So YouTube randomly offered me a French pop song, "Désenchantée" by Mylène Farmer. Curious, I listened. It's an ok song, and Farmer is obviously a star-level performer. The choreographer of the dancers, is, alas, truly horrendous, some real Eurovision-level tripe.
The video is shot in a stadium full of screaming fans. Farmer sings the song once, then walks out into the audience and has them sing it back to her; thousands of these people know the song by heart.
I can read French, sort of, but my oral comprehension is terrible. So I looked up the lyrics. As you would expect from a song called "Disenchanted," they are pretty grim.
Swimming in the troubled waters of tomorrowsThere is a second verse, then he chorus again, and then
Waiting here for the end
Floating in the air too heavy
Of almost nothing
Who can I reach out to?
If I have to fall from a great height
May my fall be slow
I have found no rest
Except in indifference
However, I would like to find innocence again
But nothing makes sense, and nothing is going well
Everything is chaos next to it
All my ideals: damaged words
I am looking for a soul who can help me
I am from a disenchanted, disenchanted generation
Chaos, chaos, chaos
Chaos, chaos, chaos
But, look around the stadium at the people belting out these words; does anybody look sad? No, they look like this is at least the best day of the month for them, if not the whole year.
It struck that this one of the themes of modern culture: nothing makes people feel as good as singing along with up tempo songs about the collapse of civilization and the misery of existence.
10 comments:
Again, attributing to the modern day what is in fact quite old.
Go listen to a bunch of traditional Irish and Scottish songs - all these lively, upbeat jigs inherently meant to be danced to, sung boisterously, with the crowd expected to join in on the refrains...
...and they're singing about being a highwayman and getting betrayed to the authorities by your lover...
...or singing about being a poor man who leaves home to try to find work and make his fortune, only to get robbed on the road; and then mocked for his accent when he tries to ask locals for help; and then denied passage on a ship because of his race and poverty; and then is forced to leap onto the departing ship as a stowaway; and has to sleep in the hold with the pigs and gets so seasick he wishes he was dead; and when he finally arrives in Liverpool gets mocked and attacked in the streets because of his race, and only escapes because fellow Irish migrant workers rush to his rescue...
...or about being a man who comes home drunk from the pub each night for a full week to find ever mounting evidence of your wife having an affair while you are out, but she dismisses your questions by pointing out that you're drunk, and claiming that each suspicious item seemingly left by her lover is in fact some increasingly implausible gift sent to her by her mother...
...or singing about a poor brick worker who is a habitual drunkard, which causes him to fall from a ladder and break his skull on the job, and then at his wake the (also drunk) mourners compete with each other in false displays of pious grief, which leads to a violent brawl, which leads to the corpse being doused in whiskey, which revives the man who wasn't actually dead, who then shouts at everyone for wasting good alcohol...
And those are just some of the livelier songs! There's a whole slew of slower, more somber ballads that people still nevertheless sing along to wholeheartedly, with crowds of smiling people crooning together about loss and longing and heartbreak and tragedy...
...a song about a man who is bound into apprenticeship in a distant town and gets seduced by a beautiful woman, but she exploits his affections to frame him for a crime she committed, and he gets "transported" to the Australia penal colony to serve seven years hard labor...
...a song about a poor young woman who works as a fishmonger, a position inherited from her parents, whom the singer admires for her beauty, but who contracts a fever and dies young, leaving her ghost to wander the streets at night still calling out trying to sell her meager wares...
And what about all the patriotic and militant songs lamenting, but also relishing in, terrible defeats at the hands of the English? Grim, dark songs about how the hated enemy cruelly cut down good and fair and noble young patriots, and how although the day was lost, the spirit of resistance will persist, and they will fight unto the last, despite knowing that the cause is hopeless and the fight was lost long ago, and the future they hoped for is well and truly dead forever.
And that's JUST the Scottish and the Irish, thought of off the top of my head! You find things like these all over, in all sorts of cultures, in all sorts of places and times!
People smiling while singing about misfortune and tragedy and despair is not remotely new! It's a deeply rooted human tendency to find comfort and even a macabre kind of joy in a communal identity built out of shared trauma and loss. Not every sorrowful song has to be an elegy, threnody, or dirge - some are instead upbeat, defiant, devil-may-care affairs where people choose to laugh in the face of misfortune because they prefer that to crying over it, and they find solace in resistance to the slings and arrows of fate.
Verloren, I think you're absolutely right. In fact, I think I recognize a lot of the specific songs you're referring to. It's not only music: I'm reminded of Lu Xun's The Story of Ah-Q and I. B. Singer's Gimpel the Fool, both beloved in their respective cultures. I think they're supposed to be delightfully tragi-comic, but, significantly, I found both too painful to finish. I think the latter, "rational" reaction is the impoverished, decadent-modern one. (I'm also reminded of the Spanish movie I saw in Spain, "Belle Epoque," which begins with a Spanish Civil War-era scene in which two sad-sack, Sancho-Panza-like local Guardia Civil men, apparently uncle and nephew, start bickering over a prisoner and then shoot each other. The Spanish audience found this scene absolutely hilarious. I don't think the laughter was about hostility to Francoism or anything like that. I think it was about themselves, and hapless, foolish, sad humanity in general.)
In fact, I think I recognize a lot of the specific songs you're referring to.
For those curious...
Whiskey In The Jar
The Rocky Road To Dublin
Seven Drunken Nights
Finnegan's Wake
The Black Velvet Band
Molly Malone
As I said, just ones off the top of my head, as those are all on the far better known side of things.
As for other cultures and other forms of media, one I can think of at the moment is Japanes "rakugo", which are comedic stories told about everyday people with themes ranging from the mild (characters all being selfish, boorish, hypocritical, liars, etc) to the extreme (characters being murdered, committing suicide, turning into youkai / ayakashi after their demises, or being tormented by such malign spirits and monsters, etc).
Rakugo is inherently meant to be a mockery of humanity's amorality and frailty of spirit - a sort of bawdy reflection on our flaws, and the cruelty of an uncaring and unpredictable world, and the general absurdity and contradiction of life and the human experience.
And I can tell you from personal experience, it's hysterical.
Oh! And let's not ignore Opera! For every tragic opera where the audience is meant to weep and mourn over some sad story full of terrible events, there's a comic opera with similarly terrible events which is meant to bring the house down and inspire the audience to sing the arias in the streets afterward.
I don't see these as the same things at all. Sad song about particularly sad events are pretty much universal. Joyful singing about the end of civilization is, so far as I know, unique to the west after 1950.
As often, I keep thinking about something I've read and then posted about here. This joy in melancholy--I don't know what it is, but it's very human. Many other traditions come to mind, though I haven't studied them, and so I'm sure I don't have them quite right, but I think they're worth mentioning anyway. There's the famous Portuguese saudade, the Spanish music of cante hondo, the Turkish huzun that Orhan Pamuk talks about, and the complex, mysterious aesthetic of chanted/sung Qur'an recitation, as described by Tamim Ansary. I'm reminded too of the way American blues musicians often smile with a tremendous joy while playing their music.
Maybe this sensibility and the art that expresses it simply aren't for everyone. But I also wonder if there isn't something in reason that seeks, one way or another, to trivialize everything, or at least every human practice or drive, that is not itself. And I wonder if that something, that drive, being practiced by humans, isn't itself irrational.
Idk, the verses you published for this French song look to me personal, and sound like the kind of thing we're talking about. And the emotional range we're talking about is not some tame, "appropriate" sadness confined to "particularly sad events" that one gets over by following the five steps of grief. What we're talking about is, I think, a kind of sensibility, much bigger than that. But, as I said, maybe it's not for everyone.
Now, if you look at a thing like the movie "The Purge," Trump's fantasy about "one violent day," etc., that may be more what you're talking about. But I'm not sure I see that wild violence in lines like,
I have found no rest
Except in indifference
However, I would like to find innocence again
But nothing makes sense, and nothing is going well
That sounds gentler, more like the blues or saudade to me.
I admit the words "chaos chaos chaos" are (or maybe it's, seem to an outsider? Idk.) more aggressive and threatening. It's an unusual combination.
Perhaps one should start by looking seriously to see whether it's really new post-1950. Maybe there's something like that joy in the end, or suspension, of civilization in a tradition like the Bacchanal, or in Carnival? Or Kali worship?
One would also have to look in detail at, say, the saudade tradition. Perhaps one would find in that poetry lines that amount to, "burn it all down." They might only be scattered, but it would still be interesting. And the Qur'an is, of course, full of apocalyptic imagery. Indeed, one might consider how human apocalyptic fantasy itself, including in its oldest forms, might combine fear/warning, sadness/exhaustion, genuine longing to rip away the veils and see the divine, and, in the vein of what you're talking about (if I have it right), hostility to one's fellow humans and a desire to "burn it all down."
So I finally watched the video. It strikes me as pretty standard stadium glam pop, more Miley Cyrus than "Fight Club." The atmosphere is sort of innocent, all the cute teens singin' along and wavin' their white balloons. They do chant "chaos," but I just don't sense any atmosphere of threat or real despair or anything else much except the admitted fun of singing along with a vigorous chorus that the whole group knows, no different from singing along to the chorus in Pharrell Williams' "Happy."
I spoke earlier about the trivializing impulse in rationalism, and I apologize for that bit of aggression. Obviously there are deep tensions between rationalism and irrationalism, and maybe each can try too hard to fight the other. The real problem is real hate, real violence, real treasuring of grievance over every other value. It don't think this little song is part of that.
I think it has less to do with any topic they're singing about than the ecstatic feeling of all singing together. People like that..whether it's rooting for the home team or the chanting of political slogans
I think you're absolutely right about the crowd. Gospel music works the same way. I was also reminded of how, when I was in Sabbath school, we'd all happily belt out upbeat songs in Hebrew without any idea what the words meant. I suspect the youth crowd does identify somewhat with the depressive lyrics, but the meaning is a secondary part of a larger group-music joy.
Not sure the group-music thing works so well once the music, or politics, or sports genuinely gets outside a crowd's identity sphere. But it's an interesting question.
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