Theme
The song describes the band's disillusionment with the music industry as a money-making machine rather than a forum of artistic expression. The plot centers around an aspiring musician getting signed by a seedy executive to the music industry, "The Machine". The voice predicts all the boy's seemingly rebellious ideas ("You bought a guitar to punish your ma, you didn't like school, and you know you're nobody's fool"). The boy's illusions of personal identity are further crushed with lines such as, "What did you dream, it's alright we told you what to dream".
Read more about this topic: Welcome To The Machine
Famous quotes containing the word theme:
“If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“It seems to me that upbringings have themes. The parents set the theme, either explicitly or implicitly, and the children pick it up, sometimes accurately and sometimes not so accurately.... The theme may be “Our family has a distinguished heritage that you must live up to” or “No matter what happens, we are fortunate to be together in this lovely corner of the earth” or “We have worked hard so that you can have the opportunities we didn’t have.””
—Calvin Trillin (20th century)
“And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme ...”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)