Top Rated Interpretation

anonymous July 20th, 2006 03:13PM  

The lucifer angle - imho - is dead on.
Take mitlon's 'paradise lost' and lay it over the lyrics and you get a nearly line-by-line fit. This may be a completely unintentional product of the band's intent, but it appears undeniable. Note that I will refer to lucifer as satan, as the former is a misnomer: satan (translated from hebrew, the personification of adversity) only carries a personal name in islam - "iblis." the name lucifer is derived from judaic/old testament prophetic scriptures referring to king darius of persia, under whom the original tribes of israel suffered. New testament writers and later christian theologians inferred lucifer into satan to provide a literal counterpoint to jesus, presented as the personification of good.

"hey miss murder can i... Make beauty stay if i/take my life?"
the chorus seems to address eve, traditionally considered the murderess of mankind, or more specifically, of mankind's natural communion with divinity. In genesis lore, eve is the only human to interface with satan and thus is simultaneously the fountainhead of all creation and the personification of mortality and mortal hubris. Satan tempted eve with the promise of eternal beauty and ultimate wisdom. The chorus may be asking eve if that promise proved valid after all.

"with just a look they shook
and heavens bowed before him.
Simply a look can break your heart.
The stars that pierce the sky;
he left them all behind.
We’re left to wonder why
he left us all behind."
this appears to be the clearest inference to satan offered by "miss murder." the angels and archangels are often referred to - in apocryphal texts as well as in pl - as stars or as the regents of the stars. Per milton, satan begins as a prince of heaven, and thus all the 'stars' would in fact bow before him; the book of jubilees (apocrypha) indicate that angels of lesser rank do prostrate themselves before their superior angels as well as before god.

"dreams of his crash won’t pass
or how they all adored him.
Beauty will last when spiraled down."
after the war in heaven detailed by milton, the warrior-angels loyal to the archangel michael and to god, though they'd won, did mourn the loss of their brother and prince. After his fall, satan is popularly acknowledged to be the only angel of those fallen to retain his beauty. Milton disagrees on this point.


"the stars that mystify
he left them all behind.
And how his children cry
he left us all behind."
satan has always had metaphoric or allegoric children. Prior to his fall, his children were the angels beneath him... Those who were entrusted by god to his care; and after his fall satan's children, per milton, are sin and death.

"what's the hook, the twist
within this verbose mystery?
I would gladly bet my life upon it.
That the ghost you love, your ray of light
will fizzle out without hope."
the speaker here may be now addressing satan, challenging the unlimate wisdom of the devil's choice. The first two lines seem to be asking, after all the words written about the fall, what was the point? Will satan's gambit ever pay off? If this is the case, the last three lines answer the first two: the speaker would "bet his life" that satan is doomed to failure... That his light and spirit will slowly die away, "without hope" of redemption.

"we're the empty set just floating through, wrapped in skin,
ever searching for what we were promised.
Reaching for the golden ring we never let go,
who would ever let us put our filthy hands upon it."
now the speaker may be addressing his (our) own mortality, and our literal unworthiness to reattain what we'd lost in eden for the efforts of satan and the ingenuousness of eve.


Again, this is all probably not what davey havok and afi intended. Nonetheless, it appears to fit well enough to acknowledge it as - at least - a valid literary interpretation.
In lesser hands, these lyrics would probably be gibberish, or at least easily interpretable. But by the body of their work afi prove themselves to be literate and skilled artists. Such a lyric reaction to milton and genesis lore is well within their grasp.


-uziel twentyone
www.Gk-sanctuary.Com