"when the fire's burning / from sky to ground / swing my weight around / begin the windstorm"

[larryhammer]

Current earworm, thanks to jennifergale: "Windstorm" by School of Seven Bells. Link is to the official video, which matches dreamlogic images to the dreamlogic lyrics.

It's gotten ahold of my brain-stem even more than "Half Asleep" ever did.

---L.

Comments

[jennifergale.livejournal.com]

It's earworming my kids now, too. The youngest keeps singing the line you quoted...

We (my daughters and I) had an interesting discussion regarding the lyrics yesterday. Em wanted to know what "the fire's burning from the sky to ground" might mean, which ended in a discussion about Nuclear bombs...er. Which is probably not what the lyrics refer to, but it was the first interpretation that came to mind. Such a sky-to-ground event is, after all, followed by a tremendous and terrible windstorm.

Which, of course, prompted questions and led to a discussion regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki...with a 4 and 6 year old. Um. (Clearly, I am a crazy parent who forgets how little her kids are.) It's interesting how quick they were to say, "that was really, really bad. Our country did that?" And, ack! The tears! My first encounter with that historical tidbit was prefaced by, "this act ended the war," which I didn't question until I was older and saw my first pictures from the event. And heard what happened at ground zero.

[larryhammer]

Just don't give them Barefoot Gen yet ...

Not an easy subject to teach. Two possibly useful picture books are Sadako and the Thousand Cranes and Hiroshima no Pika. I don't really remember what I thought about the bombs before meeting Hershey's Hiroshima in college and taking a Japanese history course -- which probably means I didn't think about it much. I was more worried, growing up in Cold War Washington, DC, about the bombs targeting me.

My main interpretation for the fire is lightning from the sort of thunderstorm with a strong gust-front, with a side order of it being possibly metaphor for the relationship that's falling apart in the verses.

---L.