People Love To Watch You Die
(HARDING/MCCAUGHEY/SEIDENBERG/BARUCK)
People love to watch you die
And wonderful to tell
People you have never met
Claim to know you well |
|
People love to watch you die
Dig your dignity
One guy said 'he's better dead
Than how he used to be'
They'll sell the souvenirs |
(5)
|
And the relics of your tears
They build a little shrine, wait until it shines
They love to watch you die and you know why
People love to watch you die
It gets them sexually |
(10)
|
And then they smoke a cigarette
And make a cup of tea
People love to watch you fry
They love to throw the switch
They'll either have you crucified |
(15)
|
Or burn you as a witch
They send bouquets of flowers
And then stare at space for hours
They build a little shrine, wait until it shines
They love to watch you die and you know why
|
(20)
|
People love to watch you die
Then give your family hell
They call it grief but it's just a relief
And they know that full well
People love to watch you drown
|
(25)
|
The symbol's what they need
They'd rather not see you at all
Than watch your hair recede
And just to watch your pain
They'd bring you back to life again |
(30)
|
They build a little shrine, sing you Auld Lang Syne
They love to watch you die and you know why |
(35)
|
The verbal play on the words 'People love to watch you, Di' has been remarked upon by some commentators, particularly those with a culturally materialist agenda ('People Love To Watch You Die In A Tunnel In Paris: Towards A Culturalist Understanding Of The Confessions Of St.Ace' by Stuart Partridge in From Camp To Campus (University Of Hastings Press, 1998). In fact, there seem to be no overt references to The Princess of Wales in the lyric. According to the Burgundy And Black Notebook, this song was much influenced by Jorg Vandeberg's 1898 painting A Herd of Wildebeest Watches The Herd Diminish which depicts a wildebeest being torn apart savagely by a lion, while the rest of the herd looks on. The painting was lost during World War II. Note also the recurrence of religious vocabulary in this poem - relics, shrine, crucified, hell. This is the language of martyrdom appropriate to anguished confessions. See: Romancing The Ring: gay bonding and cult prostitution in 20th Century Political Biography by Corvo Mandelsohn Jnr, Rimsby And Frott 1999, passim. The theme of sadistic voyeurism is of significance in the martyrdoms recorded e.g. in 'Acta Sanctorum'.
(1) 'Die' also means to achieve an orgasm. See Beninletto-Sottotutti 'To sleep, To dream: double entendres' or Hemingway's Death In The Afternoon lecture #1, BARI (price on request). The sexual double meaning is never far from the surface in this confession.
(2) A translation of the Latin phrase 'mirabile dictu'
(10) Relics: A part of the body, clothing, or belongings of a saint, martyr, or other deceased holy person which is carefully preserved as an object of veneration (OED). Here is pictured a vial of the deceased's tears, such as might have been sold by The Pardoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, an image which achieves even greater poignancy given the furious trade in the bone and knuckle fragments of the author (see 'St.Ace's Reliques: 51 Fingers?' in Tanquandam Vol VII No 3, August 1992.) 'Tears' - these could be the tears of climactic fulfillment, or more probably of the joy of 'tertius gaudens'.
(14) Thanatophilia, or the undue or abnormal fascination with death, has been discussed by Kraft-Ebbing (passim). For a more in-depth analysis of death and the sexual urge, see Phillip Adams ('The Little Death: Becoming a Spendthrift In The Bedroom Economy' Penguin 1990)
(18) Switch - also means a flail, a cruel instrument of torture.
(35) Auld Lang Syne: (Scottish Dialect). 'Old Long Since' literally, meaning the 'days of long ago' (especially as the title and refrain of a Scottish song sung at parting.) The Confessions rarely used Scottish dialect and this is the only known instance.
|