Help? Thoughts?.. on Cropduster.
bovy_j
Posts: 1,008
Ok, so I just really, really started getting into this song, it's just become one of my new favorites. Yet, I can't fucking figure out what it means, I can't even attempt it. Anyone wish to let me know what they think/know the song's about?
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This is the circle of life - the whole "from ashes you came and to ashes you will return" jazz.
Again, circle of life. You die to give new life.
I think Ed is pointing out our main flaw here - we think we control the world, the elements... We think we "think the world", but in fact, we do nothing of the sort, slaves to the earth as we are.
This part I'm not so sure about - perhaps Ed is saying that just because we don't control life, as such, doesn't mean we can't find beauty in it... an "upside".
Two circles, one rolling around the other. Man = moon. We're just rolling around this earth. A perfect image to end the song on.
Every last bit of that is subjective of course.;)
Wow, that just fucking owned my life. It really does sound like its possible when you think of it.
I've given the song a lot of thought lately, cos I've been experiencing the same thing you're going through... A strange fascination with the song, without really knowing much about it (other than the fact that it rocks:p)
I'm hoping someone can put some other spin on it tho, and completely change my outlook on it... that's always fun!:D
Pretty much nailed my take on the song.
I absolutely hated cropduster when i first heard it. After listening over and over, I finally got a taste for it. Now it is probably in my top ten PJ songs of all time. Fantastic themes and complexity, great Matt drumming as well
We don't know what or who to trust... parents, school, religion, government, TV, internet... they all tell us their version of the way it is, and they present it as truth, and at first we don't even think to doubt them... yet they have all at some point been wrong, and some of these "authorities" have even outright lied to us. Worse, with some it seems to be the pattern.
Then the artist in us speaks up. Tells us to believe what we see. Relax and take in the moment the Zen monk yells. Yet, eventually, even our trust in these "truths" diminishes. I saw things while on LSD that were not really happening. (For those not interested in hallucinogens, nightly dreams provide the similar example - we see and fully experience things that "feel real" but turn out only to be dreams.) So we send the artist and the Zen monk packing.
So we cannot trust the traditional authorities. We cannot seem to even trust our own thoughts. Then what is real? Is anything real?
The only thing we can be sure of is that we are thinking of all these f*cked up things. I don't know what's real, what's a sham, what's truth, what's lie... but I CAN be certain that I am thinking about them. That is the only rock-solid fact upon which to build the rest of my world. I am thinking right now. No one can take that away.
There's some point inside my head that wonders, that thinks. That's my identity. That's me. I'm safe and you can't get to that.
That's classic "cogito ergo sum" - "I think therefore I am" from Descartes. But it comes with problems. From this point of view, everything else can be doubted. I know I can be misled, ie. I can simply be dreaming of all of this. So nothing else can be known for sure. Even if you and I meet at a concert, you may be in my head. I would not be able to tell, it would appear the same either way - real or imagined.
It's all in my head. "I thought the world." It is secure... but lonely. Isolated. This is "solipsism."
This identity has been challenged.
How poetic it's angst, but it's too simplistic. It doesn't represent how it really is. The reality is that we "discovered" ourselves when we were babies in fragments. We saw a foot flailing here, we tasted a thumb there, we accidentally scratched our own face and it hurt. This way, a flash at a time, our conception of "me" was formed. At some point we may have even caught a glimpse of our own reflection out there. Also, we were learning about ourselves thru other people. Mommy, daddy, anyone who interacted with us... gave us clues. They were interacting with someone, oh that someone is me. (This development of identity theory was put forth by Lacan after he did psychological tests. He called it the "mirror theory.") But this is uncomfortable, not neat and tidy. Because it says that our conception of "me" which we once thought rock-solid, really comes from others - it comes from outside of ourselves. Our own formative thoughts of our "selves" were thoughts of "other." I am foreign to myself. And I always have been.
Even the way you think is not your own. At the very least you were born into a language. And it uses subject-verb-object. So now you think that way. IT IS NOT YOUR CHOICE HOW YOU THINK, it never was your choice. Our particular language insists on "I" and "me" etc. So we start to feel intuitively that there is this point in our head that is thinking. But that was determined by the language we were born into.
You couldn't even conceive of it being any other way, because you are not able to have thoughts like that. "Turns out the world thought me."
An example to illustrate Lacan's mirror theory: I'm standing on Virginia Beach in the rain before my first Pearl Jam show, their first of that tour. And this thin, golden-tanned girl with perfect breasts in a tiny pink bikini with a Hindi character tattoo on the small of her back bounces by to get out of the rain. I see perfect beauty. Even if she's in my head, thank god for that, she can stay. No they can't take that away from me. But not so... what I find to be beautiful is mediated thru the mirror of my culture. Some aborigine somewhere would think that the hot chick looks silly, he sees beauty in fat round women with plates stretching their lower lip out and rings stretching their neck longer and longer. And at first I think "so what?" Alright so she's not simply in my head, she's reflected back to me thru the prism of society. Who cares? She's still f*cking fantastic to see. But here's the "so what" -- one of the elements of that culture, that society, is a corporate element. Their marketing teams with budgets in the billions tell me what is beautiful. And they have a fiduciary responsibility to make their owners rich. So beauty is tainted by greed. Even the perception of pure beauty is not my own.
So anyway, there's the explanation. I think it's less about the cycles in physical nature than it is about the process of coming to psycological awareness. And it seems not about control of our world, but about the formation of our identity. Not slaves to the earth, but slaves to the other.
These words are the move from a solid but solitary self image ("I thought the world") to an unstable fragmented one ("the world thought me.")
It's the move from solipsism to schizophrenia.
Way to go, Eddie.
ps. If you happen to read this, you in the pink bikini from Virginia Beach... I love you. I always have.
I'll be the first to admit I didn't know the words that well even though I bought the CD on the day it came out. I thought this was purely a song advocating on behalf of the environment as the title is a plane that spreads pesticides . . . isn't it? Very interesting song. I really like the development in the first part. Some parts are over my head as always, but that first part was very well done.
I like how points of reference are given; "light green to green, dark green, brown" it's almost like Eddie is taking the listener on a trip by saying follow me. The music really adds to this almost instructional tone as it supports the point by point reference. Going from point A to point B, going from point B to point C etc. This occurs throughout the first section, and it leads the listener into the song, and into the mindset of the lyricist.
Then Eddie starts to take the listener on a different path, one where it's not so easy to follow, and maybe it's not suppose to be. However, within this confusion is exploration and similarities, how one entity and another is in the world. By noticing this the listener is able to feel empathy for another species. I think the garden reference is a Garden of Stone reference. It would make sense here as the lyrics paint the portraits of two deaths.
The chorus is where I feel that my original guess of the meaning comes out in full-force. It's an admonishment on our behaviors. If we felt the empathy Eddie lead us into discovering then our behaviors would not be practicing but fully conscious and aware. The next stanza may have a reference for Given to Fly as the protagonist in that song seems very comfortable in situations not just rightside up. Also, the line we're upside down could reference that we descended from monkeys? There's a turning turning, upside down feeling.
I must admit that the part where the music supports the movement within the words the best is the last line "the moon is rolling round the world." There is rolling within the music, and it fits very well. In the stanza that ends "we're upside down" the relationship is not as close.
The next stanza that starts "dad, he's gone up in flames" throws me for a loop. Flames could be a cremetorium, it could be hell. I don't think the line is "my dad's gone up in flames", but more like "dad, that other man has gone up in flames." To understand it I went back to the title. Cropdusters also used to drop napalm, didn't they? So, thinking in those terms, this stanza makes sense as maybe people didn't realize the affects of napalm until a movie about it came out. The truth about Viet Nam, which I'm assuming is still being discovered and discarded, could easily be what exposes the big lie.
The dad reference, why the dad reference? Maybe, asking to support him as he figures things out? I ususally look at the speaker in Pearl Jam songs as a general protagonist, but with the dad reference, I look at the song from Eddie's point of view. Because of this I have a increased chance of getting it completely wrong. Thoughts assigned to a concept, a general protagonist, can be re-evaluated, but thoughts assigned to an actual person can be argued.
Fluency, fluency, I love the word, it's definitely about language, and thought, communication. Eddie is like a docent in a museum throughout this song; look at this over here, notice this over there. He's directed us in a way to look at connections via empathy; and to see how the words can add power to that empathy. It is truly direction particulary because of the instructional tone in the first stanza. At the same time he realizes that he also needs help/direction to understand any verbal chaos, and that is when he calls out to his dad. I'm glad I finally took a look see at this song.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird