Clairo: Amoeba Meaning

Song Released: 2021

Amoeba Lyrics

Between the gaps, I was swimming laps
Got close to some epiphany
I'll convince a friend to join deep ends
Have your toes touch the lack of cement
We'll gather to our corner of the woods
Echo chambers inside a neighborhood
In centerfold,...

1. Crystear

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   Aug 1st 2022 !⃝

   I feel like Amoeba is a song that definitely needs lyric interpretation, because the lyrics are hard to hear and it definitely doesn’t help that it doesn’t tell itself outright, but I think the key to the meaning is in the last three lyrics, the first one being “I sip and toast to normalcy, a fool's way into jealousy” This reads as pretending to be content and happy with a relaxed suburban lifestyle, which I think is easy to connect back to the earlier mentions of family and lyrics like “Echo chambers inside a neighborhood” which itself invokes repeated lies and community ignorance. The second lyric I want to focus on is “I mock and imitate goodbyes when I know that I can't deny,” which I think is about feeling shelled out and emotionally fake, unable to mean and reciprocate the sentiments behind goodbyes, and having to go through that process at all because we are all expected to socially. This connects back up to lyrics like “I can hope tonight goes differently, but I show up to the party just to leave” Where the speaker of the song expresses that they already expect problems before they even show up to the party, cursed with the self awareness that the party will play out exactly as they imagined and they will end up leaving early emotionally taxed knowing that is wasn’t worth it. But the interesting part comes in with our last lyric, which is itself a foil of the last one I mentioned. “That I'll be here forever-while, I show up to the party just to leave” Where the speaker of the song acknowledges that despite understanding how their environment affects them that they will always be there stuck repeating the cycle, showing up to the party just leave. This final idea connects the rest of the song together, and lyrics like “We'll gather to our corner of the woods,” “Could you say you've even tried? You haven't called your family twice,” and “Aren't you glad that you reside in a hell and in disguise?” start finally making sense. In the first few lyrics of the song, it is established that the speaker is talking about their friends, and the person they’re speaking to throughout the song is either one of their friends or themselves, in a scathing retrospective sort of way. In the first scenario, the hell lyric would mean that the person had removed themselves from the cycle and positioned themselves somewhere arguably worse, and despite that they have more control over their actions and their life than they did in the neighborhood with the speaker, the speaker criticizing the ways they have fallen off, arguing that they haven’t even tried because they didn’t “call their family twice” which maybe indicates that they tried to come back but will probably be rejected. In the second scenario, where the speaker is talking to themselves, it paints a much sadder, spiteful story, where the hell is the neighborhood itself, and the “Aren’t you glad” becomes a lot less literal, now mocking the speaker’s inability to remove themselves from the cycle, and the farthest they have gotten is “gaps” between the neighborhood and escaping, and the pools that they leave their memories in, trying to stifle their complete and utter knowledge of themselves.
   

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