I'm late today. I'm suffering through that thing that people call the dip these days, where the enthusiasm you had at the beginning of a project wears off and then it turns into work. Hard, painful, laborious work. It's kinda silly. In the past I would have probably gotten bored and wandered off somewhere. Not these days! I'm going to take my own advice.

Brian Wilson's original version of this song, "Hang On to Your Ego" featured virtually identical lyrics but fellow Beach Boy Mike Love objected by the potentially LSD-inspired lyrics of the choruses. Wilson yielded to re-writes and what we got is this song.

It's interesting because they're both good versions, and the only difference between them meaning wise is that Answer's lyrics are directed inwardly, while Ego's lyrics are projected outwardly. Both songs are about the trouble there is in pushing against people who seem unwilling to improve their situation, but Ego's tone is nearly accusatory. "You, you there, you're going to lose the fight for your ego!"

...which isn't at all a bad thing, I suppose, unless you're totally square, which I guess Mike Love was.

Answer takes on a tone similar to I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, where the lyrics are more inner strife, more navel-gazing about the great injustice of the world: Why can't everyone just be more like me?

It's ironic, then, that the song was re-written due to external influences on Wilson's new found creativity. Wilson was living in a world of inspiration and drugs and almost no one else around him was. He wrote a song about it, and the straights brought the hammer down on him, without even realizing they were just feeding his delusion. It's no wonder then, with all the self-fulfilling prophecisizing, that Wilson eventually went kind of loony.

The answer is, unfortunately, that there is no answer. You can't convince people to your way by pushing against them, nor by insulting their way of life