I don't blame the band – the track kicks total ass - but the song's ineffable words are sacred to me now. The song has touched me. I'm possessed, and well past anything save getting those damn words right. I must know the unknowable. My very sanity is at stake.
"Surgery's"" lyrics are tightly wound and spill forth lightning-fast. So fast that it takes repeat listens. After 40 plays in a row — over two hours on repeat — I still can't dope out every last word. I get close, I have mini-aha moments, but not enough of them. So I throw myself on the mercy of the Internet to unlock the code. Google Makes You Smarter™-- right?
I try lyrics sites. Most are HTML'd circa 1997 — fugly and non-intuitive, smacking of pure spam. But I can't find the words. Not to say that I don't find "Surgery" lyrics everywhere – but they're from the album's notes, which I've already debunked. The sites also all cannibalize each other – (wrong) identical lyrics accompanied by the same thank you to "Megs," who ostensibly "found" them. When all she did was cheat off someone's incorrect paper. It's a cut and paste job from the album notes, bush-league, something that could have been fact-checked in three minutes. I hate her.
[PS — If you're out there, "Megs?" be glad I'm not CIA-enough to track you, find you, steal your Hello Kitty merch, freeze your parents' bank accounts, torture your teddy bears, sugar your VW Bug's gas tank, and give you serious, mind-numbing, embarrassing noogies in front of that cute boy you secretly pine for in sixth-period French class.]
This means – incredibly, impossibly — that I am the first person on the entire planet that has been this moved by "Surgery." How can that be? How can the power harnessed within this track not already have afflicted the masses? How can I be the only soul on this planet seeking this Rosetta stone?
Article comments
1 - Tiffany Leigh
Thankfully, I got 99% of the words right, but for that last 1% I needed an assist:
"Hi Tiffany,
Thanks for the kind words about us in your blog. You were very close with the lyrics, the only error is that it's not heart-plasty, it's 'oplasty ("some kind of 'oplasty").
It is very nice to hear our music and lyrics have touched you in such a deep way, and we hope to translate it live in NYC!
-The Vincent Black Shadow"
2 - Dacia
thank god....i also ran into Megs annoying album details, i knew that part already..and seeing that you had the right lyrics, really made my day...Ive become obsessed with this album, playing it all 24/7 and surgery was the only one that i couldnt quite grasp..but now with your help i can! Thank you!
-Dacia
3 - Cassie
I just bought the album a week ago and i absolutly love it. The Vincent Black Shadow is my favorite band right now, and i'm sure they will be for a while. :D
4 - Panther
One other slight error ... it's "cut a piece of skin FOR me" ... at least in the version I have....
5 - Austyn
Oh my god. Thank you so much! I can't even tell you. I've been looking up the lyrics like crazy but I was never able to figure out the word "oplasty." I was pretty sure it was a type of surgery, considering it was used in the same sentence as lobotomy, so I went to dictionary.com typing in random words that sounded like what she was saying, hoping that something would come up. I also tried googling "types of surgery," though that failed miserably. THEN I FOUND THIS. Thank you a million times.