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I've been familiar with and always liked Metallica's cover of the song "Crash Course in Brain Surgery" by British hard-rock group Budgie, but I never paid much attention to the lyrics over the last 15 years or so. Since it's in my .MP3 playlist I looked up they lyrics and found out when it was originally recorded (1971 as "Crash Course", then again in 1974 as "Crash Course in Brain Surgery").
I had been mis-hearing about half the lyrics in the song, but knowing what they are didn't help it make sense at first...
Look inside and you will see
The words are cutting deep inside my brain
Thunder burnin' quickly burning
Knife of words is driving me insane, insane yeah
*
Raven black is on my track
He shows me how to neutralize the knife
Show to me in surgery
The art of fighting words to conquer life, conquer life yeah
*
Now the wicked lance of fear
Is driven from my heady mountain brain
Crash course in brain surgery
Has stopped the bloody knife of words again yeah, yeah, yeah
Goddamn I hope the formatting isn't screwed up on that.
Now, when turning an interpretive idea towards the song, we immediately realize that there is no physical surgery being described here...in the first verse you have the lines "The words are burning deep inside my brain" and "Knife of words is driving me insane". The mention of "thunder burning, quickly burning" may just be filler imagery, or maybe the words that are attacking the narrator's brain are loud like thunder, possibly to the point of inducing synesthia.
The second verse has even more mysteries. Where I looked up the lyrics "Raven black" was not written in a way that implied it might be a name, but that's the only interpretation of that line that really parses well. So, who is Raven Black? I have a strange hypothesis I will get to later in the post, but it is impossible by the laws of physics as we know them so here I will speculate further with more likely explanations. A quick google search of "Raven Black" +1971 (the year the song was likely written) brought up nothing but sites related to the Ford Mustang and 1960s and '70s muscle cars - "Raven Black" was one of the more popular colors offered by Ford. Maybe the narrator is being followed or chased by a black Ford. If I do searches for "Raven Black" -car - automobile I get a lot of references to some self- promoting idiot who uses "Raven Black" as his online name and cross references it repeatedly on his websites. Since this inconsequential fuck probably was not even born yet when the song was written, I doubt it's about him.
The next line of the second verse is "He shows me how to neutralize the knife" - this is another reason why I think Raven Black is a name, as this line seems to refer to him in the first. It also makes me think "on my track" may not necessarily mean he's chasing him - maybe it means they are of like minds, or that Raven Black is working with the narrator. The knife is the "knife of words" mentioned in the first verse. The next lines, "Show to me in surgery/The art of fighting words to conquer life", mention surgery for the first time, and makes mention of "words", which are equated with knives in earlier portions. The second verse describes learning from someone named Raven Black how to neutralize a knife of words, and shows to him through surgery "the art of fighting words to conquer life". Raven Black appears to provide some relief from the words that are burning in the narrators brain in the first verse. It makes me wonder of Raven Black may be a reference to a narcotic or maybe some drug used to calm those suffering from mental illness.
The third verse seems to describe the resolution of the problems described in verse 1 and learned from and/or overcome in the second verse. "Now the wicked lance of fear is driven from my heady mountain brain" at first implied to me some kind of attack of fear coming from the narrator, a lance driven out towards foes, but after re- thinking earlier verses I think the narrator is describing the "knives of words" again when he mentions "lance of fear". "Heady mountain brain" might just be a weird pun typical of old psychadelic groups - it may also imply that the narrator's brain has been lifted up and made more defensible through learning from Raven Black. "Crash course in brain surgery has stopped the bloody knife of words again" I believe refers to what the narrator learned from Raven Black. The "crash course" part makes me think that the learning from R.B. was kind of an emergency measure, something that had to be learned quickly due to the words driving the narrator insane in the first verse. The crash course in "brain surgery" has neutralized the knives of words AGAIN...it implies that R.B. has helped people by teaching them this before.
Now, the weird part. When I was seeing how words were repeatedly referred to as something that could make a sanity-inducing attack, I was repeatedly reminded of Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash", where some people learned from ancient Sumerian tablets how to use certain words from a primal language to re-program people's minds, which could be used either as a form of mind control or to cause actual physical damage to a person's brain. And there was a second parallel - a major character in that novel is an Aleut named Raven. Raven is an antagonist and is pursuing the main character, but in the end unwittingly helps stop those who are trying to use the primal language to spread a sort of computer virus of the biological mind.
If "Crash Course in Brain Surgery" was written a few years ago, I'd be pretty sure it was making references to the novel "Snow Crash", but since it was written over 20 years before "Snow Crash", that's impossible. I wonder if Neal Stephenson was influenced by the song in any way...
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