Wait…Cotton Candy and Popsicles was about sex?  Ive always thought is was a whole jam about a platonic first date…

RobTidwell said

I think they use more metaphors than people give them credit for. After all, the jokers cards are literally personifications of concepts that exist solely to be a metaphor for aspects of the human experience. They just don’t use them in the way people expect in rap music. 

I think kinda the opposite. I think WE are the ones who take the songs and make meaning out of them. That is the beautiful thing about art, be it music,books,movies, or paintings. Some of us pay attention the the broad strokes and the whole picture while others like to focus on the minutiae, taking it apart bit by bit and asking ourselves what it means to us, if anything. Thats why some people will listen to….say….Bugz on my nugz….they will hear a song about fucking a bunch of questionable women and getting bugs on your testicles. Me? I hear a haunting commentary on what it would be like for a child growing up in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

When J says “Met this bum in the back of a dumpsta-fucked her in her rumpsta-juggalugga humpsta” He is really talking about the parallels between the Great Famine and the class warfare perpetrated on lower class citizens in america today by our government.

Maybe not….I really do believe the first few sentences though

mayhaps its a little bit of both. I just don’t think ICP sits down and plans out layered subtext into their music…Now that I think about it, the meaning of the word juggalo could be tied in this also. There are those who when asked give the standard “it’s all family” answer but some of us aren’t satisfied with such an obtuse answer.

As far as the OP (sorry omd) the one for me that comes immediately to mind is the lotus track Trapped Inside, though I don’t know if that really qualifies as a metaphor. One of the verses is literally about being trapped inside someplace, a physical barrier (madrox). Then there is the metaphysical(if that’s even the right word) barrier(blaze and shaggy). Lastly you have the mental barrier(J and Mono). This is one of my favorite lotus tracks and I love how they all chose to interpret being trapped inside someplace.

It really hits home for me because I have this deep seeded fear of being buried alive or stuck in a purgatory. Shaggys verse on Trapped Inside, J’s verse on The Ravens Mirror, Madrox’s on Given Half a Chance, and Mono’s on Fear all send chills down my spine EVERY SINGLE TIME I listen to em

LuckyNumbrXIII said
Metaphor and subtext aren’t the same thing.

Don’t mean to get into semantics, but this thread is kinda confusing from the start.

Metaphors help us understand subtext though. They all work together to make story telling interesting. 

Another one that really hits me is the entire concept behind mud water air and blood, and especially how it ends with let it rain. 

They’re talking about letting rain fall and nourish plant life but it’s clearly a metaphor for letting loving kindness poor from our hearts. Basically the hook is them saying show love to everybody, but to the people hurting the most, love them with all our hearts. It’s also kind of a prayer to their idea of god and asking it to show the same kind of love to juggalos. 

What I really love about it though is that I’ve extended the metaphor in my brain to cover faygo showers. So whenever I get some faygo rain I am reminded that they are trying to show love to the people who need it most. There’s so much pain in our community that it makes me heart heavy on the daily and when that faygo spray hits it’s like them saying they love us because we’re hurting and they hurt too. It’s like saying namaste “my soul sees your soul”. And even though I don’t believe in their god it’s nice, imo, to think that they want us to be loved by it. 

The line from The Killing Fields “You’ve crossed the finish line going in the wrong direction” sums up a possible metaphor in the song dealing with a life spent waiting to die, rather than actually living.