@PhishMarketStew said:

Show of Life just feels really emotionally manipulative, like the songwriting doesn't earn the feelings that it's attempting to express. I felt this way about BDTNL for a long time but now that it's grown legs I love the song and am happy to sing along. Tom's songwriting has just been in much more straitforward, narrative, vein in 3.0. When he comes at his expressions from an angle as in Ocelot, it works brilliantly, not so much in songs like Joy and Show of Life. But they can't all be zingers so what they hay?
@bertoletdown - thanks for the love, despite the typos.
To the haters - I'll stack the 12/28/12 & 6/3/11 DWD's against the like's of a 7/1/98 or a 5/21/00 version ANY day of the week. How about the Dick's Sand against, well, damn near every other version out there?
We've gotten all timers from Chalkdust, Fee, Sally, Rock n' Roll, Carini.....we've gotten versions of Ghost, Hood, BOAF, Waves, Undermind and more that I CANNOT imagine doing without.
And, Light??
Comparing something current with something from the past is natural, but using it as a self serving tool to validate your own myopic haze just tells everyone you've completely missed the point.

Couldn't have said it any better...except that I wouldn't blame Tom Marshall for the Dude's lyrics in the Show. (Of Life begat Of Life, or so the good book says.)

I have come to appreciate Show Of Life as a sort of "art imitates art", with awkward and cliche lyrics mirroring the "struggle and strife" that they describe at first, then gaining strength in their pithy wisdom as they describe the same. I groan with everyone else when it first appears, but invariably it moves me deeply before it ends. Again - art imitates art.