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The Annotated Lyrics
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- What You Need
- Where's the F***in Taxi? C**t
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- Win Fall CD 2088 AD
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- Wise Ol' Man
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- Words of Expectation
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- You Haven't Found It Yet
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- Zandra
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Arranged By Album
- Live at the Witch Trials
- Dragnet
- Grotesque (After the Gramme)
- Slates
- Hex Enduction Hour
- Room to Live
- Perverted by Language
- The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall
- This Nation's Saving Grace
- Bend Sinister
- The Frenz Experiment
- I Am Kurious, Oranj
- Extricate
- Shift-Work
- Code:Selfish
- The Infotainment Scan
- Middle Class Revolt
- Cerebral Caustic
- Light User Syndrome
- Levitate
- The Marshall Suite
- The Unutterable
- Are You Are Missing Winner
- The Real New Fall LP (Formerly Country on the Click)
- Fall Heads Roll
- Reformation Post TLC
- Imperial Wax Solvent
- Your Future Our Clutter
- Ersatz G.B.
- Re-Mit
- The Remainderer
- Sub-Lingual Tablet
- Wise Ol' Man
- New Facts Emerge
- 2014
- O! ZZTRRK Man
- New Facts Emerge
- Segue
- Ponto
- Smith and Mark
- Afternoon Disco
- Reece Stick
- Home /
- The Annotated Lyrics /
- Wise Ol' Man
Wise Ol' Man
Lyrics
Eleni: Dead DJ (repeated) (2)
MES:
The wise old man
All and around,
He was
Fair and just
His wisdom,
Ten thousand miles
Wise old man
WIse old man
Wisdom
Get you out, baby!
On the bus
The hill folk
Remove
Ear plugs
Sorrow he's proud
To repulse
Wise old man can get you out!
Eleni:
Wise old man
Wise old man
Wise old man
MES: His wisdom...
Eleni:
He wasn't seen
In the hareem (3)
In fact
He was only nineteen (4)
Wise old man
Didn't exist
Wise old man
He has butcher's face (5)
MES:
Old man, wisdom
And a hero's coat
All:
Wise old man! Eleni: Wise old man!
Wise old man! Eleni: Didn't exist
Wise old man! Eleni: He wasn't seen
Wise old man! Eleni: In a hareem
Wise old man, Ah ah ah
Wise old man
Wise old man
Wise old man
Ha ha ha ha ha
Wise old man
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Wise old man!
Ah ah ah ah
MES:
They cold meat,
He went to the butcher! (3)
Wise old man
He is indistinguished
Wise old man
He went to the butcher!
All:
Wise old man
Wise old man
Notes
1. Thanks to perverted by sandwich for providing the first transcription attempt, which is the basis for my transcription above. As is the norm for newer Fall material, much of this transcription is speculative; if you're reproducing any of this, don't take it as gospel, and check it out yourself. And, if you think you've discovered something we've missed, please weigh in below.
It is possible that the title alludes to sometime Fall associate, promoter Alan Wise, as nairng points out. Somehow Wise, who died in July 2016, found himself subject to rampant speculation as to whether he was "Dr. Annabel" of "An Older Lover Etc."(a fact of which he may have been completely unaware). The only basis for this seems to have been a slight similarity in sound between "Dr. Annabel Lies" and "Alan Wise," but it was repeated enough that there were those who were certain of it...in this case, so far, all we have to go on is the word "wise." Since the title could be an allusion without the subject matter having anything to do with Wise, this is at the very least less unlikely than it might otherwise have been.
The song very likely alludes to Solomon, as Brian points out (see note 3 below).
Dan points out that the "wise old man" is a Jungian archetype.
2. At least this is what it sounds like...if so, it is possible the song is about John Peel. Take this with a grain of salt, since the transcription is uncertain to begin with. But if the lyrics are about a prominent DJ, it makes some sense out of some of them, particularly the second verse. Note that in the comments below, "Dead DJ" has fallen into disfavor...it sounds fairly distinct to me, though.
3. A more common form of "hareem" is "harem," which means the part of a Muslim household where women are housed, and most commonly refers, by extension, to a group of women sexually involved with one man (usually a king or some kind of royal figure). The song may allue to the bliblical King Solomon, who was reputed to be the wisest ol' man to ever have lived, and who was also said to have had an enormous harem/hareem, as per I Kings 11:
"King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter--Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites.
They were from nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, 'You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.' Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love.
He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray."
Solomon began worshiping foreign gods, and even established one or two of the dreaded "high places" we're always reading about (temples on elevated ground dedicated to foreign deities). In anger, YHWH then decreed that all but one tribe of Israel would, after Solomon's death, be ruled by a king of Edom, with only one tribe following his son Rehoboam.
Brian also notes the line "Get you out, baby!" This line seems to be saying that the titular character can "get you out" of some place or situation, and "baby" then would be appended as a generic form of address (as the second time, MES says "Wise ol' man can get you out!"). However, Brian connects this with a story told in the Bible. Solomon acted as a judge for his people, and two women came to him laying claim to the same baby. Solomons judgment was that they would each get half of the baby. One of the "mothers" agreed to the plan of halving the baby, probably because she decided, reasonably enough, that half a baby is better than none. The other woman, on the other hand, immediately relinquished her claim to the child, and ceded the whole thing to her rival claimant. At this point Solomon revealed his ruse, ruling that the woman who would give up the child rather than see it chopped in half was clearly the real mother. This is because, I suppose, a real mother would want what is best for the child, and being hacked in half with a machete is clearly not what is best for an otherwise healthy infant. In his wisdom, Solomon realized that motherhood would give her the requisite experience to know this, whereas the false mother made an understandable mistake, but one that was fatal for her case...so the narrator may be saying Solomon can get the baby out of this unfortunate situation, on Brian's reading. This would also perhaps explain the lines about the "butcher" further down...
"Hareem": ^
"Butcher:" ^
4. Zack has reminded me that the narrator of "Pacifying Joint" is also said to be "only nineteen."
5. Dan reports that Orlando by Virginia Woolf proclaims "for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's..."
Comments (43)
From Virginian Woolf, "Orlando":
I really don't think this is about John Peel or has anything to do with a DJ. I think we are dealing with, very generally, a 'wise figure' - at least something taken to be - who is revealed to be something other than what he has been taken for. Perhaps not a fraud but someone who has had this 'wise' position thrust upon them by a dim and wanting public. There does also seem to be some theme of grief and mourning as well though.
But in this context the second verse is fairly descriptive: the figure is on the bus and people take out their earphones (which is a rather common adornment today) in order to hear him speak - a certain 'walking on water' accomplishment in these times!
I'm tempted to make a Lacanian comment about going to the butchers but I'll refrain.
I'm happy to concede that she is saying 'Dead DJ' at this point.
I think they may have been listening to him with their earplugs to begin with, in which case it wouldn't be much of a miracle...I mean, either way is possible, but if "DJ" is right it may have run in that direction.
Wise Ol' Man
Didn't exist
Is it too obvious / far fetched that, rather than being about Alan Wise/John Peel/Jeremy Corbyn, this might be about a teenager pretending to be an old chap?
In any case, it's been fun staring into the abyss with Bzfgt, Dannyno and everyone else and I hope the next album gives us plenty more to stare at.
Zack (aka dalyzach)
I'm pretty sure my original guess of "He is indistinguished" is wrong as that's not a word. Now it sounds kind of like "He is in this mirror" or "He is in a stairway", but it's really hard to make out. Also could it be "take cold meat"? Makes slightly more syntactical sense.
P.S., I'm "perverted by sandwich" who did the original guesswork on the FOF but on this site I've just been using my real name.
Seems really easy to me.
The only link is the word "wise", which crops up a couple of times in other lyrics without anyone jumping to conclusions. Nobody has ever pointed to any solid textual references other than that one word. Also Wise died in June 2016, and this song was being performed from October 2015. Not sure when the lyrics were settled, but certainly he was neither dead nor a DJ when the song debuted. And he had been fired as Fall manager in 2009. I doubt he was even on MES' radar in October 2015.
So my (as always very subjective) breakdown is as follows:
'He wasn't seen
In the hareem'
Let's take 'he' to be an ambiguous comparison of Peel and Wise.
In fact
He was only nineteen
I don't think MES would have googled Peel's age at the time. Wise died aged 63 in 2016, making him 19 in 1972
Wise old man
Didn't exist
Wise old man
He has butcher's face
While Peel and Wise both had Butcher's faces, all writing (by MES and latently by all writers by default) is about the writer himself. Really, the song is Mark facing the reaper, IMHO
Yours,
JRo AKA Theotherjr AKA The Mad Kid
Peel's first wife, of course, was 15 when they married.
I think I would suggest looking at Jungian archetypes instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_old_man
In the hareem"
There's a Fredric Brown short story, titled Invisibility, collected in various places, in which a character discovers how to become invisible and sneaks into a Sultan's harem, with terrible consequences. I don't see the story is connected to the lyric, but I'm just rolling around some readings of the lyric in my mind.
If you wanted to construct a case that the lyric is inspired by MES reading something about archaeological findings in relation to Solomon, then you probably could.
But other parts of the lyric of course would appear obscure in that light. Not that this would be unusual.
Dsn
I don't think this helps us any, and the only reason I mention it is that MES did, in a letter to Tony Friel dated 26 May 1977.