Okay, I know nothing about Hozier, so I’ve no idea if this is something he’d do, but that pair of lines:
“You treat your mouth as if it’s Heaven’s gate, the rest of you like you’re the TSA.”
Is that a direct reference to the Heaven’s Gate cult? The one that believed you had to give up all vestiges of human life, sex, food, etc, to live on pure sunlight, in order to elevate your consciousness to a new state of being and enable yourself to leave the planet? The one that committed mass suicide in 1997?
Because, um. That does change the tone a bit, yeah.
The TSA too. Because, yes, initially it scans just as gate guardians, a security organisation to protect the ‘gateway to heaven’ that is the partner’s mouth. Their body is a temple, and that temple is guarded to prevent the wrong things from getting in. But, well. The TSA was formed as a direct response to 9.11. So there’s definitely an implication of fanatical self-protection in there too, the aggressive refusal to admit dangerous elements, the fear of allowing attack.
Combined, if it is a direct reference to Heaven’s Gate, then the imagery here is very much of a very regimented individual who is pursuing an inhuman, self-destructive purity, at least partly out of fear of the world outside their boundaries. Not a pursuit of happiness, but an attempt to escape and stave off attack, to be good enough and pure enough to escape the world and be taken somewhere better.
“You keep telling me to live right, to go to bed before the daylight. But then you wake up for the sunrise, you know you don’t gotta pretend.”
“I aim low, I aim true, and the ground is where I go. I work late where I’m free from the phone, and the job gets done. But you worry some, I know, but who wants to live forever babe? You treat your mouth as if it’s heaven’s gate, the rest of you like you’re the TSA. I wish I could go along, babe don’t get me wrong. You know you’re bright as the morning, as soft as the rain, pretty as a vine, as sweet as a grape. If you can sit in a barrel, maybe I’ll wait.”
If it is a Heaven’s Gate reference, a suicide cult, then ‘I aim low, I aim true, and the ground is where I go’ is possibly a bit a refutation of the ‘heaven’ promised if they live right. The ground is good enough, and death is real, not just a step towards promised heaven. The ground is where we go. Who wants to live forever, babe? And “If you can sit in a barrel, maybe I’ll wait”, could just be, yeah, if you grow up a bit, maybe I’ll wait until then, but in this context, a suicide cult, it could also be: if you survive, maybe I’ll wait.
“You keep telling me to live right […] you know you don’t gotta pretend.” “I wish I could go along, babe, don’t get me wrong.”
There is some implication that the narrator thinks it’s a cult. He thinks they’re pretending to their purity out of fear, and he doesn’t want to be dragged in. Partly because he’s already embraced some of the ‘threats’ they see even in tiny things, like coffee and whiskey and bad sleep cycles, and it hasn’t had the consequences they seem to be afraid of.
“I work late where I’m free from the phone, and the job gets done. But you worry some”.
The job gets done. But they worry anyway.
Yeah. I think I would read this song, not necessarily as a straight exaltation of a bad lifestyle, whiskey and coffee and shitty sleep, but more as just a warning of going too far in the other direction, a life of purity based on fear and worry about other people’s rules. Rules that he thinks the partner does know are false. ‘You don’t gotta pretend’, vs ‘I aim low, I aim true’. Plus ‘you treat your mouth as if it’s heaven’s gate’. Heaven’s Gate was also built on a false prophecy, and their belief system had to change several times when elements of that prophecy were proven untrue. The rules change because the rules aren’t real. They’re externally imposed, and they build off your fear. So relax a little bit, embrace some of the small evils, live as a human some instead of attempting to be a higher life form, and see if it’s really everything you were afraid of.
