For week 6, I have decided to brave the minefield of annotations on Hozier’s Take Me to Church.

Q: What do you get when you mix religion, sex, politics, poetic licence, filmmaker’s interpretation, and 700,000+ views?

A: A bloody mess.

This issues on this song were manifold. Hozier himself has given multiple statements about the meaning of the song, mainly saying it is about sex, humanism, and not allowing religion or other cultural entities to define you. However, the director of the video used the song as a platform for protesting the treatment of homosexuals in Russia. This didn’t disagree with Hozier’s intent, but it put a different spin on the lyrics. In particular, the relationship described in the lyrics is hetero.

This led to annotations that were dedicated solely to church-bashing, arguments about the sexual orientation of the singer, conflicting discussions about Church doctrines, pagan practices, and so on…

Cleaning this up is a task that feels akin to attempting to herd cats.

I decided to allow, whenever possible, for Hozier to speak for himself, by including quotes from interviews. From there, I used his comments to guide my selection of annotations.

The tricky part came from the areas where the video took liberties with the interpretation of the lyrics that differed from Hozier’s general statements. In these areas, I allowed notations that reflected the view of the video, but added disclaimers whenever these didn’t jive with (or were more specific than) Hozier’s general comments.

Please (Pretty please!), take a look at my first run. It’s still giant, heavy and wordy, and could still use a good cleaning out. Kind of like the Church?… But I digress…

Thanks for the comments and suggestions!

Bold choice!

I made a few small edits.

The issue we still have is balancing lyric-based interpretations against video-based ones whilst keeping the annotations reasonably short.

I have been working on this song, on and off, for a while. At one point I attempted to dedicate the annotations solely to discussing the lyrics as they are written. This however, made it so that the issues in the video were not being addressed at all. This created a burst of extremely angry and offended replies, stating that the annotations were “missing the point of the song” and that Genius was “afraid to face the homosexual issues”.

You should try to dig up the previous cleanup thread on this song. We had several mods/staff on it, but…we lost interest.

Yeah.

I understand losing interest. My box started become overwhelmed with notifications about this saong about a month ago… After a while I just started ignoring them…. too much.