[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > And this thread is great - and somewhat humbling! It > makes me want to rethink how I interpret all of Joni's > songs!
Me too. Very interesting thread here. I've always taken this song as a straightforward faltering romance story, with the faulty electrical wiring being a metaphor for the energy no longer passing between former lovers. But now, after reading all the thoughts people here have shared about it... Since the song follows her "pack your suspenders" song about James Taylor, could Electricity refer to the James Taylor, Joni, Carly Simon triangle? Usually talking about who a song may be about isn't very interesting to me except as one small aspect of the story. I only wonder now about who the characters may be because of someone's mention of another woman in the story, and, yes, there does seem to be another person involved. I'd always taken the "she" as Joni looking at her own behavior from afar. Moving on... Reading the first four lines today I'm struck by what a cold guy this Minus must be to cause the leaves to fall and the pond to over-ice just by speaking. He's no Mr. Warmheart. Ok, so maybe it just happens to be almost wintertime when Joni wrote the song, but at the moment the image of him as cold and unwilling to connect fits the song. So Joni herself can be the proud headed (hasn't she often been called arrogant?) Queen Lizzie putting out little charges, and he's not returning anything. (The sparks and song he sang her to sleep are both in the past). The line "And she begs him to show her how to fix it again" is the saddest one in the whole song to me. It expresses the desperate attempt to get through to someone who's shut her out. Those warm memories cause her to beg, even though even she knows it's futile. And... Minus and the mention of a minotaur make me think of King Minos, who claimed to be such a powerful ruler that he could rule nature (and the gods) and showed his power by praying for a bull to be created from the sea. One was, and it turned out to be such a beautiful bull that instead of sacrificing him to Poseidon, Minos kept it for himself, which made Poseidon so mad that he caused Minos's wife to fall in love with the bull. She was able to consummate her relationship with this bull with the help of Daedulus, an inventor, who built a structure that she could get into and fool the bull, and so she gave birth to the minotaur. Minos was pretty darn mad about that, and had a labyrinth built to hide the minotaur away in. Not sure what any of this has to do with "Electricity", but what I do find interesting is that both myth and song include a Minus/Minos who controls nature in a destructive rather than nourishing way and, if another woman is involved in the song, it may also be about possessiveness and duplicity (as the myth is). Minos was so angry at Daedulus that he and his son Icarus had to get away quickly, and to do that Daedulus came up with the wings design, which Icarus then took too far (and we all know what Joni did with that story). I think Joni read the Greek myths or maybe Joseph Campbell who was getting a lot of attention in the 70s, and, like she has with other things, took a few clues from it and then came up with her own unique creation. And just one more thing... I love the way Joni uses images of light in this song. As a memory it was floodlights (overwhelming, input/output connecting), then a flashlight (focused and with its separate energy source), then a candle (not much illumination and no electricity at all). It's such a fine way of showing the mellowing down of a relationship to its present fragility. One slight breeze or one puff and there's complete darkness. That's it for my bits about this song. Along with all this I also agree with everything else people have written about it. It's such a pleasant surprise that after "knowing" this song for so many years, there are all these new ways of looking at it. Debra Shea
