You know you're gold

This time I shouldn't be presenting you any bullcrap (no guarantees) although AP's are coming up. Our blogpost this week is supposed to be an intellectual interpretation of a song that we picked.

"Z E B R A"  -  B E A C H    H O U S E

You know you're gold, you don't got to worry none
Oasis child, born and so wild
Don't I know you better than the rest
All deception, all deception from you

Your love is stag in the white sand
Wilderness for miles, eyes so mild and wise
Don't I know you better than the rest
All deception, all deception from you

Any way you run, you run before us
Black and white horse arching among us
Any way you run, you run before us
Black and white horse arching among us

Your love is stag in the white sand
Oasis child born into a man
Don't I know you better than the rest
All deception, all deception from you

Wilderness for miles, eyes so mild and wise
Oasis child, born and so wild
Don't I know you better than the rest
All deception, all deception from you

Any way you run, you run before us
Black and white horse arching among us
Any way you run, you run before us
Black and white horse arching among us

(Sadly I have trouble understanding these lyrics myself. I mean, what was I thinking when I picked this song? It's not even my favorite, since all my favorite bands happen to be from Sweden and New Zealand and Australia and Ireland. And sadly Mr. McCarthy has to put up with my scrunchy handwriting and insufficient answers to the questions we got in class.)

Starting with the first line, "You know you're gold, you don't got to worry none" and repeated use of "oasis child" represents that the subject of this song, in the speaker's eyes, is a person born of life in a desert, precious and valuable like gold. The speaker is telling the subject "You know...you're like gold, so don't you worry". And like the images of a golden-grassed safari this song gives, the zebra ("black and white horse" could be representing a person) is wild. "Wild" can be interpreted as mysterious, exotic, special, different. "Don't I know you better than the rest" reads like a questions, meaning that the speaker knows the subject better than anyone else, but really the speaker doesn't know all that much about the subject because the zebra is deceptive. Zebras travel in herds, and their black-and-white stripes help them confuse predators because a color-blind lion will see a moving mass of stripes, or when a zebra is alone and standing still, the stripes mimic the tall grass. "Any way you run, you run before us" shows that the zebra is always ahead and out-of-reach, always mysterious and no one fully understands it. And if "among us" means among the other zebras, then "black and white horse" means that if everybody else were horses, then the zebra is slightly different but essentially the same (horses and zebras are of the same species). For a brief stanza or two with the lines "Oasis child born into a man" and "Wilderness for miles, eyes so mild and wise", the zebra metaphor is being compared to a human (a man's eyes are more likely to look wise than a zebra's).

In the end, "Zebra" could be a love song. Who knows? I think it means that, with the song's galloping beat and almost wistful voice, the speaker thinks the subject is a good and interesting person, with a seemingly wild/mysterious image. The speaker knows the subject most out of everyone, and is telling the subject that he/she is precious like gold and yet the subject still distances himself/herself from the speaker and everyone else.