Alive has sexual mother/son undertones?

Rolling Stone asked Ed the same question. I forget what his answer was. That just gets me thinking about how much I hate rolling stone :x .

Its how you interpret it really. I had never thought that myself. Plus is just seems that from various examples Ed doesn't write those kind of lyrics. Its all open to interpretation but then there'd be a handful of other songs I suppose, I can't think of them off hand.
So basically my opinion is no. It doesn't have those tones, Pearl Jam has never seemed like the kind of band that would appeal to people with interests in their mothers. I guess we could if we wanted Freud up every song they had that would be fun. I think if you looking for songs about mommy loving stick with fountains of wayne was for.

It's legit... Pretty sure Ed wrote it that way because people would come over to his moms house and tell him how much he looked like his father (who had passed away)... So Ed took it further in the lyrics having the mom go after the son sexually because he looked like his dead dad. I could be wrong and tho haha.

Stephen Flow wrote:

It's legit... Pretty sure Ed wrote it that way because people would come over to his moms house and tell him how much he looked like his father (who had passed away)... So Ed took it further in the lyrics having the mom go after the son sexually because he looked like his dead dad. I could be wrong and tho haha.

hmm. i thought it was semi-based on Ed's real life experience of finding out his bio-father was a man he had never met, after he had died and it was too late to ever know him... the rest of it is sort of a fictionalized account of trauma after that... but now i am realizing i can't actually find anything that confirms this exact interpretation... :ugeek:

CG49089 wrote:

I think he's saying its legit insofar as the sexual suggestion is intended in the lyrics... not necessarily that is Ed's actual experience...

i like what Ed said about the song during Storyteller's... about how an audience can sort of take a song about pain and turn it into a defiant anthem...

http://www.redorbit.com/news/entertainm ... index.html

Filling in background and inspiration for songs old and new, Vedder riffed on the abusive relationship at the heart of "Better Man" ("it's much more tricky to end them than I would have thought," he said) and explained how the audience response to "Alive" forever changed the song's meaning for him.

"In the original story, a teenager is being made aware of a shocking truth that leaves him plenty confused," he said of the tale, based on his own teenage discovery that the man he believed to be his biological father was actually not. "It was a curse -- 'I'm still alive."'

But as fans quickly turned the title phrase into a self-empowering anthem, particularly at Pearl Jam concerts, Vedder said, "they lifted the curse. The audience changed the meaning for me."

twojawas wrote:

People need to understand that while lyrics may be have autobiographical aspects, the songs in their entirety are works of fictions.

A lot of people have difficulties separating the person from the author, whether it be in literature or music.

+1

Alive, Jeremy, Black etc. are all semi-autobiographical works of fiction.

I agree with what people are saying in regard to the fact that although a song can be 'autobiographical' in nature it does not necessarily mean that all the lyrics in any particular song should be interpreted as such, I think it definitely insinuates sexual undertones in this song as can be heard in the numerous boots where Ed adds the line..

"She said I'm ready...to fuck you"

That kind of spells it out doesn't it?

semi autobiographical?

While obviously not every single verse and stanza that the band has written over the years is biographical or autobiographical, your examples were all exceptions in many ways. No, the band didnt witness the Jeremy incident, but its based on an actual incident. Its fact. Alive, while it may not be ALL about Ed, its clear it is a story about his life. Who else is he talking about here? He had a horrific childhood, his story with his father is exactly the same as portrayed in the Alive lyrics, and while I have never really heard Ed speak badly of his mom, again, who else is he talking about in these lyrics?

And Black, while no one but Ed knows about his love life, why couldnt Black be autobiographical? Its not like the lyrics talk about a person with 12 arms or a person that lives on Mars. My reading of the song is that its about a person missing a person they have broken up with, or who has broken up with them. While Ed could have been writing about someone else's love life, its not too far fetched to think Ed wrote this song based on actual experiences.

I always took Alive to be autobiographical. As I said, Ed has talked about his childhood. And it was pretty horrendous. He talked about how he didnt need to take drugs to make his life tragic.

I take the mother look/sexual overtones as fact, as something that really happened.

CG49089 wrote:

I think he's saying its legit insofar as the sexual suggestion is intended in the lyrics... not necessarily that is Ed's actual experience...

I'm pretty sure this is what Ed's answer to Rolling Stone was

One of the reasons why I avoid "Words and Music ... Communication" like the plague is that people who post there often display a complete lack of reading skills. If one were to study a bit of literary theory and criticism one would realise, as twojawas wisely pointed out, the distinction between the physical author of a work and a first person, authorial narrator. The authorial narrator, the "I" in any work is a textual effect. Regardless of authorial intention the physical author has no say on the range of meanings a reader might get from a work, because that physical author is not "in" the text. Self-reflexive or autobiographical though the piece may be, there is a distance between the life of the author and the art that seeks to construct a world of meaning. You know, that old binary of signified and signifier.

I privilege the reader, and not the author, in determining meaning or multiple meanings from texts. If a reader takes a Freudian, feminist, Marxist or any other approach, seeing underlying or often inadvertent assumptions about the world in the gaps and silences between the words, it's not for anyone to discount such a reading. Language is never stable, and neither is meaning, so how can there be any one central meaning of the work at the expense of another? If the Freudian/Oedipal reading of the lyric is well-argued, it's valid.

As for musicismylife78's comments, that's the equivalent of someone asking how many children Lady Macbeth had: it's outside speculation or over- identification that doesn't really have any bearing on salient textual analysis. There are gaps and silences to be studied in any text to bring out latent discourses, but there's also a case of filling in the blanks with something that's not necessarily there.

CG49089 wrote:

NothingIsEverything. wrote:

Stephen Flow wrote:

It's legit... Pretty sure Ed wrote it that way because people would come over to his moms house and tell him how much he looked like his father (who had passed away)... So Ed took it further in the lyrics having the mom go after the son sexually because he looked like his dead dad. I could be wrong and tho haha.

hmm. i thought it was semi-based on Ed's real life experience of finding out his bio-father was a man he had never met, after he had died and it was too late to ever know him... the rest of it is sort of a fictionalized account of trauma after that... but now i am realizing i can't actually find anything that confirms this exact interpretation... :ugeek:

I think he's saying its legit insofar as the sexual suggestion is intended in the lyrics... not necessarily that is Ed's actual experience...

this is exactly what i was trying to say.