Interpretations:Now Is Strange

The chorus I believe is about how the "now" is strange because it only exists for a brief instant. "Now" is not "before" anymore, it's gone! What got changed? Weird. :)

  - But now IS before now right?  It was in the future, but now that now has passed, it is before.  It can't suddenly stop being before unless you go back in time!  Still weird though.

I think this song is about present times where's that naughty boy (man) who steals each blade of grass (cuts down forests and destroys nature) and replaces it with wires, and batteries (and puts up power lines and building and stuff) now is strange (the world today is strange compaired to what it use to look like) the rest is kinda fuzzy.

I think the narrator is a person who lacks a firm grasp on reality due to mental illness. He/she suffers from paranoid delusions and believes that the feeling of strangeness that he/she experiences in the present moment is due to the interference of outside forces, strange and nefarious, and not any internal filter that alters perception. But that's just my opinon.

While there may be political overtones to this song the way it has always struck me is that it is about how everyone always believes they're living in a strange time. Through out history a lot of people seem to have had the feeling that they would be better off living in some past time because the time they're actually living in is so weird/stressful/wrong.

I've been thinking over the apartment buzzer stanza and all I've got is: 6 is greater than 5. Something greater is being hidden underneath reality or present time. Then underneath THAT is something even better, or at least "impossible to imagine". I think basically what it's saying is that the future is getting harder to predict. In such a fast paced world, who knows what will happen? --deathgecko (Evil Emperor of Lizards) 19:58, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

"Who knows what will happen?" A seven.

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The apartment buzzer verse is an allusion to the Pixies song Monkey Gone to Heaven - "and if God is 5, then the Devil is 6..."

"If man is five ... then the Devil is six ... then God is seven."

When I listen to it, it makes me think of the ever changing Facebook home page. It's always changing format and nobody likes it and it seems strange to them. they say "No it's not before anymore! It's gone weird! Now is strange!" the 5 and 6 are the new format of the pages. And under the six, the unbelievable thing is the next format change. They can't imagine what it will look like and how awful it will be to adapt to it. --Nerdy4ever95 12:06, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

All I can hear instead of "I'd like to hear what did you change?" is "I liked your hair why did you change?"
So I thought this song was mostly about the loss of familiar things through time in the people you know. I guess it still is, but more about change in a broad sense. Also a good October song.
--CatastropheelingGood

Pick Seize

I didn't make the connection to the Pixies song until I came here. In Monkey Gone To Heaven, Man is 5 and the devil is 6 and God is 7. Perhaps the line about the apartment buzzer refers to the dehumanizing effect of technology... well, new technology. The apartment buzzer is old technology that lets people contact you if you live in a large apartment building. If you disconnect that (perhaps because you're only using the Internet to talk to people now... which is pretty much what I do, but whatever) then the people can't come up to your apartment and be with you in person, and maybe that leads to bad things. If you remove your 5 (humanity) you get 6 (the devil)... but if you remove the devil then you get God... so maybe to reach God you have to destroy your humanity and get past the devil?

Well that's just me guessing.--Mandaliet 21:10, 21 April 2012 (EDT)

Part 9 of The Spine

The Spine, upon learning that her father is dead, starts viewing everything in the world as strange. She also starts to go a bit insane, starting to worry about things that don't seem to make sense to others.

Singers: The Spine.

--MidoFS (talk) 17:33, 3 June 2018 (EDT)

The Inevitable Transgender Reading

Alright, I know, I know. This is the frame I use when listening to this song, nothing more. I also don't think it's airtight, but it's a fun way for me, personally, to listen to the song. With this framing, the narrator is lamenting the changes that someone in their life has gone through. These changes are inexplicable to the narrator, who doesn't understand the why of the matter and only sees what is happening to this person on the surface as an outsider.

We open with the narrator describing the "naughty boy" who, when you break down the action of stealing "blades of grass" and replacing them with "wires and batteries," its barest essentials can read as taking something naturally occurring and replacing them with something man-made. It should go without saying, but one of the many ways transphobes view transitioning is as something unnatural, ruining one's natural beauty with hormonal treatments and surgeries. However, I see the narrator's position as being misguided and uninformed, not intentionally malicious.

The chorus is what really led me down the path of this interpretation, for potentially obvious reasons. I liked your hair, what did you change? One of the things that kept me from finally cutting my hair short was the chorus of people in my life telling me what a shame it would be to cut it all off. I see this chorus as the narrator being baffled by such a simple physical change, and knowing on some level something else (the other person's identity) has changed without being able to fully pinpoint what. Something is different, and whatever relationship these two had before will never quite be the same, for better or for worse. It is that irrevocable change, though, which frightens the narrator.

...Underneath that five would be a six / Underneath that six would be / Something unbelievable / Something I cannot imagine... These lines have an intense overtone of a spiraling thought process, a fallacious slippery slope the narrator is slipping down whose final logical conclusion is too much for them to even bear to think about. If this other person has changed in these small, observable ways, what else has changed within them? Has something broken between them that can't ever be repaired? After all, it's not before anymore. It will never be before again. This person the narrator knew, to them, is gone forever, replaced by someone who looks different, weird, strange, a person of wires and batteries.

As I said, this isn't the only way I interpret this song, but it is one that stood out to me when I was first getting to know it.

Cremetangerine (talk) 14:25, 19 March 2025 (EDT)