Alive has sexual mother/son undertones?
(I just posted this over in Words and Communication, but I thought it might get more views here)
I was checking out the wikipedia PJ entry and it states that Alive has sexual undertones between mother and son... that the mother makes advances to the son who resembles the deceased father.
"Oh, she walks slowly...
Across a young man's room...
She said I'm ready, for you...
I can't remember... Anything to this very day...
'Cept the look... the look.. oh
You know where...
Now I can't see... I just stare. "
How much legitimacy is there to this? I always kinda thought of the song as Ed's mom telling him who his real father was... but this would add a whole new level of twisted-ness. I figured I would go to the experts here
I always kinda thought of the lyrics in that verse as being a bit suggestive... but I guess I never made any assumptions... because that's a pretty serious assumption to make.
I was checking out the wikipedia PJ entry and it states that Alive has sexual undertones between mother and son... that the mother makes advances to the son who resembles the deceased father.
"Oh, she walks slowly...
Across a young man's room...
She said I'm ready, for you...
I can't remember... Anything to this very day...
'Cept the look... the look.. oh
You know where...
Now I can't see... I just stare. "
How much legitimacy is there to this? I always kinda thought of the song as Ed's mom telling him who his real father was... but this would add a whole new level of twisted-ness. I figured I would go to the experts here
I always kinda thought of the lyrics in that verse as being a bit suggestive... but I guess I never made any assumptions... because that's a pretty serious assumption to make.
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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.
wow... very informative... always more to dig up I guess... thanks for that link
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...
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
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 totally agree. Hell, sometimes the lyrics are simply there to paint pictures that don't really have any true meaning other than how the listener perceives them. Sometimes the stories are simple, sometimes more philosophically complex. Whatever it may be, it's all great shit
"She said I'm ready...to fuck you"
That kind of spells it out doesn't it?
Yeah, Atlanta 94 has that on it. Just listened to it this morning. Agree with all the posters who said it is semi-autobiographical. But a mother/son relationship isnt that off the walls when compared with the lyrics in Once & Footsteps...lines about backseatpassengers, his hand in his pocket nice n discreet
and then a whole song about a murderer reflecting on his choices while in prison. Kinda keeps the same tone the whole way through. Bit unusual for a Radio hit i guess though!
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.
I'm pretty sure this is what Ed's answer to Rolling Stone was
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.
Eddie: I don't know whose idea it was but it was turned down.
this is exactly what i was trying to say.
And you're not leaving here without me, I don't wanna be without
My best... friend. Wake up, to see you could have it all
Finbury, you suggested my post was off the wall, I assume thats what the Lady Macbeth statement meant. That it has no basis in this discussion. I dont know what you are smoking but you may want to look into cutting down.
+1
Once, Alive and Footsteps were all written in conjunction with each other...PJ's own 'mini-opera' as Ed stated in a VERY early Pearl Pam performance in Italy, I believe...(their first time there)
This is the Mamasan (Mama Son) trilogy. It's about a boy who is abused by his mother and becomes a serial killer as a result. Except for the first verse of Alive, it's NOT autobiographical!
Semi-autobiographical means it includes events that happened to him AND that didnt happen to him.
Jeremy - Partly inspired by the kid Jeremy from Texas that Ed read about in a paper. This made him think about & include references to a kid Ed use to fight with when he was in school.
Black - Basically this song is about something that happened to Ed, but he's written it in such a way that the song is more about the emotional toll on a person, rather than the specific event. There's nothing really "Biographical" in Black, because he speaks completely in metaphors, so its hard to know if he's talking about a dead lover, an ex-lover who's gone, an aborted baby, etc. So its inspired by an event in his life, but its hardly a biographical account of it
Alive - Ed himself has said its a dramacised version of his own story. Fins point seemed to say that there's enough in the lyrics to argue validly for AND against the mother/son sexual relationship. You can argue it, but you're inferring it as he actually talks about a man in the 3rd person. The lyrics to the song are not "I" and "me" like they are in Black. .
So you could argue (1) that it is his exact experience & Ed is merely saving public face when he says its fictionalised.... OR (2) you could say he presents a neutral story, which is in inspired by his own fucked-up childhood, except thinking about how more disturbed it could have been.
Personally, I would go with the 2nd argument because it completely explains the lyrics to Once and Footsteps. Doesnt really make sense the other way in the overall context that the songs were written as one piece, all on the same day.
It would seem that you have failed to understand the concept of an illustrative analogy. My analogy was this. A zealous feminist critic without the necessary grounding in feminist literary theory would try to explain Lady Macbeth's behaviour by overreading the line "I have given suck" and imagining her past history of infant mortality and probably abuses, to boot. Now this would be a misreading of the text because there's nowhere near enough textual or supporting evidence to back it up. This example is in common usage in academia to illustrate bad reading.
Now, my point which this analogy was illustrating (which I didn't think I had to labour, but here you go) is that by imagining that Pearl Jam lyrics are somehow evidence for sinister forms of childhood abuse on the actual author is, to me, a gross misreading of the text for which there is no supporting evidence in the body of the work itself. If you want to bring in interviews to back yourself up, then you have to blur the distinction between author and authorial narrator, and in all sincerity I'm not entirely certain you know the difference, or perhaps even between author, authorial narrator ... and listener?
So, my points are entirely relevant to this or any discussion about interpretation of meaning in song lyrics, as they would be in other forms of poetry, dramatic playtexts or prose fiction. One doesn't formulate a critical ability by "smoking" anything. One gets it by going to college and getting a couple of degrees in how to read things closely. Get it?
why are students of literary studies always so smarmy?
signed, a student of literary studies
I'm not a student, matey, I'm a master.
I enjoy your posts, sir, post on.
I'm gonna hate myself for asking, but based on whose assessment, your own?
Mohandas K. Gandhi
~I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.~
Henry David Thoreau