Keane has a song called “A Bad Dream”. It’s wonderful music to just close your eyes and let the complexity of the keyboard harmonies take you. On the other hand the song speaks so strongly to my own personal experiences that when you consider I have no capacity to self censor or even to shut up you’ll understand that I felt the need to share…
Why do I have to fly
over every town up and down the line?
I’ll die in the clouds above
and you that I defend, I do not love.
This seems to me like how environmentalists who hold themselves to higher standards in a world of waste must feel like. For Environmentalists, people who buy Limousines or Humvees are pretty unlovable but there has to be space for everyone in a world that’s fairer, cleaner and more supportive of our own well being. It’s a hard slog but you have to fight for everyone.
Some environmentalists are NIMBYs (Not in my backyard), other environmentalists prefer animals to people. I like to think of myself as someone who believes that people are important and that not in my backyard should mean in no-ones backyard. When people are treated better in a system that promotes respect for one’s environment animals will benefit. You can’t really ask people earning less than a dollar a day not to poach ivory. The solution starts with people and spreads from there.
.
I wake up, it’s a bad dream,
No one on my side,
I was fighting
But I just feel too tired
to be fighting,
guess I’m not the fighting kind.
Sometimes simply walking around can be walking around in a bad dream that y0u can’t wake up from. It’s not just the environment it’s how society treats the environment and individuals within it. For every puffing exhaust you have a laughing child breathing it in. For every caring parent you have the willful unconsciousness they have in not making a world that every parent should want their child to grow up in. Concern over this is the opposite of fighting, it’s about common causes and consensus building, not about police with sub-machine guns and tear gas. If it’s fighting then it’s a battle for hearts and minds. Funny saying that -sounds like a resource war.
Where will I meet my fate?
Baby I’m a man, I was born to hate.
And when will I meet my end?
In a better time you could be my friend.
.
We live in a world where so many choices have been taken away from us. It is difficult for anyone in the modern world to find their destiny, so many paths are labelled ‘Off limits”. Society and the day to day business of living places limitations on the kinds of things we can do. As hard as I try I find that I am doing damage because I have no choice but do so. I take a dump in the same pollution dispersion system that practically everyone in the developed world does. I am forced to buy food that is wrapped up in the cellophane that we’re pulling over the face of the planet. If I like chocolate, and I do, I cannot purchase it in a returnable container. No matter how hard I try I find I’m still part of the problem. The world we live in seems designed to place obstacles between us, such that even though we live, work and sleep scant metres from each other we might as well be on different sides of the planet. All that ties in with my concern over the technology of convenience as anti-social.
[chorus]
I wake up, it’s a bad dream,
No one on my side,
I was fighting
But I just feel too tired
to be fighting,
guess I’m not the fighting kind.
Wouldn’t mind it
if you were by my side
But you’re long gone,
yeah you’re long gone now.
Where do we go?
I don’t even know,
My strange old face,
And I’m thinking about those days,
And I’m thinking about those days.
This is more personal as my face is kinda strange. If you don’t know what I look like then try to imagine a plumper version of the actor who plays Dr. House then cross that picture with Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and that’s what I look like. As you might imagine I believe that substance should take precedence over style purely out of self interest. My sense of humor might also be classified as reaction to the world that made fun of my face.
I wake up, it’s a bad dream,
No one on my side,
I was fighting
But I just feel too tired
to be fighting,
guess I’m not the fighting kind.
Wouldn’t mind it
if you were by my side
But you’re long gone,
yeah you’re long gone now.
That’s the whole song. Keane tends to write songs that are basically little interior monologues. Unlike Sting they don’t sing about the evil that was shipbuilding on the Tyne, or the disappeared in Chile under Pinochet. Unlike Billy Bragg and Dylan they actually ‘can’ sing.
Listen to the soaring keyboard harmonies in the middle of the song and despite my words of helplessness and hopelessness you will find your spirits rising. The melody runs counter to the lyrics, and so does hope in me overcome feelings of hopelessness.
I think above everything else hope is what makes us human and though I envision disaster and soon. I have to ask myself
‘Why do we fall?”
“So we can pick ourselves.”
“Things are never so dark as they are before the dawn.”
