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Peter Bhat Harkins
It's, Like, Symbolic
In a nice coincidence (though I’ve been reading Robert Anton Wilson lately and am tempted to yell synchronicity), my music player gave me Flower by Liz Phair (the better version, from Girlysounds) and followed it up with Marigold by Nirvana. They’re both slow, quiet songs (and Flower has the added bonus of being delicously obscene).
It got me wondering -- how many flower-related songs do I have that are slow and quiet? The answer, surprisingly, is all but one of them. If this were the 80s I’d have to make a mix tape of them, but apparently blog posts are the modern version of the mix tape.
- Ben Harper - Roses From My Friends
- Johnny Cash - The One Rose
- Cranberries - Daffodil Lament
- Eels - Daisy of the Galaxy
- Eels - Daisy Through Concrete (not upbeat, but noticeably livelier than the rest of this list)
- Garbage - So Like a Rose
- Meiko Kaji - The Flower of Carnage
- Nirvana - Marigold
- Phair - Flower
- Smashing Pumpkins - Lily (My One And Only)
- Queen - Lily of the Valley
- Tom Waits - Flower’s Grave
- Tom Waits - The Briar and the Rose
- Tom Waits - The Last Rose of Summer
- Tom Waits - Trampled Rose
That’s a decently-large run of songs, and Tom Waits is apparently a big fan of the sub-sub-genre. It’s pretty damn funny that so many artists thought “Hm, flowers are beautiful, pretty, and uplifting, so I’ll be outré by writing a morose song about them. My soul is so dark!” I’ll have to give the last words of this post over to the Rolling Stone, who recognized this for what it is:
For another [pitfall], there’s the inevitable song about the serial killer who dresses up as a clown, which symbolizes nothing about American life except the existence of creative-writing workshops.