Amanda might be a little quieter now, but she hasn’t lost any of her intensity, that’s for sure. This is amazing. Confrontationally benevolent.
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Intense and beautiful. Amazing video.
I do sort of have the same problem with it as with the end of Return of the Jedi, though - the message seems to be that the power of love can redeem and fix an evil man? Like, if someone would just show Trump the love he was denied as a child, he could stop being such an ass? Maybe, but that wouldn’t absolve him for slaughtering the younglings doing all sorts of awful things for 70+ years. It just feels like letting him off the hook.
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Well, Vader pays with his life, so I don’t know if it’s really letting him off the hook.
But that’s a fairy tale. If anything could have ever made Donald Trump not be like Donald Trump is now, it’s way too late.
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This is kind of a misogynistic song. It makes some amount of sense in the context of the whole album, an extended rock opera about a crazy asshole who hates everybody, especially himself, a literal Nazi, a fictional character inspired by all of Roger Waters’ most negative feelings about himself and the industry he was working in.
This seems like dangerous material to extract and reuse for other purposes.
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Yes. The song has to be seen as the protagonist blaming his helicopter mother for his own isolation, accusing her of coddling him too much and at the same time planting her own fears in his head. In the eyes of the singer, his mother protected him all too well. But the fine line here is that his mother helped to build the Wall. If you look closer at the lyrics, you can see that it’s still his own work.
That’s why I have trouble, because to me the song is a part of Act I: the protagonist wallowing in self pity before snapping. It’s like listening to an aria divorced from the rest of the opera and all context.
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I’m not usually a fan of covers, but Amanda Palmer’s version of ‘Mother’ is absolutely brutal.
The arrangement & performance of the strings is something special. And the lyrics are as timely as ever.
I like it as a cover, and I like the video as it’s own thing, but as a commentary on the Trump administration I am struggling to find a way to read it such that the imagery in the video and the lyrics fit together well, and reflect reality in a meaningful way. In fact, the video and the lyrics seem to be completely at odds - in the song the mother’s overbearing love exacerbate the son’s insecurities and mistrust - in the video, motherly love appears to be the antidote to those insecurities’ effects on the world. I almost want to read the mother’s part of the lyrics as an insincere response to the son’s infantile petulance at having to deal with a world full of other people, because that seems like the overall tone of the endeavour, but the verses really don’t fit that at all.
Yes, there’s a world of difference between somebody examining their own upbringing and identifying aspects of it that contributed negatively to their personality or psyche, and pointing at somebody else’s mother as a cause of their shitty behaviour in a way that almost seems to let the person themselves off the hook.
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