Musical adventures in materialism
In praise of pop songs that reject metaphysics.
Pop music is the medium for grandiose, self-pitying, one-sided longing. If one must feel such a thing (and most of us must, at least from time to time), a three-and-a-half minute caterwaul is the best outlet for it. There’s really no way to put unadulterated breakup/rejection feelings into text or speech and retain dignity, or avoid terrifying the recipient, even if that’s a sympathetic friend. But belting them out at karaoke is fine. The simplicity, the triviality, the self-containment of the form, gives cover: This is how I really feel. But also, it’s really not.
It’s harder to argue that pop music is a good vehicle for celebrating a naturalist view of the world. We’re all just atoms and DNA, not “luminous beings” but “crude matter”, you say? Death is the final end of our selves and this lumpy physical world is the only one any of us will ever inhabit, so it’s a good idea to know stuff about it? Not most people’s idea of a banger. And truth be told, I have no persuasive arguments for this. Just a bunch of songs that I really like.
In the brief years that Anglo-Swedish band Fanfarlo was recording, they did quite a bit about transience and materiality. But a focus on the human animal and our illusions is most pronounced in their final album, 2014’s Let’s Go Extinct, with entries like the ‘Cell Song’:
Each little cog sticks to the next;
How can it be that they’re alive?
This clever twist, this pyramid scheme
Has got you in a double bind:Out of nothing, making something like yourself,
Making patterns like a galaxy of cells.
If these interactions or these consequences don’t
Approximate it quite to make some kind of soul,
We have a contract, yeah we have each others backs,
We made a promise, but one day we’ll fall apart.Until the world gets tired of looking at itself…
The band also prods at the idea of selfhood and individual identity persisting over time (“It comes crashing down / Every time I sleep”) in a number illustrated with an animated video walking the viewer through paths in biological evolution. It’s like someone decided to make ‘Greg Egan: The Song’, so I guess I was destined to love it.
More inclined to romanticise nature than to pick it apart is eco folk band Stornoway, but you will never convince me that ‘The Bigger Picture’ isn’t a naturalist anthem:
You may have seen the blazing bonfire, burning bright with fickle beauty,
That was turned to lifeless ashes in the morning.
You may have seen the single snowdrop where it shivered in the graveyard,
No less fragile than the soul to which you cling.
But if you haven't seen the people you have come from,
Then you haven't seen the person you've become.In the bigger picture, there's no answer to your prayers,
In the bigger picture, but there's a billion other fires.
In the bigger picture, you'll learn how to build yours higher,
When you've seen the savage wonder in the bigger picture.
I generally find greater resonance in works that express a sense of the profound irrelevance of deities and the supernatural - treating where and what we are as interesting and complete in itself - rather than works that, Hardy style, “shake a fist at [the] Creator” or editorialise about the wrongness of religion. But I enjoy a Modest Mouse level of editorialising, going beyond “Someday you will die and somehow something’s gonna steal your carbon” to suggest, in the magnificent ‘Ocean Breathes Salty’, that belief can be a distraction:
For your sake I hope that heaven and hell are really there,
But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste death? /… /
You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?
And I do have a soft spot for the (laconic) fist-shaking of ‘Bukowski’:
If God controls the land and disease,
And keeps a watchful eye on me -
If he’s really so damn mighty -
Well, my problem is I can’t see,
Well, who would wanna be,
Who would wanna be such a control freak?
(Yes, I just sent you a load of song lyrics. It’s like I’m twenty again and rebooted Livejournal.)