de-gendering song lyrics, randomly

Thu, 16 May 2024 05:27:45 GMT

Oh hello. I wonder when and if anyone might read this--my friends feed is utterly empty. But sometimes you just want to write something down, and not chop it up into a million tiny bits. Facebook is (all but) dead to me, this is farrrrr too little to start up a blog for, and geebs, I could go through the long list of why every other platform is not suitable, but why.

"Robin's Complaint" -- as sung by Boiled in Lead is a song I enjoyed a lot as a youth with a lot of internalized misogyny. Nonetheless, as I was puttering around my writing retreat room this morning (Gladstone's Library in Wales for future me), I made it refer to men out of a sense of that--then I realized it works best genderless, if you just want to enjoy a song* about a person who clearly needs to think about the trauma-bound folks that they end up attracted to.

Beware of the people who grind up folks' hearts
They chew the four chambers and spit out all the parts
They paint their faces with such Byzantine arts**
And leave you used up in the morning

Beware of the people who promise blue skies
There's tornado warnings in the back of their soft eyes
Like a weather forecaster, practiced in their lies
They'll leave you a disaster in the morning

Beware of the people who open like fields
You can plow all the furrows and count up all your yields
But then John Deere comes by with their newfangled wheels
And leaves you with the children in the morning

* if I recall the liner notes, the lyrics are based on (or taken whole cloth from, I've never been sure) a Jane Yolen poem, but I feel like I must be mis-remembering that. Certainly, my brief searching came up with no answer to that. This is because Google sucks now and I lost patience to try other things. I'll look it up when I'm back home... in ten years, when I stumble across my stash of CDs in storage.

** alternate line: they paint the future with such grandiose arts

(original binary rewrite was "they paint their future with such masculine arts" but that makes actually less sense)

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Holding Places

Tue, 05 May 2009 03:38:37 GMT

Your places. Let me hold them for you.

Still holed up at LJ: http://fairmer.livejournal.com

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standing on a star unstable

de-gendering song lyrics, randomly

Holding Places