After a long hiatus, I've been listening to the forty or fifty eMusic freebies I'd accumulated over a period of months, and flagging the ones I think are especially good and will want to hear again. I found this one sort of haunting. It's not especially appropriate for Easter, but the video makes it a bit more so.
A strange and compelling song, I could listen to it for hours. Though the lyrics are starting to disturb me, they’re quite beautiful but a bit malignly so; I’m reminded of a dream I had once in which I became suicidal and desired to end it all by dissolving into light from a high window. The siren call of something higher than life and love and goodness, that sort of thing.
…though the youtube comments have slightly more benevolent interpretations: Zula being either a freed gorilla or someone who escaped from a bad relationship. Both makes sense, sort of. (One interpreted it as being about escaping religion, although an antitheist accepting “love = religion” so implicitly is curious.)
And though I cannot possibly approve, the likening of love to “a killer come to call from some awful dream” is a memorable and amusing metaphor.
I was very curious as to whether anyone would comment on this song, and if they did if they would hear anything like what I did. I sat down at the computer just now (mainly to check on whether any more spam comments had gotten through) thinking that I would explain, and saw your comment. I think you’re hearing at least some of the things I did. Actually a lot of what I’m “hearing” is almost certainly not what the songwriter had in mind. Anyway, very interesting comments, and I’ll say more later.
I just listened to this for the first time, and read the lyrics. I think they are deeply troubling–a rejection of Love.
AMDG
I hope it turns out that the writer did intend the “escape from an abusive relationship” interpretation for that reason (or the “escaped gorilla” interpretation, but on reflection I’m not sure that holds). As a rejection of love and goodness, the song is still beautiful but in a pretty psychopathic way (“I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free”); the sort of thing it’s not a good idea to have hanging around in your head, and would not reflect well on whoever came up with it. I wonder if the songwriter had been OD’ing on Nietzsche when he wrote this.
Mac, looking forward to your thoughts. I was wary of judging the song partly because songs often have non-obvious meanings and need to be given time to sink in, and partly because as mentioned it reminds me of a disturbing dream, which is a dubious basis for judging anything.
Gotta work now, maybe I can say something during my lunch break. Janet, where did you read the lyrics? Was it one of those dubious “alllyrics” sites where people submit whatever they thought they heard? I avoid those–besides the fact that they don’t seem particularly reliable they seem like the kind of places that would be malware-infested? Or something official from the band? I’m just curious because there were several lines I couldn’t make out–as I mentioned my reaction to the song is not necessarily a reflection of what’s actually in there. In some aspects in fact I’m sure it’s not.
It was one of those websites. This is my least favorite thing about downloading music. You never get the lyrics.
AMDG
You don’t get them half the time with a cd, either. If the artist is very considerate and knows the lyrics are worth attention, he/she/they will sometimes put them on their web site. Which I really appreciate.
Aha!
Ok…I will have to be brief. My lunch breaks have to be short these days, and every time I plan to write something during one of them I realize that I can’t type while I’m eating, and then only have a few minutes left after I finish eating.
The song itself seems to me to be a broken-heart song, so I wouldn’t take those bitter sentiments (“I will not open myself up again…etc.”) as the end of the story.
What I hear in the song that’s so powerful to me is the imagery of love as appearing to us as a terrible destroying force. I’m thinking not only of eros, which presumably is what the song’s actually about, but God’s love, which threatens so much of what we want ourselves to be and what we want to happen. Eliot said it best:
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
Real love, human or divine, is catclysmic. It’s the Cross. Intense romantic love is certainly sweet but even if it works out it will sooner or later take you someplace pretty uncomfortable, the perfect image of that being a woman in labor. That’s the only way it can work for us in our fallen state. It does sometimes seem like a killer come to call. And the song presents that face of love very powerfully to me.
Also, that last verse: I’m departing completely from the song here, but as a result of what the earlier verses suggested, the last one made me think of Jesus before Pilate and the mob–jeered at, apparently weak and helpless, but with all that power that he nevertheless conceals and doesn’t use.
Well, that’s kind of what I meant. There’s a recognition of Love as what you describe, and a rejection of that. If that’s what it is, then no more. I guess it is a “broken-heart” song, but it’s much more than your typical bhs because it recognizes the way that it changes you and you end up with your face in the sand, etc. When your talking about man/woman relationships that can be very unhealthy, of course, but either taken as love in the abstract, or divine Love, that is where it leads.
If this makes no sense it’s because my lunch hour is already over.
AMDG
AMDG
I think we more or less agree, except about whether to take it as some kind of once-and-for-all rejection of love, or the expression of an emotion that will pass.
Well, I’m agnostic as to that. I think that he thinks it’s once-and-for-all, but of course, we are often wrong about that sort of thing.
AMDG
Right.
The more I think about it, the more it reminds me of The End of the Affair, but then, you haven’t read that. 😉
AMDG
One of these days…I actually have a nice early edition of it, too, that’s been sitting on my shelf for quite a while now.
Godescalc, I just now, 9 hours later, discovered your comment with the link to the lyrics in the spam catcher. Sorry. I really need to check that more often. Yesterday I found one from Marianne that was something like 48 hours old. This is very annoying.
That’s a far more benevolent reading of the song than mine. I hadn’t looked at it like that, as an entirely reasonable fear of the destructive potential of love – which I can pretty much relate to; I was too busy experiencing it as an unholy assault on love and goodness, a Nietzsche-like proclamation of transcending worthless lesser values and becoming a glorious and beautiful sociopath. I know you’re probably right and the rejection of love is not absolute, just situational; but the songwriter’s made the song slightly too beautiful, it’s hard to see it in anything other than absolute terms.
Also, it’s interesting that the singer-persona is presenting itself as turning away from love to become something more animalistic – the third verse in particular. You can turn away from love and goodness and become like the animals, or become like a demon, but if you want any other options you’re left with the Freddy Nietzsche option of waving your hands a bit and talking vaguely of the Superman. I wonder if the songwriter put that in out of an understanding that even if you have to reject love in some situation, turning from love makes you inhuman and savage, and the glories left to you are the glories of an animal. (Or a robot, but it’s hard to get that across in a song.)
It also occurs to me that perhaps we have gotten the genre of the song wrong. If we assume Zula is a genderless alien psychopath, possibly written by Gene Wolfe, everything becomes clear!
(…I am now being way too unfair to the poor songwriter, I think. I’m going to go off and analyse some other song that doesn’t excite such strange reactions from me.) (Or possibly do some work! I have a paper to write.)
And regarding the spam filter, I feared that would happen; but in the event, I spent those 9 hours away from the internet anyway, so no harm done.
Hmm, I don’t read the third verse that way–as animalistic. Strikes me more as just delight in escaping the pain, turning to the natural world.
We’re probably trying to make more sense of it than is really there. The singer seems to be back in the cage in the last verse–how did he get there if he was just now racing out on the desert plains?
It would be funny if the last verse really is about a gorilla. What does “my bones are steam” mean, I wonder? I thought he was saying “steel” until I read the lyrics.
Now that I think about it, I can’t point to anything definite that indicates the singer is (becoming) an animal, just the evocation of the wilderness and the general tone of freedom and danger contrives to give that impression.
And you’re right: it’s likely the singer would be utterly bewildered if he ever read what we’re making of his song.
I actually thought about emailing him the link, saying “look at the discussion your song provoked,” but the only email addresses I saw on his web site seemed to be for booking etc.
I think in general with pop songs one can’t expect to get to anything very definite with a literary-style close reading. It’s all too free-associative and that-sounds-good-leave-it-in-ish. So impressions are, like, valid.
Here’s what the artist had to say (and not say)…
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2013/12/cover-story-phosphorescent—the-art-is-the-art.html
Very interesting. Thanks.
Light On Dark Water 
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