DON'T THINK (pt. 2): Paste whatever is on your clipboard right now into the window and hit SUBMIT!

-- AaronHz (aaronh...), September 18th, 2004.

1. cheap airline tickets to philippines
2. how to pay off credit cards
3. depression help
4. fantasy football
5. cheap airline tickets
6. music downloads
7. low interest credit cards
8. disneyland hotel
9. allergy relief
10. heli skiing

(Yes, I am now part of that collective too.)

No entry found for Ooh, fingers is another good option. I might have to vote for fingers, because they are a better sex.

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I don’t want a holiday in the sun
I wanna go to the new Belsen
I wanna see some history
Cos now I gotta reasonable economy.

An attempt to hear this as the statement of an individual subject could interpret the first three lines as a discussion of a choice of holidays or other journeys, with ‘new Belsen’ remaining mysterious. The fourth line, however, makes this ‘naturalistic’ interpretation less tenable. States, not individuals, have ‘reasonable economies’. If this is an individual, his idiolect is being signified as exceptionally eccentric. ‘Ideolect’ is Barthes’ term for the ‘plurality and co-existence of lexicons [discourses – DL] in one and the same person, the number and identity of these lexicons forming in some sort a person’s ideolect’.
But there is an alternative response to the lyrics of this first verse, one based on recognizing links between words and their connotations across rather than within the linear narrative. That is, words are connected by their membership of the same discourse in the world of communication beyond this particular song. Thus, the presence of ‘Belsen’ and ‘history’ suggests Nazism and the Second World War, while the addition of ‘reasonable economy’ sets up faint echoes of terms like the ‘German economic miracle’ (a media cliché of the 1960s and beyond to describe the rebuilding of West German prosperity). In this perspective, the lyric becomes something like a collage put together from the discourse of newspaper, advertising, pulp fiction, sensationalized history.
Further verses and the chorus offer more material to support this response: ‘Berlin Wall’, ‘Communist Call’, ‘World War Three’ all make an appearance. To hear the lyric as the product of a unified psychological subject it becomes increasingly necessary to regard the lyric’s ‘disconnected’ narrative form as itself a symptom of a state of psychological disturbance. Verse 3 begins: ‘Claustrophobia, too much paranoia/There’s too many closets, when will we fall. . . .’
The final vocal passage of the record, delivered in a recitative manner, provides a third dimension to the mode of the énoncé:

I can go over the Wall
This third rate B movie stuff
Cheap dialogue, cheap essential scenery

I’m gonna go over the Berlin Wall
Before they come under the Berlin Wall
I don’t understand this bit at all (three times)
Please don’t be waiting for me.

While line 1 can be read as part of a skeletal narrative scenario, as a sign of emotional intensity or as an example of Cold War obsessions with the Berlin Wall (including an ironic reversal of the conventional wisdom that people from East Berlin are those determined to climb the Wall), the next lines introduce a new point of reference. What is the ‘third rate B movie stuff’? – is this the (barely) unified psychological individual commenting on his own paranoia? Is it the producer of the ‘collage’ pronouncing on his raw material? Or is it a ‘performer’, a ‘Johnny Rotten’ making a comment about the words he has to sing, a comment which is returned to in the penultimate line: ‘I don’t understand this bit at all’?
There is no ‘correct’ way to hear the lyric. Where it differs from the bulk of lyrics is that the ‘I’ of the enonce is not forced to be unitary. A phrase like ‘reasonable economy’ can thus float towards the complex of meanings suggested by the other political reference points dotted throughout the lyric. While Johnny Rotten’s voice, the enonciation, still offers the pleasure of identification with a unified position, a different kind of pleasure – that which enjoys the transgression of the codes through which conventional meanings are constructed – is available for listeners to the lyric.

0

Calm (glassy)

0

1

Calm (rippled)

0 - 0.1

2

Smooth (wavelets)

0.1 - 0.5

3

Slight

0.5 - 1.25

4

Moderate

1.25 - 2.5

5

Rough

2.5 - 4

6

Very Rough

4 - 6

7

High

6 - 9

8

Very High

9 - 14

9

Phenomenal

over 14

Let faxes butter-curl on dusty shelves.
Let junkmail build its castles in the hush
of other people's halls. Let deadlines burst
and flash like glorious fireworks somwhere else.
As hours go softely by, let others curse
the roads where distant drivers queue like sheep.
Let e-mails fly like panicked, tiny birds.
Let phones, unanswered, ring themselves to sleep.

Above, the sky unrolls its telegram,
immense and wordless, simply understood:
you've made your mark like birdtracks in the sand -
now make the air in your lungs your livelihood.
See how each wave arrives at last to heave
itself upon the beach and vanish. Breathe.

Ros Barber