who's singin' Bruce?

[fflo]

in my brain:

... let me in: I wanna be your friend;
I want to guard your dreams and visions.
Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims
And strap your hands 'cross my engines ...

Comments

[groovesinorbit]

Not me. Must be vjsmom.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I was thinking it was somebody in the office...

it's definitely me

[homovegetarian.livejournal.com]

tho' i've actually been listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town, rather than Born to Run, obsessively this week.

baby this town rips the bones from your back
it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
we've gotta get out while we're young

Re: it's definitely me

[fflo.livejournal.com]

tramps like us, baby!

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Clearly someone with better diction. I never understood more than a few more words...

Run me in: I wanna garble end;
I want American dreams and visions.
Just wrap your legs around the tired rims
And strap your hands 'cross my engines

Together Mandy we can mumble flap
It's a death trap, a suicide rap
We wanna mumble while we still run
Cause trams like us baaby we was born to run...

On the other hand, I deeply love the music. It has a dramatic structure and energy that simply blows me away every time, absolutely transcending the incomprehensible drunken biker lyrics.

I think it was an Edgar Allen Poe story about a mad doctor who loves this girl but hates her birth mark, so he invents this birthmark-burning-out machine, and he uses it on the girl only to discover that this birthmark, the flaw he obsesses about, goes allt he way town to the girl's soul, so he kills her in the process of trying to perfect her. SO it is with that song...the vocals don't do it for me, but aside from that, it's a perfect song, but if you took out the vocals, like the Poe's girl's birthmark, it would kill the song.

I feel like that mad doctor about a lot of art. There is often something irritating that is vital to a work. If I was cultured, I'd actually know what that story was called. I bet I could find it online and re-read it. Except, even though it's a great story, I don't really want to read it, because I don't like that message about how you can't get rid of imperfection. Maybe I could re-write it without that annoying moral, and it would be a perfect story.

[groovesinorbit]

That's why there's always a lyric sheet with Springsteen's albums.

Together Mandy we can mumble flap is even better than the original lyric, though. *giggle*

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Maybe the message isn't that you can't get rid of imperfection. I don't know the story, but my off-hand interpretation would be that, just as you conclude about Brooce, the whole process of getting rid of imperfection is not such a hot idea---or anyway it may lead to bad things with the potentially obsessive. And the other message is that Poe (or whoever) probably enjoyed waxing grisly.

Me, I wish that the otherwise wonderful "Thunder Road" didn't have the line "The door's open but the ride it ain't free"---the door to his car, cuz she's gonna take that long walk from her front door to his front seat. I mean, maybe it's just me, but the price, in association with the car, always comes off to me like a "gas, grass or ass---and I don't mean gas or grass" kind of line. Like he might as well have said "from your front door to my back seat."

I suppose I shouldn't get peevish about any inference of teenage dude wanting to get some, but I do. Or I did back then, at least.

But "Born to Run" does have the kind of energy & delivery that sorta makes you want to "mumble flap" with its narrator, y'know?

i always thought. . .

[homovegetarian.livejournal.com]

well, i fell in love with broooce because he always sang about getting the hell out of dodge, in a dodge, if necessary. and i always (proof of geekdom if this is what you are thinking at 12) thought he was saying that even if you hate everything (people and place) about where you are from and there is really nothing there for you, leaving that much of yourself behind is always a high price to pay, whatever the benefit.

Re: i always thought. . .

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I was at least 25 before it even occurred to me he might have been referring to another (larger? different, anyway) price. And yeah, it's funny that salvation, or self-rescue/escape, or whatever the hell one wants to call getting outta Dodge, has that price. I was a lot older than 25 when I got my first good glimpse of that notion.

Not Poe after all

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Thanks to the modern miracle of Google, I know the story was "The Birthmark" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I skimmed the beginning somewhere online, an realized that that the thing I didn't like wasn't the moral I stated, but the anti-science attitude--the idea that science is about ruining nature, rather than understanding nature.

Re: Not Poe after all

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Hey, another laugh-a-minute guy! Those 19th century folk often seemed to think about nature v. science, savage v. culture(d), dichotomies along those lines. And there was a godlessness or intentlessness of nature theme, too, I recall in certain works.

But I pretty much skipped that century in formal literary study myself.