The Byrds' "Mind Gardens"

Yester-day I listened to the Byrds' Younger than Yesterday, and I noticed a small thing about "Mind Gardens."  The "walls all down" part of the line "I tore the walls all down" is sung to a descending phrase (E D C#), so there's a musical representation of the walls' coming down.

Just for the sake of making this post a bit more than just "hey, there's significance to this descending phrase," I was going to note the origin of the phrase "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," which occurs earlier in the song, but in doing so, I actually found something I hadn't realized before.  I've known for years that this is a phrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet.  It's actually in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy.  He asks himself "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them." (III.i.65-68).  But I hadn't realized that both Hamlet and David Crosby's song are talking about minds.  Hamlet specifically mentions "in the mind," where Crosby seems to use a garden as a metaphor for a mind.

The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema

Also this morning I listened to the New Pornographers' Twin Cinema, and I noticed a couple small things in a few tracks.

"Twin Cinema"

The line "They've shown this on both screens" is sung twice in succession and has a harmony each time, and both of those features represent the double in "Twin Cinema."

"Use It"

There's the phrase "the cup of human kindness," which is an allusion to Shakespeare's Macbeth.  In Act I, Scene 5, Lady Macbeth fears that Macbeth "is too full o' th' milk of human kindness" (I.v.16).

"Streets of Fire"

The "every" in the line "Let's sully every stage" is pronounced with three syllables rather than the usual two, which emphasizes the exhaustive nature of every.

The Easybeats' "St. Louis"

I'm surprised I didn't notice this either, but the Easybeats' "St. Louis" starts with "Countrymen, friends, lend me your ears," which is pretty close to Mark Antony's "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" (III.ii.73) in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

OK Go's "Bye Bye Baby" (demo version)

This morning I listened to OK Go's Twelve Days of OK Go (which you can still get for free here).  I listened to a few of these songs when they were coming out (they were posted one-per-day during late 2012), but about half of them I still hadn't listened to yet.

I noticed something interesting in "Bye Bye Baby" - the demo version.  I should note that I've not heard the actual, "proper" version, so I don't know how/if the demo is different from that version.  (This was the even first time I listened to this version.)  In any case, the demo version contains the lines "So take me to winter / As if it was discontent I’d see," which seems to be a reference to the first lines of Shakespeare's Richard III:  "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York" (I.i.1-2).

However, I'm not exactly sure why that Shakespeare reference is there.

Loudon Wainwright III's "New Street People"

I'm currently listening to Loudon Wainwright III's Social Studies.  I found a reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet in "New Street People."  Wainwright's line is "a thousand toxic, natural shocks," which adds only one word (toxic) to a sentence from Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy:  "To die--to sleep-- / No more; and by a sleep to say we end / The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to" (III.i.68-71).

However, I'm not exactly sure what Wainwright is trying to say with that Hamlet quote.