It's raining here in Oakland tonight...and I'd like to share something inconsequential with you. A late nite special.
You ever get a song stuck in your head? Well, me and an army of seventy million have this one by Coldplay pumping through our headphones right now.
Here's my stab at why it's "of the moment." Maybe I'm just infatuated...but I'd like to think that there's something else going on...and, well, regardless, on a rainy night, I'll take what I can get...
Since the Pitchfork reviewer linked above, ably dissecting the music side of the song (which I like well enough), rips on the lyrics...let's just get them on the table right off the bat:
SPEED OF SOUND
How long before I get in?
Before it starts, before I begin?
How long before you decide?
Before I know what it feels like?
Where to, where do I go?
If you never tried, then you'll never know.
How long do I have to climb,
Up on the side of this mountain of mine?
Look up, I look up at night,
Planets are moving at the speed of light.
Climb up, up in the trees,
every chance that you get,
is a chance you seize.
How long am I gonna' stand,
with my head stuck under the sand?
I'll start before I can stop,
or before I see things the right way up.
All that noise, and all that sound,
all these pieces I've got found.
And birds go flying at the speed of sound,
to show you how it all began.
Birds come flying from the underground,
if you could see it then you'd understand...
Ideas that you'll never find,
all the inventors could never design.
The buildings that you put up,
Japan and China all lit up.
The sign that I couldn't read,
or a light that I couldn't see,
something's you have to believe,
but others are puzzles, puzzling me.
And all that noise, all that sound,
all those pieces I've found.
And birds go flying at the speed of sound,
to show you how it all began.
Birds come flying from the underground,
if you could see it then you'd understand,
Oh when you see it then you'll understand...
All those signs, I knew what they meant.
Something's you can invent.
Some get made, and some get sent,
Ooh...
Birds go flying at the speed of sound,
to show you how it all began.
Birds came flying from the underground,
if you could see it then you'd understand,
oh, when you see it then you'll understand...
Yeah, poetry. From Chris Martin....(happy hubbie of Gwyneth.)
Poetry for kids who grew up on Blade Runner and music videos...poetry for kids for whom "all that noise and all that sound" means...literally....a non-stop wall, a Times Square of the brain that runs on computer screens, video displays, TV monitors, movie screens...and those pesky little phones that everyone's been carrying around in their pockets for the last decade or so. (Mine has an alien who does push ups and takes baths...I wonder how many millions of other folks have the same little green guy greeting them every time they go to make a cell phone call?)...
So, yeah, poetry about looking and seeing, about knowledge of self, for a generation whose retinal walls don't flinch at 64 FPS....and 150 BPM....much less the "Speed of Sound." A vision of China all lit up for kids for whom the "new Shanghai" is the only one they've ever known....a glowing beacon like New York...and now, Kuala Lampur and TaiPei.
My take is that the song is about...taking enough time to respect metaphysical insights and the personal questions they raise despite the hub-bub that flies around us....the song is about, in a way, "a quest for meaning" in the media age. About taking time for poetry.
It's as if Chris Martin, in his insistent questions that start the song, had been reading from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet":
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day....
And if Martin and Coldplay bring us face to face with Rilke again....well, it's worth it. Because there's something there, I think. Something essential to us right now.
Because that's what the song is about. About how we don't fucking see the essential. How we don't know, and can't know in the midst of all that's going down that the very world we live in has changed...and that change has called into question even 'who' we are. And Rilke, in his Duino Elegies, explored and lamented and raged over those very questions, and their heart rending answers.
In this, the song echoes the words of Antonio's famous lines that open Shakespeare's the Merchant of Venice, and describe a similar mood:
In sooth, I know not why I am so sad;
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me
That I have much ado to know myself.
Can I just say that we're all a bit like Antonio, the Merchant of Venice lately?
The relentless pace of things...the inventions, the buildings, the infrastructure...the way that non-stop news dominates our lives...and yet, on another level, a spiritual level if you will, nothing of consequence has changed on a fundamental level....or has it? Who are we? What are we doing here with our lives? Are we fools for asking?
When Guilliaume Apollinaire, who died during the First World War....wrote his famous poem Zone at the turn of the century, Paris was much like the world we live in today. Changing by the second, yet locked in a stasis that belied the even greater change that was about to come. A change that gives his poem a richer meaning:
Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowd
Herds of bellowing buses hemming you about
Anguish of love parching you within
As though you were never to be loved again
If you lived in olden times you would get you to a cloister
You are ashamed when you catch yourself at a paternoster
You are your own mocker and like hellfire your laguhter crackles
Golden on your life's hearth fall the sparks of your laughter
It is a picture in a dark museum hung
And sometimes you go and contemplate it long
To-day you walk in Paris the women are blood-red
It was and would I could forget it was at beauty's ebb.
(trans. by Samuel Beckett)
None of us knows if our goofy reflections...our tiny obsessions with the latest song...our puzzling out of the meaning of what the hell it means for birds to go flying from the underground...mean much at all in the grand scheme of things.
Or maybe this poetry, this turning of our eyes to the stars above....this quest for meaning in the face of relentless change...even embodied in a pop song that has taken the airwaves and "podcasts" like jiffy popcorn...is an indication of something that is a beacon of hope given the circumstances.
A renewal of a kind of reverance for meaning...for asking questions. For seeking understanding.
Some will try to meld this mood into their religious and political ideologies...others will see it as a kind of worthless hoo-haa that has nothing to do with anything except selling tunes at applemusicstore.com.
I don't think so. I actually hope the kids (and not so kids) are walking the streets of Paris and Shanghai and TaiPei and Lagos and Rio...
puzzling, writing poetry, asking questions. Trying to sort out, like Apollinaire or Rilke's young poet, why they feel they way they do. Why they see things the way they do. What it all means.
Asking:
How long am I gonna' stand,
with my head stuck under the sand?
Songs have power. Words have power. We don't know if, how and when that power finds an outlet....but, long term, I think the poets are onto something. And once and awhile...
it's nice to acknowledge that. And to stop and consider if this moment, walking alone and asking these questions...is but a pause in history.