The feeling of being derivative and "Exquisite Tension" by You'll Never Get to Heaven
These days we're neither doing nor thinking anything new & revolutionary that didn't exist before. At most, we're just reproducing&keeping up the best of what our culture already achieved. So, maybe our subjectness has already been captured by capital, and our minds are just some system's complicated hidden agenda to make money. "Hidden form of value". I'm just wandering back and forth on beaten pathways myself, and all my art, all my feelings, all my thoughts are so derivative it feels. Maybe it always has been. MAYBE MY WHOLE LIFE IS DERIVATIVE! :D But nobody is able to see anything in me what they haven't seen millions of times in others. And just because "man first sees and recognises himself in other men", through how these men look at you every day, I feel myself more being something like Berkeleyan collection of ideas; just like some fragment stuff rather than wholesome person. And that makes me feel pretty awful, and it has been always spinning in my head ever since... The reason why I'm writing this at all in that micro song review is because this song represents perfectly what happened with me after. One day I tried so hard to go beyond of what already exists, I so wanted to find something new. At first, I was trying to remember my whole life. Didn't work. Then my mind wandered from book to book and it couldn't find an answer here either. Ancient Greek philosophy, German classical philosophy, Eckhart's medieval religious mysticism, Zen mysticism, marxism, social psychoanalysis, Soviet pedagogy, silly self-help books, Ronald Laing's existential studies of schizophrenia, Fromm's "Man for Himself" and "The Art of Loving", Chernyshevsky's "What Is to Be Done". For some reason, only after I strained all my soul that hard, this feeling that was murduring me suddenly became comfortable and fragile.
The next morning I noticed some melody being stuck in my head. I remembered that it was indie song sung very quietly that I've been listening to maybe 2 years ago. And tbh it was so hard to find, but I found! And god, this is so rare, when the lyrics being like they were written about your real feelings. Usually, the lyrics in songs like this are very abstract, and you only tend to imagine they’re about you. Each previous line has no connection to the next, creating a kaleidoscope of words, and it's like a vessel you have to fill with your own meanings. So, you don’t really pay much attention to the actual subject matter. But that’s not the case with this song, even though I hadn’t really paid much attention to the lyrics before. I'm sure this track is about the refusal to turn into some finished product for society, and also it's about recognizing the moment when you stop growing and simply start reproducing aspects of yourself that you've already outgrown, but no matter how hard you try, you can't seem to overcome it, break through it to something new, to something deeper within yourself and people around. What's so wonderful about this track is that it sings outside of that emotion, so, it has some space and distance to reflect on this emotion outside. So, it radiates the same calm and fragile feeling I experienced that day. 'Tho those long chord played on violin-pad (the same pads you can hear in Mujuice's "Decadance"), create a sense of tension and languor. And this line "don't sing me to sleep" reminds me that reality is constantly singing us lullabies, distracting us from the real contradictions of the world around. I also felt like it's important to keep that thought about derivativeness in mind, otherwise, you’d get completely swallowed up by it. I don't know if it was intentional, but the music itself captures the essence of what Alice Hansen is singing about so perfectly. It sounds so beautiful and divine, almost like... well, it doesn't matter, go listen! Here it is:
youtube.com/watch?v=QpbMnyrcepU
#indie #music #alienation #lyrics #fragmentation #existentialism
