Now that I have my new turntable, I’m able to listen to selections from my vast vinyl collection again. I recently found myself singing *Cinema Show* a relatively well-known song from 1973, during the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis. I have a live version on the album *Seconds Out*, so I played that the other day. Yeah, wow, good tune.

Anyway, today, while I was eating lunch, I was singing it in my head, and realized that I didn’t know all of the lyrics, so I figured I’d check the web. Naturally, I had no problem finding [the lyrics](http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/The-Cinema-Show-lyrics-Genesis/1A1D2CB5E64C53C74825696000138A73). I had most of them, including “take a little trip back with Father Tiresias”. But the key line I was looking for was the following statement, being attributed to Tiresias:

I have crossed between the poles, for me there’s no mystery.
Once a man, like the sea I raged,
Once a woman, like the earth I gave.
But there is in fact more earth than sea.

Yeah, ok, what the hell? The real words I was missing were “I raged” and “I gave”. But, learning the words didn’t really satisfy my curiosity.

Well, thanks again to the World Wide Web, I also had no problem finding out [more about Tiresias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiresias). I certainly recognized the name, I’m sure I knew it from studying mythology in high school. I probably would have been able to remember/guess that he was a prophet. But I certainly didn’t know that he had spent time as both a man and a woman, and lost his sight by agreeing with Zeus that sex was more pleasurable for a woman than for a man. Hera, who learned with this information that she had lost a bet with her esteemed husband, struck Tiresias blind.

So… woah. This song is apparently a poem about sex being better for women than it is for men…. with an apparent comment that it’s because women are “giving” where as men are “raging”. This has really changed my understanding of the song, to say the least. I wonder when, if ever, I’ll be able to hear/think about the song without having to wonder if sex is a matter of “raging” for me as a man (I’ve certainly never thought of it that way), or whether being “giving” in sex brings one more joy. Or whether it was that way for Zeus and Hera. Or whether it’s fair to say that earth “gives” while an ocean “rages”. Or…

The inspiration to blog about this was not because of these particular questions. Rather, it was because I was struck again by how interesting it is when one’s understanding of a song can change suddenly when one learns the actual lyrics. Much has been made of the misunderstanding of song lyrics, but in this case, I didn’t have any of the lyrics wrong, I just knew I didn’t exactly know all of the words. I was really close, but just a few holes in my understanding, combined with an incomplete knowledge of the mythical character involved, made me pretty much not get the point of the lyrics, even though I’ve known the song (minus a few words) quite well for about 20 years.

OK, that’s not all that deep either, but what do you want? It’s just a short post to a blog!

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