As with a lot of Pulp songs it purports to be a story of something that may or may not have happened to Jarvis Cocker in his early years. But having heard the song countless times I’m still not actually sure what happened in the story it tells.
The beginning is pretty straightforward: it tells how as a kid the protagonist was a peeping tom, spying on an an older girl as she gets changed. But then in the later verses it immediately jumps forward to a presumably adult protagonist who is now married or living with someone, presumably the older girl he spied on in the earlier verses? Or someone else? Who then leaves him, but then returns to find him in bed with someone else? Who’s this other women? Did he call her over the instant he realized his wife had left ? Or is the other women the girl from the early verses? I’m confused and have no idea what is happening. Maybe I’m being dense and completely misunderstanding what’s going on, but seems like bad storytelling to me.
What other examples of this are there? Not a bad (dumb, offensive, or preposterous) story in a song but bad storytelling in song, where you have no idea what the story is they are trying to tell
I know I am on the “wrong” side of judging Dylan’s musical genius…
But I think Tangled Up In Blue makes no damn sense! I think the narrator shifts at least twice with no clutch, and I have no real idea what the story, or the point, is.
The all time classic, though, is The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia. It’s a great southern gothic that, what is that phrase again? Makes no damn sense! Without the benefit of modern lyric sites, I couldn’t even tell the characters apart. Is she singing “Andy”, or “and he”?
For me this is poetic and eclectic enough to give it a pass (plus it’s one of my favorite songs). Though when it suddenly starts taking about someone being involved in the slave trade it’s a bit WTF. Is this a metaphor or are we have we jumped back in time a few centuries for some reason?
Not every song has to be a single coherent story about something that happened to the singer, but if you are going to write that kind of song then take the time to make sure the story makes sense
The rest of the song is fine, but “tin soldier” doesn’t fit the narrative. The valley people are not “tin soldiers”, they are all in, and apparently, good at it. We don’t know if the mountain people had an army (I assume not) but if they did, I don’t think they were “tin soldiers” either.
Even as a metaphor for Viet Nam, who are the “tin soldiers” in that context? War hawk generals? Nixon?
Is the titular soldier part of the valley people? Then why is he riding away? Did he realize he was being used? All that killing for nothing?
Maybe.
They could have done a better job.
And I really don’t see how Billy Jack fits into it. Or why a band of witches sang it
My interpretation was that he married the sister of his peeping tom victim because she looked like the woman who influenced his sexuality in his formative years. (“I only went with her because she looks like you.”) It’s creepy AF. Pulp is creepy AF. But I love them.
You’re not wrong, though. It’s confusing.
ETA: Having read the lyrics, I think it’s something different. I think in the story, he’s the peeping Tom, dating the sister of the woman he’s spying on, he gets caught by his victim, he starts making out with her, the sister (girlfriend) walks in and “catches” them and he’s like - noooo, it’s just that she looks so much like youuuu.
Conquistador by Procol Harem. Great symphonic bombast, particularly impressive to 20-year old me. But let’s look at it.
Guy happens upon a dead Spanish conqueror on the beach, complete with vulture. He’s been dead long enough that his scabbard is rusty, but not so long that his horse has run off or starved.
And what does the singer learn from this?
Though I hoped for something to find
I could see no maze to unwind
Since he sings that five times he must be pretty certain about it. Then it’s getting dark and he has to leave, so he gives the dead soldier his regrets.
I always took it to mean that he was standing before a statue of a conquistador on a horse, not an actual corpse. The statue appears to be facing the seacoast and has not been well maintained, so there is some rust and sand and so forth.
There is perhaps a suggestion that for all their bully-boy swagger, the valley soldiers were toy tin soldiers, beating up on a paper tiger who didn’t even have anything worth stealing. Of course, even then, they should all be riding away, not just one of them.
What has always bugged me more, is why did the mountain people write “Peace on Earth” on a piece of paper, place it (presumably) in a chest, and bury it on their mountain? Was it so they could have a post mortem “gotcha” at the expense of whoever dug it up? They were pretentious dumbasses who deserved to get invaded.
I assumed the stallion was metaphorical and the story was set in the present day, so the conquistador is just bones in a rusty suit of armor - he’s been there long enough that his armor-plated breast has lost its sheen and the sea has rotted away his face, after all, and the singer finds it remarkable that his jewel-encrusted blade is still there after all this time.
My nominee for the thread is Steve Miller’s much maligned Take the Money and Run, because of just how narratively sloppy it is. Billie Joe and Bobby Sue are bored because all they do is smoke weed and watch TV, so, as one does, they commit a home invasion robbery and murder a man! But wait, there’s a detective, and he’s gonna catch them! Except that as soon as he’s mentioned, they just “slip away” with no further explanation and head to Mexico, where they’re probably even more bored than they were to start with since they can’t even watch TV now. It feels like there are two verses missing for every verse that got recorded.
There’s also Tattoo by the Who, of which Pete Townshend once explained that he couldn’t think of an ending to the story and jjst started scat-singing on the demo to fill space, and his “rooty toot tootle tattoo to you” closing ended up being what Roger Daltrey recorded.
No, it’s definitely “maze”. I assume the singer heard from the locals this legend of a dead conquistador on the beach and went searching for it in hopes that he’d learn something or come to some deeper understanding, but now that he’s seen it, he realizes there’s no mystery to solve or truth to discover - it’s just a fool who died fighting someone else’s war in a strange land.
If “maze” is what’s on the lyric sheet for the album, I’ll accept it, but I still think “place” is a better fit. As for the rest of the song, I saw it as an observation on how the conquistador’s all-consuming search for glory and greed for riches led only to endless obsession and death. That’s why “Coquistador” always makes me think of Aguirre, the Wrath of God even though the song was written before the movie was released.
Or why a band of witches sang it