Karls Poetry
 

i cant remember if i made a post on this before or not, either way, im doing it again.

what got me so into Underworld was Karls lyrics. his way with words and random they were. it evoked a feeling and mood i knew he was trying to get across. i realized that even though the lyrics as random as they may be hit "the right spot" to recreate that feeling.

in some cases, hes telling a story. for example:

skym.
-----

mmmmm...

do you still feed the animal?

animalfinger
fingeronthephone
curvearoundcorners

do you still feed the animal?

yourmuffledvoice
isairupthesideofyourhead

and the wires come in

open eyes close us
(slide beneath the city)
slide beneath the city
and the feet in the streets above us
(and your voice again)
and your voice again
(and your voice again)
(and your voice again)

i dont want you to call again

do you still feed the animal?

muffled madness

quietcalmprevadeher
i couldn't go through this again

you say you love her
you know you love her
you never want to be without her

you say you never want to hurt her
you know you hurt her

how many lives you've lived
how many hurts you've done
how many times you've come to this place
how much you want it

you say you love her

do you-


at first hes asking if you feed the animal. now at first one would think, what, this man is mad!

but if you think deeper hes asking someone, a woman, if she stills feeds the animals, likesay, a DOG!
and then he goes in and out of the story telling and the mood evoking poetry.

then towards the end hes talking to the guy, the girls boyfriend. and giving him advice through rhetorical questions. just like in Born Slippy! Well, without rhetorical questions.


has anyone else noticed his magical poetry?

im sure most of you have, this is just one of those things i think everyone knows but never talks about.

cheers

Re: Karls Poetry
 

What often gets to me is Karl's fascination with phones. I can relate very much to a lot of his lyrics in that respect.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

Yes! "Beaucoup Fish" is loaded with phone refs..."Push Upstairs", "Push Downstairs", "Moaner", "Skym", "Jumbo"...probably some others i'm forgetting!

i admire what Karl's said about the voice being an instrument, so that the sound of the words is what matters rather than having a clear story. It's like concept art, and very much poetry. A definition of poetry that i remember from school is: "The best words in the best order". That's what Karl does, i think! The beats and grooves are paramount to this type of music, so it's such a cool treat that Karl's words are so good, too! Frankly, i prefer the sort of spoken/shouted style of vocals on tracks like "Pearl's Girl" and "Born Slippy" to some dance track with a diva singing "Whoaoaoaa! take me hiiiigher!":p Apples and oranges, i know, but still.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

Karl is definitely one of my favourite lyricists and his lyrics are definitely the strong points of much of their work.

I don't grasp the meaning exactly all the time and I don't think you're supposed to. I enjoy analysing my responses to the music and the words over and over as I go through their music, trying to pinpoint the emotions they evoke and their meaning to me. Songs like SolaSistim are for some reason very moving to me. Other songs express anger or feelings of mystery and of joy.

Whatever the words do to me in the end, it is an uplifting and inspirational experience that drives me to think about life. What is does is really really difficult to describe I think but for me a line that perfectly illustrates this is:

I'm just a waitress she said.

The unexpected randomness of this is brilliant and you automatically try to link it with the words:

now I kiss you dark and long

that went before making you think about a relationship between two people. The emotion of the song changes from dark, broody sexuality into a feeling of smallness in the world, the big city or wherever, and the dark feel to the song empowers this smallness. The line I'm just a waitress... therefor all of a sudden sounds very pure, sweet and innocent. Something meaningful is established in the world between these two people and the lines that follow after it might support this (not that that is necessary) but to me that onel ine shows the essence of Underworld. The ability to trigger in you this pure emotion of identifying yourself and your place in this world.

I just reread this and once again I failed to explain it as I feel it. I tried to write such a thing down for myself earlier but I can't exactly define the meaning I attach to Karl's words and underworld's music in general. Ah well I tried. Hope it makes a bit sense.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

its expressionism.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

One of the reasons I'm such a big advocate of music from India and Africa.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

As is Dirty Epic. I often wonder if "channel six" is in reference to CB, tying in with the "phone sex" part.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

yes!

the local college station here played some music from India and Africa. Sure i didnt understand what the person was saying. But it was so cool. The drums and guitars and whatever else they used meshed so well that i still got the point.

yes, the voice is an instrument of music.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

...except in the case for Bjork's last 2 albums
BURN!

:D

Re: Karls Poetry
 

hahahha. so true

:D


but i agree. i got into underworld first because the sounds were so fresh to me at that time, but then they became my favorite band when i started to get into the lyrics and the feelings that they were presenting

Re: Karls Poetry
 

Always felt like "stream of consciousness" to me.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

I thought most of it was snippets of found dialogue.

Re: Karls Poetry
 

http://www.dirty.org/forums/showthread.php?t=432 :)

Re: Karls Poetry
 

for the time being, i won't go into analyzing what karl's words mean to me. but i have to say that they are fresh and certainly different from the standard i've mainly seen from other lyricists. what i mean is, he doesn't try to write something catchy which everyone will sing along to, or put his feelings and thoughts into a long poem-like form like we see in most songs.

so, it was different for me at first since i hadn't experienced something like his lyrics but now i'm quite hooked and the randomness does not bother me at all. just my thoughts...

Re: Karls Poetry
 

i think that's partly true, although I think of it more as a scrapbook sort of thing. He writes down a lot of stuff in notebooks, which might be a conversation overheard, or just some thought he gets thinking about the colour blue. They might be recollections of dreams, events or emotions. It's also very geographical. Karl once said that some of the lyrics are almost like a road map (lots of references to streets and tubestations in london for example) What I love about it is that it's mysterious, but at the same time very much linked to the real world. Real people, real places, but seen from a different perspective. He picks out all this stuff, all this detail that seems mundane at first (a phone conversation, traveling with the underground, a can of coca cola) but manages to find and extract the beaty from these things.

...it's also about sex a lot ;)

Re: Karls Poetry
 

i understand it as meaning that that's the channel his video's running off...