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see emily play

Melf

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Nov 6, 2002
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ive been told seperately by two different people, that pink floyd's song. "see emily play" is 'bout child abuse?

can anyone confirm or deny this charge?
 
I think the official line is that the song was composed for and about the "Games for May" event in 1967.

I've never made or heard the connection with child abuse myself.
 
In a Syd Barrett biography (probably "Crazy Diamond" by Mike Watkinson and Pete Anderson, but I'd have to check), there's a reference to Syd claiming that he wrote it after a naked girl danced past him while he was attempting to sleep in a wood, but nobody seemed to take this claim particularly seriously.
 
It's proving hard to find a definitive quote about the meaning of the song (hardly surprising, considering who wrote it), but the girl in question was Emily Young, who was a face on the 'scene' at the time.
 
Well Arnold Layne (their other most early single) is about a transvestite - maybe someone got confused along the way?
 
Fairy stories held me high on clouds of sunlight floating by

I think this is just another example of our current tendency to suspect a paedophilic subtext to any piece of popular culture which references childhood. Piper at the Gates of Dawn (the title itself taken from a children's book) contains several lyrics in a similar vein - such as Matilda Mother and The Gnome - which recall the dreamy nonsense lullabies of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear (both of who have come in for more than their fair share of amateur Freudian analysis).

Lyrics which recalled childhood - or were written in a mock nursery rhyme style - were fairly common among psychedelic bands of the late 60's. Off the top of my head, I can think of songs like Traffic's Hole in My Shoe (with it's lisped childish spoken-word interlude), The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit and Lather and Caravan's Land of Grey and Pink. But I'm sure a student - or survivor - of the era could come up with much better examples.
 
I'd add the whimsicalness of Hilaire Belloc to that list.
 
I'm tempted to agree with Graylien on this one. The reference I was on about is indeed from the Crazy Diamond book, and goes:
Emily was a girl Syd claimed to have seen walking and dancing naked through some woods one morning when he had slept under the stars "after a gig up North". Whether this romantic tale is true is debatable. Syd's unpredictable behaviour was becoming more evident by the day. By mid-1967 his LSD consumption was awesome.
 
H_James said:
Well Arnold Layne (their other most early single) is about a transvestite - maybe someone got confused along the way?

Wasn't Arnold Layne inspired by a character in the Bette Davis film The Anniversary? The son who collects ladies' underwear? Or is that another myth?
 
If I remember rightly, according to one of the Syd Barrett biographies, the song was inspired by the fact that someone kept stealing women's underwear from the washing line of Roger Water's mother!
 
I see. The line "Moonshine, washing line" always seemed a bit odd to me, because who hangs out their washing at night? Not that the rest of the song is entirely sensible.
 
gncxx said:
I see. The line "Moonshine, washing line" always seemed a bit odd to me, because who hangs out their washing at night? Not that the rest of the song is entirely sensible.

But if you were stealing it you would perhaps wait til cover of darkness....




I know I do. :oops:
 
Erm...

Yeah, but surely the washing would have been taken by their rightful owner in by the time the moon came out?! :confused:
 
Maybe Roger's mum was as crap as I am at bringing the washing in in the evening. Mine's sometimes out for days.
 
gncxx said:
Erm...

Yeah, but surely the washing would have been taken by their rightful owner in by the time the moon came out?! :confused:


Simple really. If the weathers fine I leave it out overnight or a few days if i just forget to take it in. Specially if you wash later in the day with mo reason to rush unless there's a knicker thief about.

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_Lizard23_ said:
I'd add the whimsicalness of Hilaire Belloc to that list.
I'd say Hilaire Belloc wrote with too much adult cleverness to be properly children's literature.
 
Quite, but I don't think that was what the Lizard was claiming. I think you could make a case for a whole sub-genre of 'mock' children's literature in which stories (or songs) intended for adult consumption are written in the style of children's stories. Oscar Wilde's fairy tales (surely too sophisticated and melancholy to have really been intended for a young audience) and George Orwell's Animal Farm spring to mind immediately. In recent years the subgenre has also spilled over into film (such as Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas) and video games (such as American McGee's relentlessly banal Alice).
 
I see your point - but these things are also clearly distinct from the likes of Syd Barret earnestly trying to get back to a state of childlikeness.
 
H_James said:
_Lizard23_ said:
I'd add the whimsicalness of Hilaire Belloc to that list.
I'd say Hilaire Belloc wrote with too much adult cleverness to be properly children's literature.

Okay, you didn't think I was going to let that sit, did you?

Belloc is a good example of someone who is accessible to both children and adults in different ways. In fact, there are probably adults who never progress past a childish understanding of his work, and children for whom it provides a catalyst for development of new thought - remember that moment at which you suddenly "got" irony, or the simultaneous existence of two meanings?

The division of literature into "children's" and "adults," with "adult" assumed to be the more sophisticated of the two, is a poor reflection of reality. For one thing, children's literature serves all states of the growing brain. For another, not all adults are equally sophisticated readers; and not even all sophisticated readers enjoy everything of merit that is out there, or never enjoy "trash." (I should perhaps remark here that I believe there is such a thing as "good trash," and that all generalizations are false at some level. Including that one, yes.)

If you compare Enid Blyton to Virginia Woolf, or Danielle Steele to Diana Wynne Jones, you get very different results because you are not comparing similars. An interesting exercise is to compare the "for adults" and "for children" works of top artists (I'm not talking modern adult authors trying to take advantage of the "crossover" phenomenon, all too many of whom are second-raters to begin with and most of whom are responding to market demands not to artistic needs) who has consciously done both - C.S. Lewis, for example; Joan Aiken; Fred Gipson; or A.A. Milne.

While it is true that some books require a minimum level of maturity to access, the very best literature can be read in different ways at different ages. My experience is that the very best (in the sense of most widely enjoyable, most rereadable, most multi-layered) literature is most likely to be shelved in the sections set aside for young people, and that this is not an accident. One does not have to be able to grasp the entire effect of a work the first time one encounters it in order for it to be "for" you at that age. In fact, a book that is not fully understood the first time can haunt the reader and call him back for multiple readings, discovering new things every time, and thus become a favorite and a life influence. This can happen to adults, but it happens routinely to people whose brains are not done growing.

There is also a genre which relies on providing two levels of meanings, one more accessible to small children and one more accessible to adults - the picture book intended to be read aloud. Since preliterate children demand (and probably need, for developmental purposes) to be read the same story again and again and again and again and again, the writers and artists responsible for them habitually create them at two levels of sophistication, one of which goes straight past the primary audience to provide a buffer against boredom for the adult re-reader. One of the results of this is that the child is exposed to multilayered productions before he can read for himself. Thus, a work with the primary purpose of amusement can become, spontaneously, an instrument of enlightenment and mental growth - for the child, or the adult, since some adults don't get the reading habit until they perform the service for their children.

Anyway, on the topic of ULs about this or that work being "really" about some form of child victimization, I think the commonness of such stories is based on a couple of negative aspects of modern life. One, is a widspread inability to interpret text systematically. Think of all the songs that are heard in a way that is at variance with the content of their lyrics - "You Are My Sunshine" is about abandonment, "Good Night Irene" is about a disastrous marriage, and "Born in the USA" is about a poor working class slob who gets screwed over by his country. In the case of radio rock songs, this can be excused a bit by the fact that lyrics don't always make straightforward grammatical sense and are easy to mishear when mixed with the guitar riffs; however, we tend to interpret ambiguous lyrics in accordance with our desires, prejudices, and fears, and the prevalence of child victimization in these interpretations is ominous in the extreme.

I believe that the root of such ULs lies, not in the lyrics, but in a generalized distrust of and disrespect for children. Our society does not recognize children as independent human beings with wills, needs, and minds of their own. We see them as parasites on the body economic, as helpless victims, as pictures of innocence in an age which does not believe that innocence exists, as blank slates to be written on by the nearest adult - as anything, in fact, but what they are: essential members of the race involved in the tricky and complex process of maturation, which each one has to complete on her own.
 
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