Where a Song Hits You, or the Prescience of Michael Stipe
One day, not long after 9/11, I was listening to one of my favorite REM albums, Lifes Rich Pageant (no, there isn't an apostrophe there). As I was listening, I felt a chill run up my spine as the words to the song "Fall on Me" slowly wended their way through my wounded psyche:
There's a problem, feathers iron
Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys
Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air
Buy the sky and sell the sky
and tell the sky and tell the sky
Don't fall on me (What is it up in the air for) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (If it's there for long) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (It's over it's over me) (It's gonna fall)
There's the progress we have found (when the rain)
A way to talk around the problem (when the children reign)
Building towered foresight (keep your conscience in the dark)
isn't anything at all (melt the statues in the park)
Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky
Don't fall on me (What is it up in the air for) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (If it's there for long) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (It's over it's over me) (It's gonna fall)
Don't fall on me
Well I would keep it above
But then it wouldn't be sky anymore
So if I send it to you you've got to promise to keep it whole
Buy the sky and sell the sky and lift your arms up to the sky
And ask the sky and ask the sky
Don't fall on me (What is it up in the air for) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (If it's there for long) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (It's over it's over me) (It's gonna fall)
Don't fall on me
The morning of 9/11, I was running late for work. Normally, I would have had CNN on, catching the headlines of the day, but that day, I didn't. I was halfway to the door when the phone rang. It was my wife's aunt.
(Frustrated) "Hello?"
(Frantic) "Scott, this is Barb. Turn on the TV. Something's happened at the World Trade Center."
(Irritated at being made even later) "Okay, I'll do it."
It was about five after seven, Pacific Time, when I turned on CNN to see the horribly altered Manhattan skyline. I'd grown up with the notion of the twin towers - seeing the remake of "King Kong" and visiting New York City all within six months of each other sealed the notion in my head. When I thought of Manhattan, it was those two towers, not the Empire State Building or the Chrysler building of previous generations.
The first tower had fallen.
I, too, fell, to my knees. I think I yelled; I don't really remember.
I watched for about five minutes, resigning myself to the fact that there was only going to be one World Trade Center building in Manhattan from then on.
As I was driving up Highway 14, staring at the glacier-capped peak of Mt. Hood on a flawless late summer morning, I heard the second tower fall, live, on the radio.
Now, "Fall On Me" was written in 1986, and is vaguely about pollution, if analysts of Michael Stipe's sometimes muddled writing are to be believed. But, suddenly, in the events of that morning, the song took on a much sadder, much more ominous meaning.
Please indulge me as I offer my own critical analysis of the song. Troy, Karen, rom, wouldn't this be from the school of reader response? All those guys from Lit Crit (Barth, Eco, Derrida, Fish) tend to swirl around in my brain. I had to take Lit Crit twice. The first time was a disastrous run with Dr. Samuelson that I ended up dropping - the second time was with the more easygoing Dr. Pomeroy. (Pulled a B+).
(my criticism in bold - others are invited to agree, disagree, or tell me I'm a loony):
There's a problem, feathers iron ( feathers = flying = airplane, iron = iron-framed buildings)
Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys (commerce and trade, elevators)
Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air (planes struck the buildings before our response, or "weight", civil or military, could respond. Also could refer to the nightmare of people leaping or falling from the buildings.)
Buy the sky and sell the sky (again, commerce and business in the WTC)
and tell the sky and tell the sky
Don't fall on me (What is it up in the air for) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (If it's there for long) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (It's over it's over me) (It's gonna fall)
There's the progress we have found (when the rain)
A way to talk around the problem (when the children reign) (previous method of always negotiating with hijackers)
Building towered foresight (keep your conscience in the dark) (America blissfully sleeping the morning of 9/11 and in the years before)
isn't anything at all (melt the statues in the park) (the crushed bronze statue found in the wreckage, now in Battery Park)
Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky (bleed the sky - self-explanatory)
Don't fall on me (What is it up in the air for) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (If it's there for long) (It's gonna fall) (30-year-old towers)
Fall on me (It's over it's over me) (It's gonna fall)
Don't fall on me
Well I would keep it above
But then it wouldn't be sky anymore
So if I send it to you you've got to promise to keep it whole
Buy the sky and sell the sky and lift your arms up to the sky
And ask the sky and ask the sky (millions, imploring God "Why?")
Don't fall on me (What is it up in the air for) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (If it's there for long) (It's gonna fall)
Fall on me (It's over it's over me) (It's gonna fall) Don't fall on me
posted by scooter @ 7:46 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Scott,
I simply cannot top Romy here; she's too funny, too smart, and too good. But I would say you are right scooter: this is reader-response at its wildest.
I tell my students that any poem may have several possible meanings (is Stopping by Woods about suicide, life crisis, simple desire for death (or the death force) or just a fantastic wish to connect to nature in its fullness, including its danger?) but that any interpretation they argue must be based on the text or on actual historical/biographical data. Old school new critical mixed with the conventional historicism they hated pretty much. I've found this kind of approach yields information which directly relates to the work and which students can actually use as readers.
So Stopping by Woods can be about many things, but not, say, baseball. There is no support for that interpretation in the poem or anywhere else (what if we knew the speaker was describing the wooded area where Frost coached little league every spring, ah, there's something; but we don't have that).
So what you're doing with Stipe is similar to what people do with Nostradamus or Stairway to Heaven. And there's nothing wrong with it. But I would say you have found an application for Stipe's lyrics, not an interpretation. That's as much jargon as I can manage.
And on Freud in Flanders...I think libidinal theory is dead wrong; I think most of what Freud says is wrong, except for the concept of the unconscious and the psycho-pathology of everyday living (but not in his details as I remember them). But surely, if Freud is discussing unconscious forces which have been at work in all authors and hence all texts throughout history...then one can certainly discuss the phallus/i in Moll. So to speak. Why not? An author doesn't have to have read Freud, or have been informed of him unconsciously via social idea exchange, to be analyzed using Freud's language. That's like saying electrons didn't exist in chemical reactions before quantum theory. But wait, do electrons exist?
Of course, I wouldn't want to be analyzed by Freud for any actual problem.
Well, you see my level of theoretical expertise. I was pretty mean at it once, oh about 1991 or 92, at least by state college standards. Now I'd rather listen to Garrison Keillor while a storm rolls in and sip hot toddy.
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