Heart Shaped Box (in 3 parts)

Part 1

I was gonna do a whole big thing about religious persecution, how i grew up without religion, the way it all ties into my larger project of trying to decipher the insanity of the Klein Bottle that is the Christian Right using historically Left rhetoric, but then i was like "nah, let's climb back up the umbilical noose and do a tediously intricate reading of Heart Shaped Box instead. That'll ruin everybody's Friday night appetite." 

I think any proper pop song analysis should start with considering the chorus in its isolated context, then observing what the verses do to it or require from it, and finally culminate  with some coherent statement about the song as a whole.

"Hey, wait, i've got a new complaint;

Forever in debt to your priceless advice.

Hate, Haight, i've got a new complaint;

Forever in debt to your priceless advice.

Hey, wait, i've got a new complaint;

Forever in debt to your priceless advice."

So, the chorus is A-B-A with a repeated "advice" at the end. The B version is all about the puns, and the fact that you can't really hear any difference between them unless you over-enunciate or intentionally mispronounce them. In other words, all of the nuance is completely lost if you're just randomly yelling them. I think it's fair to extend that analysis to say you have to already understand the differences to understand the actual meaning, you're in on it or you're oblivious, or you're transitioning between those two states. If you already knew the words were different you might say "oh, i can't actually hear that difference." Conversely, you might say "oh, i had no idea hey was saying different words each time." 

Now, what do those words actually do? "Hey, wait" is of course a standard interjection, and the immediately understood surface interpretation of yelling words that sound like that. I think we all understand the statement of "hold on there, Mr. McPerson, i have some objecting to do before we proceed." 

Now it gets kaleidoscopic. "Hate, Haight...." Haight of course referring to Haight/Ashbury, a kind of synecdoche for the more general 1960s hippy culture. That's a fun little progression, "hey, wait/complaint" transitioning to the general attitude of aggression and hate, then contrasted by the symbolic epitome of love and tolerance. It is of course a coin flip as to which hallway you use to approach it, but this chorus is really doing some stuff. All that's left is to add the actual refrain "forever in debt to your priceless advice." And there it is, the duality phrased as sarcasm. Smoothe move, Exlax. Do you want a cookie to go with all that "milking it?" I'm hyperbolizing to point out the inherent sarcasm of "priceless advice" implying an insurmountable debt. What's more interesting is how we view the possessive implications of the two parts together. Culturally speaking it's obvious how this total sentiment works, but gramatically speaking there is no signifier of direction; is "forever in debt..." the complaint he is voicing, or is it the complaint he has received. Like i said, culturally we instinctively understand that he is issuing the complaint at some form of authority, be it either the hate or love side, but ultimately we decide whether he is actually complaining at that authority, or whether he is the authority to whom this complaint has been presented. 

Taking a step back, we can see that the chorus as a whole represents an objection in its most abstract form: stop, i don't want/like/need/care about/etc. this (whatever "this" turns out to be; that's what the verses are for, after all). 

And some spectacularly imagistic verses these turn out to be. First, the highlights. We have that pun on Astrological Signs, sexual euphemisms, and the aforementioned heart-shaped box. Now we have to unpack all that stuff, so maybe grab the rolaids and/or dramamine cause things are about to get a little bit icky. 

Is this song specifically about Courtney Love's vagina, like Courtney Love thinks it is? No, Simpsons did it, i mean there's a Carly Simon song for that. Sure, motherhood, vaginas, childbirth, it's all there, but whether or not it's personal or biographical or abstractly Oedipal, or anything else is completely up to the listener to construct. There is no clarifying communicative authority, no actual narrator, only an "i" and some contextual "self victimization." That's how the verses and chorus seem to interact, he describes how he is the victim and objects to it. Who "he" is is anybody's guess; the not telling you who "he" is is the generalized artistic expression at work. We open a door to interpretation by removing personal omniscience, rather than closing the door by explicitly stating it. 

I'm sure i'm going to regret it (i have a tendency to wander away and forget to rejoin the tour at the scheduled reboarding time), but we're gonna call this a to be continued. Hopefully part two materializes, but if not at least you've got a head start on thinking deeper. 'Til then....

Part 2 

Ok, i'm back after winning several rounds of Guess Who and getting a proper retaliatory stomping at Candyland. I am now disconcertingly sticky. 

"She eyes me like a Pisces when i am weak." 

I do not have any idea what that actually means. Do us February/Marches give a specific kind of look at people? Does "she" think of him the way people think of a Pisces at their most fragile? Is it just an elaboration on "fish eye?" 

"I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks." 

It's tempting to rag on rhyming weak with weeks, but we have the benefit of knowing that the needs of the homonym outweigh the needs of the rhyming acumen. Is "your" the same as "she?" If so, then we have a shift from third-person to first-person. If not, then we have an uncorroborated love triangle kind of situation. More meaningfully, however, we now clearly understand that he is a prisoner of whichever situation it is. He is "locked inside," he can't get out, he has no control of the situation. It's fairly intuitive to say that "heart-shaped box" simply means she loves him, but the connotation is that he is not an active participant. Rather, she has put him in a box, out of sight but still in her posession AS a mere posession to take out in the future whenever she wishes. He is merely a keepsake. 

I should point out that these pronouns are non-deterministic. I say "he" in reference to Curt singing, "she" as a quotation, but gender roles or identities are in no way inherently meaningful, and in the larger context of Nirvana interestingly fluid. In this song there is no indication of the gender of the "paper speaker," so we revert to the known gender of the singer who voices "i" and "me," but it will eventually become extremely plausible that the speaker is a literal or metaphorical baby. That singer is not literal person Curt, but the middle ground character voiced by Curt. 

"I've been drawn into your magnet, tar-pit trap." 

Quick checkup on the status of human understanding about magnetism... yep, i thought so, it's "prohibitively complex" to try to figure out why all the quantum thingies vibrate like they do, what with all those electrons doing whatever they feel like. Tar pits are much better understood, but also much more icky. Dunno why, but can't escape. Mysteries of the universe. 

"I wish i could eat your cancer when you turn black." 

Oh deity, i need a shower. That's the most gruesome sentence I've ever heard in my entire life, and the obvious pisces/cancer pun doesn't help me one little minuscule quark of an iota. I can only assume it's meant to be the most grotesque possible expression of thriving on someone else's misery. It makes sense, her love is his prison, her suffering his nourishment. If this song is about Courtney like she thinks it is, she might not want to be so proud of it. On the bright side, it's clearly not about her in any way, it's the dichotomies talking. 

So, now we're at the chorus and we have to ask what is this advice? Is the advice to get married? Have children? Be famous? I think in the grander scheme of Nirvana it's most likely the Fame to which he's referring, but inside the song itself there's nothing. No advice has been presented in any way, shape, or charred rotting form. I'm grossed out, though, so that's a plus. 

And now the moment of truth. Can Bottle survive the dreaded 2nd to be continued during which he sleeps it off? Tune in tomorrow for either the riveting conclusion or the equally riveting non-sequiter of doom!

Part 3

Holy moly, we actually made to part 3.

Bacon and eggs and potatoes and coffee, we need our strength 'cause we're about to contemplate that second verse of Heart Shaped Box. 

"Meat-eating orchids forgive no one just yet,

Cut myself on angel hair and baby's breath.

Broken hymen of your highness, i'm left black,

Throw down your umbilical noose so i can climb right back." 

Wowzers, i maybe haven't had enough coffee yet. The orchids might forgive someone in the future? Hang himself with his own umbilical cord? Is this just the most grotesque possible way to describe a stillbirth? I don't think a botony lesson will help much, I think maybe we should just remember that opposites are really the driving force behind the whole song. 

We should also take a moment to consider Bush because Summer is Winter and you always knew it's the little things that kill. 

Ok, climbing back into the womb is a fairly common idiom for describing wishing to not be alive, safety as opposed to danger, etc., but it's a noose so we have to consider the similarities between after dying and before being born. Again, Samsara is probably not the actual operating theme, and tempting as it is there's no real karmic balance being equalized, it's a much simpler opposites kind of thing. I wasn't alive before i was born, i won't be alive after i'm dead. 

Maybe the advice, just throwing it out there, is "get a life." It certainly matches the sarcastic tone of the song. 

It's tempting to look at all the sexual innuendo that grows out of the astrological symbol for pisces (yin/yang, 69, you see what i'm saying), but i already know the punch line at the end of that hallway is Monty Python's "sit on my face and tell me that you love me...," so i'm not gonna do it. It's also interesting to add it all up to the feeling that life is pretty terrible if you're nothing more than an actual meat puppet. There's the larger connection to the album and the discography, parents/children, marriage/divorce, young/old, serious/ironic, nourishment/poison, and so on. 

For this song, what stands out to me is that central opposition between priceless advice from authority (whatever form that authority takes) and the subjugating debt it places on the receiver. In a very real sense, that advice has no effect on the giver, but collapses the free will of the receiver into nothing more than a coin flip. Either the advice turns out good and we owe an unrepayable debt to authority, or it turns out bad and we have no way to escape the miserable life forced upon us by authority. Life, it seems, is never our own, and the only possible response is the sarcastic lashing out at everyone and everything else, giving if not an actual identity, at least a coherent voice to the feeling of victimization. But there too, always remember that you are making it up in your own mind as you go, deciding to play the victim and passing it on as your own priceless advice. 

Does that say anything about our absurdist experiment in being a dysfunctionally backward experiment in being an idiotic country led by a perpetually bankrupt real-estate mogul? Yeah, i think so. The only war on religion happening right now is the concentrated effort of a small subset of Evangelical Christianity attempting to seize political power and enforce its own doctrine on the world. Conversion and rebirth are after all the central impulse of Evangelical Christianity, the world full of wretched, hell-bound heathens in need of teaching and salvation through the belief in Jesus's atonement as the salvation of all humanity. Contrary to popular belief among themselves, Evangelism is by far the majority of America's religious demographics, crossing nearly all denominational boundaries of Protestantism, and it has a long history of using its own propaganda to acquire as much politico-economic power as it possibly can to "protect" the way of life it believes it rightfully controls. America, for the Christian Right, is an unquestionably Protestant Christian nation prevented from exercising its rightful political and moral authority by Roman Catholicism, and the competing and even more dangerous man-made institutions of Science, Humanism, and secular governance. 

Propaganda, by the way, is language and information that promotes any larger cause while omitting any consideration of opposition or criticism. Conversely, absolute rejection of a competing idea without consideration of its potential merits is also propaganda. It's a highly Borderline view of the world and reality. Nearly all political speech is propagandist in nature, regardless of the topic it addresses. 

Did we solve anything? No probably not, but we did come to a relevant statement about the subjective nature of all of it. We looked at both sides of the coin, and sort of watched the Stockholm and Lima syndromes fluctuate back and forth. I probably sounded condescending at some point in there, but it's hard not to when our topic is competing for non-tangible fun and prizes. Still half a Saturday left, i say use it as thou wilt. Interesting grammar thingamabob, "thou" was originally the singular form of the plural "you." Y'all have fun now, and i'll see you when you're visible.