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DriveYourCarDownToTheSea · 03-17-2013, 10:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Surell

Damn this is hard. I'm one of the people who love that particular Beatles songs - it'd definitely have to be a top 5, and I'd probably say it exhibits their best songwriting - but "Surf's Up" is a masterpiece in its own right. There's not a song out there that sounds like it, it's got some cool little left turns, and, though it's so full grandeur, it's so very personal. Really, I wouldn't call it a social commentary song, but more of an observation on the inevitable aging process, on how we're always one step closer to misery and death or being brought down by life. Like the whole "Surf's up/aboard a tidal wave" idea; you think being atop a tidal wave is just where it's at, but really, it's just the predecessor to a great crash and a huge wipeout.

This discussion here, while not intended to be anything remotely definitive, does suggest a possible social commentary angle to the song (a decadent society going downhill, to be renewed by the children at the end of the song).

I think maybe VD Parks was writing stream-of-consciousness lyrics which may have had his own cryptic meaning, but which he deliberately wrote so as to be interpreted according to the listener's own whims and biases.

EDIT: From pg. 2 of that link, here's BW's own words:

Quote:

"It's a man at a concert," he said. "All around him there's the audience, playing their roles, dressed up in fancy clothes, looking through opera glasses, but so far away from the drama, fromlife. Back through the opera glass you see the pit and the pendulum drawn. "The music begins to take over. 'Columnated ruins domino.' Empires, ideas, lives, institutions;everything has to fall, tumbling like dominoes. "He begins to awaken to the music; sees the pretentiousness of everything. 'The music hall a costly bow.' Then even the music is gone, turned into a trumpeter swan, into what the music really is. "Canvas the town and brush the backdrop.' He's off in his vision, on a trip. Reality is gone; he's creating it like a dream. Dove-nested towers.' Europe, a long time ago. 'The laughs come hard in Auld Lang Syne.' The poor people in the cellar taverns, trying to make themselves happy by singing. "Then there's the parties, the 'drinking, trying to forget the wars, the battles at sea. "While at port a do or die.' Ships in the harbor, battling it out. A kind of Roman empire thing. "'A choke of grief.' At his own sorrow and the emptiness of his life. because he can't even cry for the suffering in the world, for his own suffering. "And then, hope. 'Surf's up! . . . Come about hard and join the once and often spring you gave.' Go back to the kids, to the beach, to childhood. "'I heard the word'of God; 'Wonderful thing';the joy of enlightenment, of seeing God. And what is it? 'A children's song!' And then there's the song itself; the song of children; the song of the universe rising and falling in wave after wave, the song of God, hiding the love from us, but always letting us find it again, like a mother singing to her children."