Reply To: ITT we explain to each other song lyrics
All right, now that everyone’s said their say about Shop Vac in the wrong thread, I’m going to bump this thread even though probably no one wants to talk about it any more.
CoolJammer00, in the other thread:
This [Shop Vac] is really one of the most depressing songs JoCo has written, especially if you read into all that forum subtext about the two news articles at the end of the song being about the man going postal and killing everyone and himself, so now he is literally “up above the house and looking down” wanting to go “back there”.
I don’t reject it as impossible, but I don’t agree with the reading of the news stories in Shop Vac as talking about the guy going postal and killing himself. As I said in September of last year:
My interpretation of the last verse (just my guess, of course) is that it follows the theme of the rest of the song, that is, dissatisfaction with staid suburban life. The speaker goes to bed at bedtime (which is after all what good suburban folk do at bedtime), but he’s dreaming of his escape — then he admits to himself that he can’t escape, he’s “gotta go back there” to his home and his wife and his kids and his shop vac. He’s lying there, listening with regret to all the people driving on through the night to who knows where, wishing he could join them but knowing he never will.
[There’s a famous passage, known as the Flitcraft Parable, in Hammett’s novel _The Maltese Falcon_ — the 1941 Bogart film follows the book pretty closely, but it omits this part. Sam Spade, detective and protagonist, tells about one of his past cases, in which he was hired to track down a successful businessman and family man named Flitcraft. As it turns out, Flitcraft had narrowly avoided death (he’d been walking down the street when something fell and nearly killed him), and he’d decided on the spot to run off to live a more exciting life. After a few years of that, though, he’d tired of it and returned to a city near his old home, started a new business, and remarried. “Shop Vac” has always reminded me of that story.]
To me, the news story is there to illustrate how boring and humdrum life is, with bathroom ads and mass murder given equal weight because nobody really cares about either.