Criticism of "Exploder"

“Exploder” performed by Audioslave, literally, outlines the acquaintances of the narrator. In the first verse he meets a man who was in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. The second verse is about the daughter of a man who committed suicide, who ended up taking her own life and a boy who heard voices and might have killed his mother. In the final verses the narrator appears to have a mental break. He meets a man who looks a lot like himself, he fights this man in the street, then when he turned around the narrator shot the man, but when he looked in the mirror, he realized he’d shot himself and there was never another man. The chorus is about how if you’ve never experienced the dark side of life, then you can never truly appreciate the good in it or be prepared for the bad.
In the first verse, “the man locked away for things he hadn’t done” (lines 1-2), could be an extension of the narrator feeling trapped by others' opinions or drugs. The roses and smile could refer to the man’s death, being laid out in a coffin holding roses, which could be foreshadowing to the end of the song because he says “When he smiled at me/ I could understand,” (lines 5-7). The second verse about the girl says that she did what her father had done before her, which could refer to possibly a drug addiction, depression or a combination (line 15). The boy who heard voices is obviously schizophrenic and may have killed his mother because the voices told him to because he had no one to confide in (lines 16-18). The last verse tells about the narrator, he could have been on drugs or possibly deep into depression so that what he saw in the mirror was only similar to himself. He fought the drugs or the depression, but he “turned away” and shot the vice, a part of himself, however the narrator could have given up and killed himself (lines 24-29). The chorus relates all of these back together, the first line goes with the first verse, and the second line goes with the schizophrenic boy. “If you’re right you’ll never fear the wrong,” (line 10) goes back to if you’re always right or do the right thing you do not understand the consequences of a bad decision, so you cannot understand the fear of what happens if you slip and “fall off the wagon”, as it were. “If your head is high you’ll never fear at all,” (line 11) means that if you have always kept to the straight and narrow or had a mental illness, you cannot really relate to the person who does have one. This relates to my topic because it conveys the narrow-mindedness and the shortsightedness of the public.

"Audioslave Exploder." youtube. Web. 14 Apr 2010. .
Cornell, Chris. "Exploder." Slave to the Audioslave. tripod, n.d. Web. 14 Apr 2010. .