success from complete failure by hiding it away. Or perhaps doing this is his way of becoming like the "[h]eavy stones" that "[f]ear no weather"; he's got reserves of gold and accomplishment backing up his next risks.
"Tompkins Square Park" is about a relationship that ends in Tompkins Square Park in New York City, the site, according to Wikipedia, of numerous riots over the past 150 years. The park served as a gathering place for artists (Allen Ginsberg lived nearby during the 1988 riots), bohemians, and the homeless. Due to gentrification, the park has lost some of its artsy vibe, but its legacy serves well as a backdrop for the difficult subject of Mumford & Sons's new song.
