“Siren” by Taeyeon, Saturday, May 14, 2022
It’s a song about an unhealthy relationship that beckons the speaker to stay in it. Ultimately does she dive in or get out of the water?
CRUEL FANTASY. Today’s song, “Siren,” uses the image of a mythical creature from ancient Greek and Roman legends. Creatures with a beautiful song that lure sailors to perilous shallow, rocky waters appear in Homer’s The Odyssey. In book 12, Circe advises Odysseus not to listen to their “honey-sweet tones” that “bewitch everybody who approaches them.” But the cunning Greek epic hero takes the warning as a challenge. He asks his crew to cover plug their ears with wax and to tie him to the ship’s mast so that he won’t take the ship to land. From those lines in the epic poem and from the mythology itself, sirens seem to be a symbol for sexual pleasure that is the final step that took a “reasonably good man” into sexual depravity. In antiquity, sirens were depicted as either bird-like or mermaid-like creatures. Some have said that the myth of the sirens was really the low visibility at sea and the yelps of sea-lions, and a bit of hallucination, seeing a something on the rocks through the mists.
EVEN IF WE KISS EACH OTHER FOREVER. Siren myths appear in literature and culture throughout the ages. Starbucks’ logo is perhaps one of the most common examples in our everyday lives. Siren mythology appears in Anberlin’s “Take Me As You Found Me,” a song about a divorced couple who are still love each other. A siren (or mermaid) appears in Copeland’s video for “I Can Make You Feel Young Again,” dragging the fisherman to the bottom of the lake. But the word siren in English doesn’t usually bring the mythical creature to mind in everyday conversations. Instead, we think of the mournful, high-pitched sounds related to an emergency: a fire, a bank robbery, a tornado, missiles launched. Are the two words related? It seems that we started using siren to describe the sound of steam ships as late as 1879. The usage of the word migrated to land and it now sounds like the intro to Anberlin’s “Hello Alone.” Plugging the etymology back into today’s song, Taeyeon describes a magnetism to an unhealthy relationship. He’s a siren beckoning her to the dangerous rocks. She hears the warning siren, others can see that there’s danger. What happens? Is there an ambulance chase? Is it a fifty-car pileup that causes a collision in the other direction? Or does she sail away?
Music Video:
An ancient painting of sirens in The Odyssey. Source. |
Starbucks logo depicts a double-tailed siren. Image source. |
Lyric video in Korean, Romanization, and English:
Behind the scenes:Music Video:
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