Comments on "All you need is...what?" - Faerye Net

Re: Reading into it

2006-04-20T14:59:04+00:00

That may actually be a far more sensical reading (although the tenses/cases don’t quite seem to line up. As it is, with your reading, it works out to “with love, you are able to sing something you already can sing.” Well, since when did case and tense matter much in rock ‘n’ roll? “I can’t see me lovin’ nobody but you for all my life,” for example :)

I freely admit mine is odd and probably not meant, but it did inspire musings on the topic of inspiration and expression, so it did some good :p

Reading into it

2006-04-20T07:42:12+00:00

I guess we read into things what we want to see. I always took the song to be more of the message “You can do anything if you have love”.

Arriving at a different result

2006-04-18T00:31:41+00:00

It is true in science, at least, that people often arrive at similar, if not identical, results. However, in creative arts, it’s almost impossible to create something identical to another person’s creation. Think about how many chimpanzees would have to pound on their proverbial typewriters for endless eons in order to arrive at just the lyrics you’ve highlighted in the article.

That is not to say that it is easy to be original. Most creative output is shackled to whatever culture and time its source is embedded in. Originality takes practice. Only when you’ve gained an intimate familiarity with mainstream material can you twist and turn it into something truly unique.

Perhaps the world isn’t quite as deterministic as the song implies, although shedding the slough of tradition often requires half a lifetime of intensive wiggling. I always thought those iconoclastic weevils themselves managed to attain that goal. Who’s to say that self-contradiction isn’t an imperative component of good art, anyway? After all, art imitates life.