Busdriver 2

by fandorin

There are three things about Busdriver I really really like - the first open chord guitar riff after the intro chug, the doubled-up vocals and the rhythm change in the end. Also the sinister lyrics... "Busdriver, busdriver there's no one else but us" - i don't have to read on to understand being trapped on a bus, driving into the Realm of Darkness isn't my fav hobby. Who in the end is the Busdriver? Is it God? Jesus? The Devil? The four busdrivers of the apocalypse? The lyrics are fucking scary. A guy noticing he has been on that bus forever, and noone else but the busdriver, finally singing to the busdriver...as there is that sign "don't talk to the busdriver".  

Fiery rain pouring from the sky. Baal, Thor and Zeus throwing lightnings, hammers and other stuff from Walhalla, Olymp and wherever Baal's dwellings might have been... Odin's raven hiding in terror. Cassandra and Teiresias dancing the mussolini. A blind archangel Gabriel taking the death mask of the sun. Quicksilver boiling in the oceans. You really start to hate the place and pray for salvation and all of a sudden, you find yourself on a bus at "Speed"-speed. You read the ad - "Charon's Comfy Shuttle Bus", that greek guy driving the bus sells you a ticket and you're outta here, next stop Styx River Station. 

It reminds me of two things - a surrealist short story called The Tunnel by Friedrich Dürrenmatt about a man taking the train to his job, and suddenly he notices the drive takes longer than ever, and they have entered a neverending tunnel. There's no way to contact the driver, and you're just stuck in that dark train forever (Finally, the train is heading completely vertically and the falling student lands on the front glass of the still falling locomotive, where he greedily stares into the oncoming darkness. The train conductor, ever concerned with duty, asks what they should do, but the student answers: “Nothing (...) God let us fall. And now we'll come upon him.") the other thing is a sci-fi series by russian author Max Frei - a guy dreams something up, those people start to appear regularily in his dreams, they become friends, and somehow they tell him to take the l-train there-and-there (there is no stop, but he goes there nevertheless), and he is transported into another world by train.

It's somehow cool, despite its blatantly unsnappy title. Actually, Busdriver's shaky coolness is reciprocal to the title's snappiness. A shame they never had a song called The TV engineer or My lovely horse. 

PS - Food for thought 

In the early days, Steve Kilbey must have been obsessed with the cars and driving motif. Cars, cars, cars - "I parked my car by some memories" (She never said), "People grow up and learn to drive some car" (Tear it all away), Busdriver, "A car abandoned long before, when I was free" (Fräulein), "Grief won't last in the departing cars" (Field of Mars), "The scenes where cars once crawled these streets" (A Fire Burns), "I must have put the horse before the cart" (You Took), "Inside the car sat a sulky blonde" (The Night is very soft), "Poppies sleep undamaged, we drive into the east" (It's No Reason), "Still troubled by the rumbling of a million distant cars" (Tristesse), "I start the car for Ten Mile Beach", "I start the car for Violet Town" (Already Yesterday), "So now we're cruising down this shuddering highway" (Myrrh) 

1) What is the significance of the author's view on cars? 

2) "Nebukadnezar's Parking Place" is a metaphor for what? 

3) Examine the author's relation to his car Tibor using the known sources. 

2000 words, essay deadline: Feb 31