Thursday, September 13, 2007

Entry for September 13, 2007

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Watching TV

Roger Waters

We were watching TV
In Tiananmen Square
Lost my baby there
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes
She was a short order pastry chef
In a Dim Sum dive on the Yangtze tideway
She had a shiny hair
She was a daughter of an engineer

Won't you shed a tear
For my yellow rose
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes
She had a perfect breasts
She had high hopes
She had almond eyes
She had yellow thighs
She was a student of philosophy

Won't you grieve with me
For my yellow rose
Shed a tear
For her bloodstained clothes
She had shiny hair
She had perfect breasts
She had almond eyes
She had yellow thighs
She was a daughter af an engineer

So get out your pistols
Get out your stones
Get out your knives
Cut them to the bone
They are the lackeys of the grocer's machine
They built the dark satanic mills
That manufacture hell on earth
They bought the front row seats on Calvary
They are irrelevant to me
And I grieve for my sister

People of China
Do not forget do not forget
The children who died for you
Long live the Republic
Did we do anything after this
I've feeling we did
We were watching TV
Watching TV
We were watching TV
Watching TV

She wore a white bandanna that said
Freedom now
She thought the Great Wall of China
Would come tumbling down
She was a student
Her father was an engineer

Won't you shed a tear
For my yellow rose
My yellow rose
In her bloodstained clothes
Her grandpa fought old Chiang Kai-shek
That no-good low-down dirty rat
Who used to order his troops
To fire on women and children
Imagine that imagine that
And in the spring of '48
Mao Tse-tung got quite irate
And he kicked that old dictator Chiang
Out of the state of China
Chiang Kai-shek came down in Formosa
And they armed the island of Quemoy
And the shells were flying across the China Sea
And they turned Formosa into a shoe factory
Called Taiwan

And she is different from Cro-Magnon man
She's different from Anne Boleyn
She is different from the Rosenbergs
And from the unknown Jew
She is different from the unknown Nicaraguan
Half superstar half victim
She's a victor star conceptually new

And she is different from the Dodo
And from the Kankabono
She is different from the Aztec
And from the Cherokee
She's everybody's sister
She's a symbolic of our failure
She's the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free

Because she died on TV
And I grieve for my sister
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6 comments:

  1. Tề PhiSeptember 13, 2007 at 5:12 PM

    Albeit one of my two most favorites of Roger Waters (together with Amused To Death), I never managed to understand why he mentioned about "yellow thighs", or "perfect breasts" for that matter. Can you explain? At times, I thought of it as lack of meaningful words, or a combination of laziness and arrogance ?! After listening to Roger Waters' post-PF songs I often find a weird sense of incompleteness - perhaps deliberately created to savor the bitterness and irony of his own philosophy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. siriusstarSeptember 14, 2007 at 12:12 AM

    Trong album "Amused to Death" ngoài bài What God Wants và Amused to Death thì bài này khá nổi tiếng do có lyrics quá độc :))

    ReplyDelete
  3. LinhSeptember 14, 2007 at 1:12 AM

    @Quốc Anh: yeah, I also think these words are weird, and even sound racist and sexist. Perhaps he wants to make a joke, or he wants to describe human body so that the readers are more connected to the girl in the song, she's no longer an abstract concept but a particular human being. Another hypothesis is that he wants to show the irony, sometimes people can "enjoy" the sorrow of other humans in watching comfortably on their TVs. They watch a dead on TV and see "yellow thighhs" "perfect breaths". This is reflected in the sentence "Half superstar half victim". That's the way people see her.

    ReplyDelete
  4. hanoiheesySeptember 14, 2007 at 3:05 AM

    Lời bài hát weird quá anh L, even "quá độc" (as above comment said) nữa ...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yankee Hates GlassesSeptember 16, 2007 at 5:26 AM

    Fears?

    ReplyDelete
  6. A _ jAzZy ( aka DĨN )September 17, 2007 at 1:09 AM

    I love everything that tell bad things about China :D
    Và yellow thighs thì thay cho blonde hair còn perfect breasts thì thay cho long legged ... có lẽ thế !!!

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