"Inaudible Melodies"(7)

"Inaudible Melodies", an oxymoron in itself, is a song written by Jack Johnson with the sole purpose to remind it's listeners about looking into things more, about not believing everything you see. It's about slowing down and taking things in, and not getting caught up in the rush of everything. His tone in this song is mellow. He is trying to prove a point, but he takes a very melodious way in the way he describes everything. In the first stanza, Johnson writes," well shortcuts can slow you down." He is saying that sometimes when you try to take the easy way out, you come up short because you aren't thinking about what you are doing which sometimes causes you to mess up. In the line, "to rebound off of we" he uses anastrophe. What he means we are bound to rebound off of what we have done in time. Before Jack Johnson was a song writer, he was a film maker. I think he used his knowledge of film making to describe a deeper meaning of the pace of life. Johnson says, "silent films are full of sound…. inaudibly free", which basically is saying that silent films have life and meaning to them even though they are free from sound. During the entire song he speaks of images in relation to movies,” pretty pictures of things we ate," "frames can't catch you when you're moving like that," "visual relevancy," frame-lines tell me what to see." All of these lines are personification because he is giving objects like frames and pictures, human like abilities. In the fourth stanza, Johnson describes the “inaudible melodies” saying, “serve narrational strategies..unobtrusive tones…help to notice nothing but the zone..of visual relevancy..frame-lines tell me what to see…chopping like an axe and maybe Eisenstein should just relax.” He mentions all these things to portray the meaning of how fast things really move in a lifetime, and how people aren’t focused on what’s going on around them. In the last stanza, he says, “well Plato’s cave is full of freaks..demanding refunds for the things they’ve seen..in all the things that never made the screen.” What this is being referred to is the men trapped in the cave, in Plato’s Allegory, they were conditioned to believe the lies that they'd been told their whole lives, and when they were confronted with the truth, they were closed minded and not willing to accept the possibility that things were different than they'd appeared. When you look at the rest of the song from this reference point, it seems clear that this song is about the TV/media serving the same purpose today as the cave served for Plato. Lastly Johnson repeats what he says throughout the entire song, “ and just slow down everyone..you’re moving too fast…frames cant catch you when you’re moving like that.” When growing up, stop and enjoy life’s little pleasures.