Studio Practice: 603 - Brief 05 - Secret 7 Initial Research

The Tracks:

Jimi Hendrix - Castles Made of Sand - 1967

Psychedelic Rock
Story about his childhood
Strong visual lyrics : http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/18479/

"And so castles made of sand fall in the sea eventually"

- This is the inevitability of death, but also the beauty and fragility of life represented by a sand castle. Nothing is certain and nothing lasts forever, eventually things will fall apart.

It could also mean the fragility of dreams that are often unfulfilled.

Down the street you can hear her scream "You're a disgrace"
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbors start to gossip and drool
He cries "Oh, girl, you must be mad
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?"
Against the door he leans and starts a scene
And his tears fall and burn the garden green

The type of breakup you wouldn’t want people to be watching and gossiping over if it was yours. He’s drunk and unintentionally making a scene for everybody on the block, while crying out of love for her, and missing the sweet memories of what they had.
In a documentary about Hendrix his brother explains that this verse is about his parents who would fight and had a rough relationship. The story of how they met however is a nice one as they met a a dance bar and quickly fell in love and got married “the sweet love you and me had”

"And he built a dream that when he grew up
He would be a fearless warrior Indian Chief"

- A big psychedelic chief headdress?

IMPERMANANCE.

- 1st verse is about a changing relationship. Love and acceptance is lost. (Mother & Father arguing)

- 2nd verse is about plans for the future that go wrong. You build your life on a dream and live for that future but along the way it is snatched away. (his little brother, who did actually play war games in the woods with his native american friends. The death of the warrior indian chief represents his brother growing up and turning to drugs. It's the loss of naivety that occured suddenly and 'killed' the person his brother used to want to be.)

- 3rd verse is about fate, the hand of god, and miracles that don't happen. Even when they should. (his mother, whom Hendrix didn't know well, as she died when he was just a child. As others have said she sent him to live with relatives because she didn't want to have to cope, and abused alcohol)

- The universe is uncaring. Nothing is permanent and change is the only sure thing.
- The tone is dispassionate too. The last verse is especially potent: Hope, even for a brief instant is useless. Abandon hope.
- Its beyond good and bad things that happen - things just happen. There is no TRUTH in things or situations. All will change. Its very deep, compassionate but not sentimental.

Impermanence, also called Anicca or Anitya, is one of the essential doctrines and a part of three marks of existence in Buddhism.

- The doctrine asserts that all of conditioned existence, without exception, is "transient, evanescent, inconstant".

- All temporal things, whether material or mental, are compounded objects in a continuous change of condition, subject to decline and destruction.

Anicca or impermanence is understood in Buddhism as the first of three marks of existence, which are characteristics of all existence and beings - the other two being dukkha (suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness) and anatta (non-self, non-soul, no essence).

- These three characteristics are mentioned in verses 277, 278 and 279 of the Dhammapada.

Buddhism teaches how all physical and mental events, come into being and then dissolve. Human life embodies this flux in the ageing process, the cycle of repeated birth and death (Samsara), nothing lasts, and everything decays.

That humans are subject to delusion about the three marks, that this delusion results in suffering, and that removal of that delusion results in the end of suffering.

- Mandalas: Exploring The Buddhist Art Of Impermanence & Meditation

A mandala [or the process of creating one] is used by practitioners to focus their attention during meditation, and is known as a ‘yantra’ or instrument [and not an end in itself]. Meditation being one of the prime practices in Buddhism, involves focusing your undivided attention to an object, letting thoughts go as they come, and brining your attention back to the object

The mandala’s design, however, is much more complex than the name would infer. It is meant to represent an imaginary palace that can be focused on during meditation, and contains deities which serve as role models, with the principal deity in the centre of the image. This palace is surrounded by an outer circle of flame, which is said to represent wisdom, and an inner circle of eight charnel grounds, which is said to be a reminder of the Buddhist teachings of impermanence, that is, to remember the transient nature of our lives and the constant cycle of samsara (birth, death and rebirth).

“The mandala is representative of our bodies,” said Lama Tensin, one of the monks. “Our body one day is gone; our life is gone second by second.”

The sand-made mandala is common practice in Tibetan Buddhism as part of their belief in impermanence. The mandala design is drawn out on the surface where they then use funnels to carefully lay out different coloured sands.

The mandala symbol itself is sacred. In addition to being a metaphor for our bodies, it represents a world in harmony and peace. After praying over it, they will dissolve it with water, leaving no trace of the design. In a moment, it will all be gone.

Jeff Buckley - Lover, You Should've Come Over - 1994

Folk Blues
about the end of an ex-relationship
a young man troubled by growing older, finding that his actions represent a perspective he feels that he should have outgrown.
The sad state of mind from Jeff, became after he’d understood, that his life was full of failed relationships.

He recognises that he’s been too immature in relationships in general, but at that moment when he thinks about her, he realizes that she could be the one

IDEAS...

Illustration of a phone - "cum round?"
Portray the scene from a modern perspective.
Take the comments off http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/44076/ - glitch? typographical?

https://genius.com/Jeff-buckley-lover-you-shouldve-come-over-lyrics

Manic Street Preachers - No Surface All Feeling - 1996

Alternative/Indie, Pop
Welsh Rock Band - quite ballardy
Members: James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire & Sean Moore / Richey Edwards (89-95)
Edwards went missing on February 1 in 1995, and was officially ‘presumed dead‘ in 2008. He had suffered a lengthy battle with depression.
Song is about the friendship through sickness between Nicky and Richey, before Richey disappeared
The outro of the song is said to feature one of the only recorded guitar performances by Edwards. Partly for this reason, the song has become the one on the album which has really taken on a kind of mythic quality among a section of fans
The song looks back on the past in quite a dim light

“what’s the point in always looking back / when all you see is more and more junk”. This has been interpreted as a reflection of the band’s conscious decision to continue as a working unit and to move forward rather than attempting to recreate their own history. In short, it taps into the whole regenerative theme of EMG as an album.
This song is more about Richey and Nicky's friendship than Edward's disappearance. Wire acknowledges here that they bonded so closely through their sickness (Wire's liver disease, Richey's depression) and wrote hoards of material together picking apart the world over a bottle of wine and reinforcing each other's somewhat bleak viewpoints. They had a rare love for each other that was indeed no surface... Wire once commented that what he and Richey missed out on was a 'normal' friendship just being mates and goofing around - they didn't have the opportunity to as one or bother were often in hospital or recovering or writing albums like "The Holy Bible". This song beautifully recalls the intensity of their bond, one of which only an certain extremes can create.

https://genius.com/Manic-street-preachers-no-surface-all-feeling-lyrics

Image result for manic street preachers everything must go

Image result for manic street preachers album

Quite minimal design approach already - something to consider?

The Clash - I'm Not Down - 1979

Punk Rock
Big Type / Grain-y / Scanned in & ripped
Mostly active from 77-85
The song was a response and defiance to difficult times faced, its encouragement to be strong never give up. But also a reminder someones always going through worse.
"But you're streets away from where it gets the roughest, you ain't been there"

"If it's true a rich man leads a sad life
That's what say from day to day"

This is a reference to the popular saying “money can’t buy happiness”, which supposes rich people don’t feel happy because what they have in monetary excess, they lack in true happy feelings.

"Then what do all the poor do with their lives
On judgement day, when nothin' is saved?"

Following the previous lines, Mick Jones is asking what will be of the poor people, who supposedly feel happy, when their life is close to the end. Jones' question may address the insignificance of life – no matter what we do or how we do it, someday we will die and all we leave behind will mean nothing. Thus, let rich people be sad and poor people be happy, because in the end, either way, they won’t have anything.