The Paper

Shayla Sivert

ESL 102

Song Analysis #1

“Pardon Me”

Incubus

“A decade ago, I never thought I would be at 23, on the verge of spontaneous combustion. Woe is me. But I guess that it comes with the territory; an ominous landscape of never ending calamity. I need you to hear, I need you to see that I have had all I can take and exploding seems like a definite possibility to me. So pardon me while I burst into flames. I’ve had enough of the world and its people’s mindless games. So pardon me while I burn and rise above the flame. Pardon me, pardon me… I’ll never be the same.

Not two days ago, I was having a look in a book and I saw a picture of a guy fried up above his knees. I said, ‘I can relate,’ cause lately I’ve been thinking of combustication as a welcomed vacation from the burdens of the planet Earth. Like gravity, hypocrisy, and the perils of being in 3-D… and thinking so much differently. . So pardon me while I burst into flames. I’ve had enough of the world and its people’s mindless games. So pardon me while I burn and rise above the flame. Pardon me, pardon me… I’ll never be the same.”

As the electronic sliding pulsing tones eerily introduce us to “Pardon Me” by Incubus, an alternative rock group, its “siren” lures us into a strange calm. The initial lyrics gently yet sarcastically request a pardon. The music quickly moves into loud guitar chords together with a fairly muted cymbal, then into the staccato male voice, almost a cappella, explaining its speaker’s utter despair and inability to understand or feel understood. The refrain slams us with a return to the loud guitar and intense percussion composed of drum and an incessant cymbal. The voice becomes a loud wailing plea for freedom as it tells us, “I’ve had enough of the world and its people’s mindless games. So pardon me while I burn and rise above the flame.”

The lyrics clearly work as a metaphor for his desire to escape the world as it is and to become part of something else, somewhere else, defined only at the moment as “above the flame.” He speaks of burning, exploding as “as a welcomed vacation from the burdens