Quote (___ @ Sat - Feb 13 2010 - 04:11:35)
tool - lateralus
i get caught up more in songwriting than anything else when i listen to music because thoughts are what i know; whereas to take in music completely there's a lot more than thought-work going on. what i like about lateralus is that the songwriting is good but the sound itself goes beyond the words, which is oddly enough what i take to be part of what the words want anyway,
"Black then white are all I see in my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
reaching out to me, lets me see.
As below so above and beyond I imagine,
drawn beyond the lines of reason.
Push the envelope. Watch it bend.
Over thinking, over analyzing,
separates the body from the mind.
Withering my intuition, missing opportunities and I must
feed my will to feel my moment drawing way outside the lines.
Black then white are all I see in my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
reaching out to me, lets me see.
There is so much more and it beckons me to look though to these,
infinite possibilities.
As below so above and beyond I imagine,
drawn outside the lines of reason.
Push the envelope. Watch it bend.
Over thinking, over analyzing,
separates the body from the mind.
Withering my intuition, leaving opportunities behind.
Feed my will to feel this moment, urging me to cross the line.
Reaching out to embrace the random.
Reaching out to embrace whatever may come.
I embrace my desire to...
I embrace my desire to...
feel the rhythm,
to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow,
to feel inspired,
to fathom the power,
to witness the beauty,
to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral,
to swing on the spiral,
to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human.
With my feet upon the ground,
I move myself between the sounds and open wide to suck it in.
I feel it move across my skin.
I'm reaching up and reaching out.
I'm reaching for the random or whatever will bewilder me,
whatever will bewilder me.
And following our will and wind,
we may just go where no one's been.
We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been.
Spiral out. Keep going.
Spiral out. Keep going.
Spiral out. Keep going.
Spiral out. Keep going."
it's pretty good anyway you look at it. what turns me off some guys like dylan, cohen, and some of the other great songwriters is that they fuck around trying to hard to get something right when going the natural route would have worked better. i almost wanted to piss on dylan's "modern times" CD for exactly that reason. there's too much egoism in those guys, and someone like woody guthrie (whom dylan treats like a hero) is much better for sake of keeping it simple and sticking to what's out there while wondering about what there might be. his music is always going somewhere.
what i really enjoy about lateralus is that it's sort of inviting you to go where people may or may not feel comfortable (the sound seems to achieve that better than the lyrics do, which is actually pretty amazing), and it hangs on the theme of will and desire. maybe it's a bit ambiguous about what happens with reason but i guess the song is treating reason like a tool that gets us lost, and then (the song) brings us back to the point where we're feeling like we've all got some common ground that we can tread. but that's not enough because we've got to open up to something more visceral, viz. whatever allows to experience stuff that blows us away. the other way to see it would be to suggest that it's reason that does the work and so it's never dumped along the way. but the spirit and desire talk sort of makes the first way of seeing it more apparent.
that doesn't really capture the feel of the song but the point is that in a way what makes the song really great is that it deliberately lacks a clear subject/object and in a way it completely disregards such dichotomies anyway. the whole thing is pretty rhizhomatic in a way that i think guys like the writers of _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ would really appreciate:
"Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible to neither the One or the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five etc. It is not a multiple derived from the one, or to which one is added (n+1). It is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of coinsistency, and from which the one is always subtracted (n-1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessairly changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphisis. Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, the rhizome is made only of lines; lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. These lines, or ligaments, should not be confused with lineages of the aborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and positions...Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detatchable, connectable, reversable, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight.(see Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21)"
what tool does in the song is a bit like what deleuze was doing to western postulations about reason and how knowledge is seen as a tree with all these branches which stem from epistemology or possibly science; the contrast drawn by deleuze is the rhizhome whereas for tool it's actually the spiral. ofc some people might substitute the abyss, the web, gray areas, etc to build on similar "paradigms" which are basically the opposite of paradigms.
sorry got caught up in the moment and pooped a tl;dr. hope it was relevant.
This post has been edited by RewtheBrave on Sat - Mar 6 2010 - 14:01:47 