DESCRIPTION:
Artist: The Hip
Song: The Sick Rose
Album: Song about Books and Flowers (Trot Records, 1994)

The song is the juxtaposition of several motives taken from William Blake's poetry and paintings along with the free reading of Werner Herzog's movie "Nosferatu".
The idea behind is to present the condition of a modern man unable to connect with the world that lies behind his fragmented perspective. The knowledge derived from the Tree of Eden has turned into Newton's calculations of the universe preventing the man to see the reality as a whole. Blake called this state "a single vision, Newton's sleep". When the soil that feeds the roots is corrupted the rose grows sick. Unable to exchange between life and death, the rose is facing the destructive Nosferatu (the undead) attacking its foundation as an "invisible worm". Thus the beauty turns into decay and the moral plague (the rats) invade the world. In other words, if there is no exchange between those who have power and those powerless and between the young and the old then the society is transformed into a sick soil where the pestilence prevails.