Sunday, August 20, 2006

A Brief Musical Interlude

I mentioned before with reference to the Narnia books that I, the reader, am free to interpret a work of art as if it meant whatever I wanted it to mean. Sometimes this involves painful mental gymanstics, but sometimes it is very easy to subvert the author's intent. For example, I frequently listen to Green Day's 'American Idiot' as if it referred to blue-state idiots rather than red-state idiots. This interprets the references to ominpresent media-instilled paranoia to mean liberal paranoia about sinister right-wing conspiracies rather than conservative paranoia about external threats. The 'new media' and 'information age of hysteria' can easily refer to things like the Daily Kos rather than Fox.
The only tricky part was the line 'maybe I'm the faggot America, I'm not a part of a redneck agenda', but then I realised that it *could* really mean, 'conservatism is an inclusive philosophy, not a redneck agenda'!

No comments: