A new one, finished yesterday. I wrote this around the same time as Chosen Again and What’s Wrong is Right, and I think of them as a trio. They’re some of my favourite ever pieces of work, which means, of course, they are likely to be among the least popular.1 More thoughts follow below the song and lyrics.
First, they say human and everything breathing, Then it's the forests and fields that you walked in. Before they say sun, they say honour your feelings, So you feed your own stifling addiction to healing. "Look, I know your position is: fuck this remembering, We've done it before and we'll do it again an' The world doesn't listen, there is no great purpose Our life has been built upon purposeless murder." So fuck all your dreams and fuck all your healing, Love's not the answer, there's nothing more misleading, Than thinking your feelings are something worth reading, You'll always feel shit cause there is no big meaning. I know you think that the heart is the answer, And that obsessing with power kills hope, kills laughter, But the truth is it's ashes, ashes then dust, "Yes, after skin, after touch, after lust." From the first fucked up fish that flopped onto land, "To that face that I make that I know you can't stand," Before we need love we need food we need shelter... Yeah, I got all your letters...sure, they helped me feel better. But fuck all your dreams and fuck all your healing, Love's not the answer, there's nothing more misleading, Than thinking your feelings are something worth reading, You'll always feel shit cause there is no big meaning. Surely we can do more than feel better. "How are you feeling, exhausted your gestures?" For God's sake, lady, you're above this behavior. "Now that you mention it, enough with your temper. "You know, fuck all your dreams and fuck all your needling, Love's not an answer, but there's nothing more misleading, Than thinking all this squealing is better than healing, You'll always feel shit 'cause I'm finished, I'm leaving." "You'll always feel shit 'cause I'm finished, I'm leaving." You never made me feel great! "Well, I'm finished, I'm leaving." You'll keep your head in the sand! "It ain't me you're deceiving." Go fuck all your dreams and fuck all your healing. "No go fuck all your dreams and fuck all your feeling." Go fuck all your dreams and fuck all your healing.
This was originally supposed to be a gentle piano and vocal tune, with maybe a string arrangement coming in towards the end. But I was feeling somewhat displeased with my early attempts and so did what is almost always the right move: let go of any pre-existing notions of what the song ought to be. Follow your instinct, and let the ideas guide you.2
In some ways, this song is influenced by existentialist and nihilist ideas. It’s certainly about the relationship between cold-light-of-day materialism and romantic ideas of soulfulness. I was also thinking about anti-natalism at the time, the idea that the reproduction of life is immoral because it leads to suffering and death. In the end, I’m not sure it’s fair to try and create a morality so distinct from humans-as-animals that procreation becomes immoral. But it’s a valuable point of view for revealing some of the hypocrisies endemic to humanist thought. And when most3 people in wealthy countries have children simply to undergo intense emotional experiences, it’s a question worth asking. So while not an anti-natalist, I’m suspicious of any knee-jerk suggestion that procreation provides the grounds for the meaning of life.
There’s a solipsism to that, just as there is to contemporary obsessions with therapeutic language. I find aspects of the psychoanalytic tradition very interesting and useful (and sometimes intuitively right) — I’ve written about Jung here before. But, you know, a ruthless criticism of everything existing. So here we get the chorus, “fuck all your dreams and fuck all your healing.” Evidently, not a chorus for the inner child brigade.
But, a song is not an argument. So, as I did with What’s Wrong is Right, I took the opportunity to play with different perspectives and to think about what the person who makes a coldly materialist argument might look like in an interpersonal sense. So we get a dialogue between a couple: one speaker is decidedly anti-romantic, perhaps anti-humanist, and the other is more sensual, perhaps soulful. (I’d like to have the second perspective sung by other people in future versions but, for now, I just made the second voice sound a bit weird.)
For the first speaker (who appears without quotation marks in the lyrics) we must never forget that it took a long chain of brutal inter-species murders for you to be born. Cute little you, lucky enough to find a new Steve on Steve in your inbox today, are the beneficiary of millions and millions of years of cold-blooded murder.4 With that in mind, what could your individual desires and dreams really amount to other than a head-in-the-sand conceitedness?
For the second speaker, any allegedly hard-nosed materialism is still an act of faith. Consciousness remains one of the great mysteries of human experience. Without an explanation for that, is it not unscientific to outright reject any notion of a soul?
Using the device of a romantic relationship allowed me to ground abstract ideas in the day-to-day realities of living.5 Humans have both material and emotional needs. In some ways, the line, “sure, they helped me feel better” is the most cutting of all — the admittance by the cynic that the romantic serves a purpose.
In the end, the song perhaps comes down too harshly on the first speaker, but that’s okay because the second person had to sing with a silly voice.
Neither person represents my perspective, although I do think we should all be deeply suspicious of ourselves, even (especially) when that makes you feel bad. Marx’s ruthless criticism of everything existing should absolutely be applied to you, whoever you are, lovely, sweet, dear reader.
Never has the word popular meant “relatively popular” more than in the case of Steve on Steve.
I’ll save the stripped version for a live performance someday…right?
I don’t have the exact figures…
Good times.
And gendering the characters means listeners can project their own prejudices into the work, which I know will thrill all you cretins.