The toxically interesting part of the song can be found in its second strophe where it says:
“And I'm driving home, it's 5 AM
And I look at the sun come up over the hills
And the clouds are turning pink and green
And all I can see is her eyes”
What struck me as odd was this colour scheme of the clouds. Coming from a rather small town I wasn’t used to pollution having that much of an effect on the sky. Marsters is from Los Angeles, a city with such a high degree of air pollution it causes the sunlight to shine in many different shades of the light spectrum, while the smog is dense enough to conceal the HOLLYWOOD sign at day from only a few hundred metres away.
The baffling part is that people in cities like LA are used to these circumstances of a polluted environment. To Marsters the colour scheme is normal and simply resembles the emotional state of being in love.
PS: The example of the HOLLYWOOD sign is (I think) from Michel Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine”.
Posted by Konstantin Zielke
Yes, Konstatin, this is very true. Part of the problem with a city like Los Angeles (just outside of which where I grew up, actually) has to do with its being surrounded by mountains that trap a good bit of the air pollution. From where I lived (at about 700m elevation), I remember seeing a brownish haze below, in the Los Angeles basin.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, what--as you say--we can "get used to" is quite striking.
This is a great example of references to toxicity and pollution in popular culture. And you need not look far. I was thinking the other day about Britney Spears' "Toxic," which deploys the same phenomenon as a metaphor for illicit sexuality. That, too, can be a "toxin."
I guess it's not really that far from "Love Potion #9," is it