The Tragically Hip - New Orleans Is Sinking Lyrics Meaning
click a star to vote
Jan 2nd 2023!⃝The fella that wrote that New Orleans is *literally* sinking (and had an avg score of one from the rocket surgeons who voted for them, oh the humanity, haha).
If you live anywhere in North America and have not heard before that New Orleans is going to be x miles offshore as an island with huge huge dikes and levees, etc., an island under the sea level as they have in Belgium and Nederland.
So, downvoters of that contributor please stop voting if you can't pass this simple skill testing piece of the most common trivia I can possibly think of that every 9th grader in the US has heard at least once!
Now, onward and upward for the figurative. It is a person vowing that their attachment to something, in this case New Orleans, is so strong and way past irrational that they would rather die than live without this societal construct ("if New Orleans is sinking man then I don't want to swim").
~~~
Now, the construct? Segregation in the Jim Crow south (and I can personally attest that it is still socially unacceptable to eat in a public restaurant at the same table if you are white and black... I just did a sales run through rural Mississippi and N. Georgia and there are *still* places that won't serve unless you sit at separate tables, I was shocked!).
Think of segregation in the US, all those fine Southern church-going bible-reading White folks who said if New Orleans (i.e. segregation/Jim Crow generally, from the extrajudicial murders being commonplace for such offenses as looking too long at a White woman, etc., everyone knows the history that wants to) then I don't want to swim, this is what Gordie was writing about.
Listen to the song a good half-dozen times thinking about what happened at Ole Miss under Eisenhower, the reactions on both sides to Emmett T. and MLK Jr.'s murder and assassination's, etc. If you have a competent workman's knowledge of this part of American history once you hear it you can't unhear it, you'll never listen to the song the same again.
