"Just a line in a song" - Part one of four.

Welcome to the first of four weekly posts which Square is giving you. Take it, take it and enjoy it and love it forever.
I'm going to pick a song each week with some kind of interesting twist or that I just like, and talk about it in typings. My first, for this week, is 'Porcelain', by Moby. Listening to this song, as I have many times, I realised that the lyrics were in stark contrast with the music. Listen on youtube:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Fcaro25Ek

What are your perceptions of it so far? I thought that it was a pretty song, a song with a haunting but ultimately lovely sound, and one which could only talk of love. But no. Well, sort of; it's some good old bog-standard heartbreak. The lyrics, when you listen, tell a story of the deep frustration and angst of a love which was never fully returned, and the final break of that relationship. Through the contrast of lyric and melody, you feel some of the parodoxical contentment that the finality brings, with the regret and heartbreak of a severed love.
The inclusion of dreams and ideas of mortality in the verses synthesises the melody and lyrics in a way, as the ethereal piano and vocal, with the soft beat, all conjoin to make a record of that well known self-pitying (though no less valid for it) despair which comes from "This is goodbye".

Moby - Porcelain

Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.
Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.

In my dreams I'm dying all the time
Then I wake its kaleidoscopic mind
I never meant to hurt youI never meant to lie
So this is goodbye
This is goodbye

Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.
Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.
Tell the truth you never wanted me
Tell me...

In my dreams I'm jealous all the time
Then I wake I'm going out of my mind
Going out of my mind
Hey, Hey, Hey, Woman, it's alright.

Here, only half of the story is told, as after 'Tell me...' you really do get the sense of knowing your relationship is doomed. As the piano soars, the vocal kicks back in, it's a content yet conflicted contradiction, which just 'fits'.
The final aspect of the song is the self deprecation of the lover who has done wrong. The cliched "I never meant to hurt you, I never meant to lie" recreates the trite wording of a familiar feeling, something everyone understands.
Porcelain is about porcelain, how breakable and fragile it is, and dropping it on the floor, looking at all the pieces and admitting that you can't stick it back together.

The Insult of the Ancyent Marinere...

As I have recently been studying Coleridge's epic poem 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere', I noticed that many of the lines of the poem serve superbly as insults, which really pack a punch. If you fancy really pressing someone's buttons, I recommend any of the following snappy lines:

'Now get thee hence, thou grey-beard Loon!'
[You are as]'...broad as a weft'
'with black lips bak'd'
[You are covered in] 'mouldy damps and charnel crust
They're patch'd with purple and green.'
'Her skin is as white as leprosy'
'Her flesh makes the still air cold.'
'a ghastly crew'
'their stony eyeballs'
'it has a fiendish look'
'full plain I see,
The devil knows how to row.'

So there you go. Go away now, and offend at your will!
Cheerio
Sq.