Brushfire fairytales

Itsy bitsy diamond wells

Big fat hurricanes

Yellow bellied given names

Well shortcuts can slow you down

And in the end we’re bound

To rebound off of we

Well dust off your thinking caps

Solar powered plastic plants

Pretty pictures of things we ate

We are only what we hate

But in the long run we have found

Silent films are full of sound

Inaudibly free

Slow down everyone

You’re moving too fast

Frames can’t catch you when

You’re moving like that

Inaudible melodies

Serve narrational strategies

Unobtrusive tones

Help to notice nothing but the zone

Of visual relevancy

Frame-lines tell me what to see

Chopping like an axe

Or maybe Eisenstein should just relax

Slow down everyone

You’re moving too fast

Frames can’t catch you when

You’re moving like that

Well Plato’s cave is full of freaks

Demanding refunds for the things they’ve seen

I wish they could believe

In all the things that never made the screen

Slow down everyone you’re moving too fast

Frames can’t get you when you moving like that

Slow down everyone you’re moving too fast

Frames can’t get you when you moving like that

Moving too..

“According to a radio interview, Jack wrote this song while he was still in college. He had a paper to write, but he didn’t want to, so he was screwing around with his guitar. He wrote part of this song then which was “Slow down Bruce Lee, you’re moving too fast”. There is an impressive fact that during filming some of Bruce Lee’s martial arts movies he punched too fast that the regular 24 frames per second video wasn’t high enough and you basically couldn’t see his movement. There are loads of videos online that show this if you want to check it out and Bruce was actually asked to go slower so they could film him properly.

‘Bruce Lee’ became ‘everyone’ and from that line the song took grew and morphed into its final shape.

To most people I think this song seems to be about a sense of the 21st century lifestyle being too fast paced. That perhaps we’re missing the point in trying to live too fast and too goal driven. I also think that this song is critical of TV and our relationship with it and it shows a great sense of longing for a time before all of this.

The first 4 lines of this song are hard to decipher but I think they are supposed to be all the terrible things we see on TV such as news stories of brushfires and hurricanes; of diamond mines and maybe politicians?

The lines “rebound off of we” and “shortcuts can slow you down” I think is meant to be about how we are working against ourselves in by living too fast. That by living too fast, ‘taking shortcuts’, we are getting further away from what he thinks we should be aiming for.

Well dust of your thinking caps is a call for us to examine what we’re doing. We have got to the point of making solar powered plastic plants. Which if you think about it is completely ridiculous. Real plants are solar powered through photosynthesis. This could be representing how far consumerism has gone.

‘In the long run we have found silent films are full of sound, inaudibly free’. Obviously silent films, if you have ever seen one, aren’t silent, but contain a lot of music. This was used to convey what was happening on screen at any time; to build tension, to show sympathy or whatever the director wanted to convey. This practice declined when ‘talkies’ came in. ‘Talkies’ are the film format that we’re used to today where there is more dialogue than music. I think these lines are trying to say how what is an old an outdated medium or maybe lifestyle was still full of meaning. Maybe even this is better and now we have lost our connection to this older meaning.

Then we come to the chorus. In its new form it’s a call for us to return to the way things used to be. To stop the change that has been happening.

The inaudible melodies, the music from silent films and the ideas we’ve become disconnected from are really important. This is repeated in the next three lines with different words. The ‘unobtrusive tones’ help you to live well, to see what’s important.

Now frame lines tell him what to see. I think this means media tells us what to see, how to see the world, how we should act. We are influenced by it in often bad ways. Note at this time that he was at film school in California. A far different culture to that of Hawaii where he grew up and maybe this song is about the difference between these two places or maybe just the change he has seen happening with time.

“Eisenstein” or Sergei Eisenstein was an experimental Russian film director. He was very influential in driving cinema towards its current style. But in particular he invented the technique of montage. Where you chop together bits of unrelated scenes together to build an overall idea but without the detail. The call for him to relax is again in reference to this songs overarching theme. That the important things are being left out.

Back to the chorus.

Plato’s cave in its roughest form is a thought experiment laid out by Plato. So you have some people in a cave chained up facing a wall all their lives and their heads are stopped from turning so that all they can see is the wall of the cave in front of them. Behind them outside the entrance of the cave, there is a busy marketplace. But the people can never see it directly, all they can see is the shadows of these people cast on their wall. So they grow up thinking that all that exists is shadows, not any people connected to them. These cave ‘freaks’ who don’t know the real world outside the cave are the 21st century livers. They miss the point, miss the detail, they are almost blind to the way things really are. They demand “refunds for the things they’ve seen” I think is a reference to the law suit culture that had been growing especially in the USA. He wishes that they could see all the things that don’t make it onto tv. This links back to his call that ‘Eisenstein should just relax’. That we are missing out on a lot of important things that don’t make the media.

In summary I think this song is about what we can potentially miss by living in the 21st century and a call for us to not get swept away in that kind of lifestyle. I think it is a very nostalgic piece and has great longing for the way things used to be.

Do you agree? Leave me a comment below if you have anything to say about it.