Written by Icelandic singer Björk, the song is an ode to a highly spiritual sense of surreality, dreams, unconsciousness, and the pre-verbal place in all of our brains where such things dwell.
"Today is the last day that I'm using words
They've gone out, lost their meaning
Don't function anymore
Let's, let's, let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious honey
Today is the last day that I'm using words
They've gone out, lost their meaning
Don't function anymore
Traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, to the arms of unconsciousness
Traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, to the arms of unconsciousness
Chorus:
Let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious
Let's get unconscious honey
Let's get unconscious
Words are useless, especically sentences
They don't stand for anything
How could they explain how I feel
Traveling, traveling, I'm traveling
Traveling, traveling, leaving logic and reason
Traveling, traveling, I'm gonna relax
Traveling, traveling, in the arms of unconsciousness
(chorus)
And inside we're all still wet
Longing and yearning
How can I explain how I feel?
(chorus)
Traveling, traveling (repeat twice)
Traveling, traveling, in the arms of unconsciousness
And all that you've ever learned
Try to forget
I'll never explain again"
The lyrics--and particularly the last three lines--call to my mind a quote by the brilliant C.G. Jung: “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.”
The nearly all-electronic sound is ominous, heavy, unearthly, and references nothing acoustic, in keeping with the subliminal sense of the song and visuals. And speaking of visuals, between the sets, art direction, special effects, and costuming, the video is an absolutely incredible hallucination. It seems to somehow capture the paradox of a kind of "organic science fiction" and contains some arresting, painterly tableaux. Madonna has admitted that much of the phantasmagorical look for the video was influenced by female Surrealist painters such as Leonora Carrington and especially Remedios Varo (the shot of two Madonnas, faces in mirrors, on a bench in water is a literal staging of the Varo painting "The Lovers"). Filmed over 5 days in 1994 and directed by Mark Romanek, the video is part of the permanent collection at MOMA New York. At the time of shooting, it was the most expensive music video ever made, coming in at $5 million.
http://www.madonna.com/
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