What does The War is Noise mean?

Sundowner: The War is Noise Meaning

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Album cover for The War is Noise album cover

The War is Noise Lyrics

The war will never end.
It crackles through the speakers.
I watch as the landscape roll on by.
And all the drinks have warmed me up
from my toes on through my fingers
I made it through this day alive.
Everything must go wrong before it goes...

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  1. anonymous
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     Jun 20th 2017 !⃝

    From my perspective, this song is about going through a breakup.

    He's listening to the radio, on a long drive, and every song is reminding him of her, them. The songs keep coming, forever. Alcohol doesn't help, but he's still alive, and hopeful that things will get better. He must stop writing, and thinking about their relationship. But, he has internal conflict, and unresolved feelings, like if he could just try harder. And, so goes the revolving dilemma of a hopeless romantic.

  2. anonymous
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     Mar 10th 2012 !⃝

    I think the singer is letting us know that the contrived war he has gone through is nothing but a horrendous cacophony. The singer has a lot to give and say but sometimes he gets depleted & feels finished with contributing to the bologna "cause". He is really tired because he doesn't sleep well. The whole war as entertainment methodology and vice versa is a shitty way to live. He is probably singing about an article he read recently, written by Butler Shaffer. It is below:

    """Politics and entertainment each feed upon — and help to foster — public appetites for illusions and fantastic thinking. The success of such undertakings, in turn, depends upon unfocused and enervated minds, which helps to explain why motion picture and television performers, popular musicians, and athletes — whose efforts require little participation on the part of the viewer — have become the dominant voices in our politicized culture. It also helps to account for the attraction of so many entertainers throughout the world to visionary schemes such as state socialism, as well as the increasing significance of entertainment industry gossip and box-office revenues as major news stories.

    The entertainment industry helps shape the content of our consciousness by generating institutionally desired moods, fears, and reactions, a role played throughout human history. Ancient Greek history is tied up in myths, fables, and other fictions, passed on by the entertainers of their day, the minstrels. We need to ask ourselves about the extent to which our understanding of American history and other human behavior has been fashioned by motion pictures, novels, and television drama. Through carefully scripted fictions and fantasies, others direct our experiences, channel our emotions, and shape our views of reality. The fantasies depicted are more often of conflict, not cooperation; of violence, not peace; of death, not the importance of life.

    Nowhere is the interdependency of the political and entertainment worlds better demonstrated than in the war system, which speaks of "theaters" of operation, "acts" of war with battle "scenes," "staging" areas, and "dress rehearsals" for invasions.

    Adolf Hitler understood, quite well, the interplay between political power and theater, a truth that continues to reveal itself in entertainers involving themselves so heavily in political campaigns, some even managing to get themselves elected to Congress or the presidency. Nor was it surprising that one of the first acts of the Bush Administration, following the announced "War on Terrorism," was to send a group of presidential advisers to Hollywood to enlist the entertainment industry's efforts to portray the war as desired by Washington! As with earlier wars, the "military/entertainment complex" will continue to write the scripts and define the characters that are required to assure the support of passive minds in the conduct of war.

    Furthermore, because entertainment is often conducted in crowded settings there is a dynamic conducive to the generation of mass-mindedness. One need only recall the powerful harangues of Adolf Hitler that coalesced tens of thousands of individuals into a controllable mob, to understand the symbiotic relationship between entertainment and politics.

    Entertainment is a part of what we call "recreation," which means to "re-create," in this case to give interpretations to events that are most favorable to one's national identity and critical of an opponent. In this connection, entertainers help to manipulate the "dark side" of our being which, once mobilized, can help to generate the most destructive and inhumane consequences.

    All of this leads me to ask whether the entertainment industry is an extension of the war system, or whether war is simply an extension of our need for entertainment? What should be clear to us is that entertainment is one of the principal means by which our thinking can be taken over and directed by others once we have chosen to make our minds passive, which we do when we are asked — whether by actors or politicians — to suspend our judgment about the REALITY of events we are witnessing. When we are content to be amused (i.e., to have our attention diverted from reality to fantasy), and to have our emotions exploited by those skilled in triggering unconscious forces, we set ourselves up to be manipulated by those producing the show."""

    This writer just described the singer's life over the past three years. Nothing/Nobody is worth what the singer has gone through. He doesn't care anymore. The singer will go on with his life and try to keep an open heart but not for what once was. Done. Over. End of story. No loving person conspires with a group to put another person through total hell for ANY reason. He learned that some people are indeed "very, very bad" as his Opa warned him several years ago. Maybe the goal was to try to kill the singer but the plot didn't turn out the way the warring "factions" had hoped & planned.

    This is a good song and remember, it is just a song. :)


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