wont you open your eyes

For awhile I thought " Dear Prudence" was a Siouxsie & the Banshess original. Well awhile was a couple of years, until one day I leafed through the liner notes and found * written by lennon/mccartney. It did not change the way I liked her version of it, though I have not listened to the Beatles's original until just last week when I got the White Album.

The lyrics are simple and straightforward, a persuasion of a kid to come out of the house and well, just play in the garden. But with Lennon's deft pen and perhaps a coincidence of the young girl's name to be Prudence, the lyrics take many a level if one is so inclined to read it that way.

As a mark of a truly good cover, Siouxsie does not simply imitate but she does it her way. One may expect the fuzzy overlay of electric guitars to be chaotic and smothering, but it never really does tip that way, and with her voice the simple sincerity, which I think was what the original was about, goes along very nicely.

So why did I not see that in Prudence of 'Across The Universe' until Jas pointed it out after the film? Sure she may not exactly be completely essential to the plot, but some things exist because they just are like that. I suppose sincerity is not simply about reducing things to a bit that *what* really matters, though in a sense it is; a lot of it, perhaps most of it, is from an understanding of *why* that one last bit matters from all the other things around it and this is what is expressed to another.

So Prudence may actually have no bearing on any of the characters in the film. But that's not the point really is it? For people like her really do exist, and if you are so inclined, but im still not fully convinced, you can take Jas' view that she's there as a sole bastion of unrequitedness in a film that bursts ( like strawberry) from so much of everything else.

Siouxsie And The Banshees - Dear Prudence (Cover)