Please post your favourite songs about what's wrong with the world

Started by SueC, April 18, 2021, 05:47:50

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SueC

Dear all

...including new members and old non-posting members and just-readers - please talk to us.   ♥

I'd love it if all sorts of people posted their favourite songs about what's wrong with this world, and also, alternative ways of being - so, some of the stuff that really makes you nod your head and go, "Yes, this so sums this shiitake up!" and also, the songs that are like a rare beacon of light to you, that give you hope, that show an alternative way to be in this world, or even just some human qualities you can be enthusiastic about.

While this is "Other Artists" @Ulrich isn't going to shoot us for posting Cure songs in the mix - apparently this is the classification for "Any Artists" by default, as well.  :smth023

I'm NOT going first.   :P
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Ulrich

Quoteisn't going to shoot us for posting Cure songs in the mix

Are you sure?

The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Bwahahaha!  :lol:

It will be hard for you to do with the distance, curvature of the Earth, etc.  Do you have a guided missile perhaps?  :winking_tongue

PS:  On second thoughts, the curvature of the Earth is a moot point since gravity will pull the projectile to the ground quickly anyway... brain fog today...

QuoteIf you're wondering what the maximum distance is that a gun has ever been used effectively, BBC says it's 3,870 yards, just over 2.2 miles. A Canadian special forces sniper made the shot in Iraq in 2017, killing an Islamic State militant.

Read More: https://www.grunge.com/166830/how-far-can-a-bullet-travel/?utm_campaign=clip
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Ulrich

No one seems to want to play? There are many songs - so I'll start with one of the best songwriters around...
"Not in my name" was written at the time of the Iraq war (2003):


"The world's ruled by a cheat with his gang of thieves
whose lies and double-speak spread faster than disesase..."
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

That's a good one, @Ulrich, and I agree with so many points he's making.  (...and am looking forward to that acoustic album arriving here!)

In 2003 I went to the protests in Sydney, first time I did something like that, but I just couldn't not.  The ferries were overflowing with people, and so many said the same.  Not that anyone listened to us - well, maybe they heard, but they went ahead with their mindless destruction anyway.  Just like 9/11; in its aftermath so so many more innocent bystanders were killed than in the World Trade Centre but nobody seemed to care, and 20 years later there's still soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.  Because the people in charge make a buck out of this destruction and because it rallies stupid people in to vote for parties like this.  Peace doesn't pay apparently, but then our entire system, including the economic system, is completely fvcked, no other way to put it.

Here's a song that came out when I was in high school, and it still makes the hair on the backs of my arms stand up.  This guy actually turned up at the Sydney Peace Rally in 2003 too, and spoke really well.  I've got a lot of respect for him - but he was totally shredded by a commercial TV station who interviewed him here once, behind his back once he'd left, and after they'd been nice to his face.  Bunch of backstabbers, but the commercial media is part of this whole Western fvck-up.  (The curses are certainly pouring out today but sometimes you actually need these words.  :1f635:)


Since I also asked about the positive side of things - because this topic can get so wrist-slittingly dire - well, it does feel good to me when people write songs like this, first of all because they're speaking up, and doing it very well in the two examples posted so far, and it's very heartening when someone else makes a song about the things that concern us.

And also because people who write songs like this differ in important respects to the people who are foisting this whole mess on us, and represent a decency that is an increasingly rare commodity.  Which is not to say that these songwriters aren't also an integral part of the whole sorry human race with their own flaws and hypocrisies, and yes it's so much easier to write well than it is to live well - but it's something good, anyway.  Plus, I kind of think that people who write protest songs are on the whole more genuine and more inclusive with their goodwill than many people who preach peace off pulpits...
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Plays ok on the link. But here's another, a bit of an antidote song for me.

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You'll notice most of these so far are from the mid-80s to early 90s - when I was in high school/at uni. After that I mostly turned off ongoing contemporary music and started primarily listening to classical and folk. Which is partly how I missed that The Cure had actual serious music and not just pop songs and "we're existentialists"/substance-mediated woe-is-me. I didn't realise that until I came across Bloodflowers randomly on my husband's iPod in 2014.

So some of you reading might want to actually join in and fill some gaps here from when I was turned off new contemporary music artists (gotta tell you, Triple J was OK in the 90s and I occasionally tuned in after 96fm had been sold to the corporates, but any attempts we make to listen to it these days are quickly aborted by the horrible noises it broadcasts which seem to us as offputting as turning on Top 40 was in the 80s...).

From Australia:





And returning to Yothu Yindi for a lovely "antidote" song and clip:

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SueC

I feel like posting some Cure songs here, because they have plenty of things eligible for a topic like this. I'm going to start where I personally started, which is with Bloodflowers. I like different tracks on that for different reasons; but here's some standouts for this particular topic.

The two first tracks of this album had already made my jaw hit the ground. But the third really resonated with me as a coming-to-terms song with some of the tricks we play on ourselves to keep afloat, individually and as a society - in order to deal with a world that's, as the song goes, actually neither fair nor unfair. People can be fair or unfair but the just universe hypothesis causes people a lot of grief - it doesn't work like this. So people try to work around it with an afterlife etc to try to make it all fair but in the end all of that is probably just castles we want to build in the air. At the time I was first listening to this song I was having to adjust my world view rather dramatically, for reasons discussed elsewhere - and this song expressed a lot of things very eloquently that I had been thinking about.


Sometimes it's incredibly comforting when someone else beautifully captures in words or music difficult things you've been contemplating yourself - it makes you feel a bit more connected to the rest of humanity, a bit less alone in those things, a bit more able to accept hard things. It's like something I heard in an interview with a viola player last year - how during lockdown she thought it was pretty vain of her to be a musician - what was she doing that was so essential? She told a friend of hers who was an intensive care nurse working on a COVID ward this and her friend said, "If I didn't have this piece by Mozart, and my other favourite pieces, and people like you weren't playing this stuff, how could I get through? I'm only surviving because I can go home and listen to beautiful music."

This song is a bit more personal/philosophical and less attacking broader problems in society directly, but I think the microcosm and the macrocosm reflect each other. The Cure seem to me to have written more often about the personal than offer broad critiques or write battle songs or protest anthems - but then if we don't look with a microscope, we'll miss things we don't see with a normal camera, or a telescope.

Here's another favourite for the topic of "what is wrong with this world" - and it's looking at a microcosm - an intimate relationship:


This song very much reminds me of several poems on this topic in the high school poetry anthology I had as a senior student, which looked at the growing cold of people's relationships, at their not really getting to know the other person because they're just looking at projections they've made. The guitar in this makes my hair stand up on the backs of my arms - to me it's like a tolling bell, and then for me that runs directly to, "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee..."

I find it incredible that quite a few YouTube comments (I've learnt to mostly ignore YT comments now for the sake of my blood pressure) under versions of this song said, "Oh, Robert Smith is describing a wonderful perfect relationship!" No he bloody isn't. How sad that anyone could think so. If you end up like this it's like living death. I'm the child of a relationship like this, and let me tell you, it's anything but wonderful. I grew up with the nuclear fallout of such a relationship and it poisoned some of my own early relationships in turn - pure textbook.  What we need is recognition, relationship education, understanding - not romanticising the dysfunctional. I think this song, like those poems in my high school text, is a warning, a gravestone that says, "Do not play with traffic on a freeway! It's a really bad idea!" - or leastways, "Please think, please inform yourself, please don't just unwittingly repeat cycles."

An older friend of mine, before I was married, had a poster on her wall about happiness. One of its points was that the majority of your personal happiness or misery in your life would flow from who you were going to partner with, and how you were each going to approach that relationship. She was happily married, overall. Twenty years later, I'm happily married, overall - took me a bit longer than her to get to that point in my life, to be able to do that and to have the luck to meet someone with whom that was going to be possible (because you don't see the half of it at the start, even if you're going over it like you would a job interview etc, and it's still something you both have to really work at on a regular basis, and not take for granted).


Here's another sanity song for me:


I've got to go feed my animals, so I'll just hyperlink that to another place I've already looked at why I love this song, and what contribution this makes etc. What I love about all the songs I'm posting on this thread are three things it turns out I want to see in art: Love, thoughtfulness and skill - looked at that here in case anyone wants the long version.

You don't often hear something from The Cure you would classify as an out-loud protest piece, but this one fits that classification - and is very well done indeed...more here...


And clearly this one looks squarely at an actual issue (where the microcosm and macrocosm again echo each other)...a bit of a tribute to this piece here...


From early on - another excellent microcosm song (as well as having gorgeous floaty guitars etc):


There's more to include yet, but it's getting dark so watch this space, I'll add more and tidy this post up later.


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dsanchez

Quote from: SueC on April 18, 2021, 05:47:50the songs that are like a rare beacon of light to you, that give you hope, that show an alternative way to be in this world

easy one, probably the best for this...


Quote from: undefinedThose who feel the breath of sadness
Sit down next to me
Those who find they're touched by madness
Sit down next to me
Those who find themselves ridiculous
Sit down next to me
In love, in fear, in hate, in tears
2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo

dsanchez

and in the same line...

QuoteI see you falling
How long to go before you hit the ground
You keep on screaming
Don't you see me here
Am I a ghost to you

Now your grip's too strong
You can't catch love with a net or a gun
Gotta keep faith that your path will change
Gotta keep faith that your luck will change tomorrow
Tomorrow

2023.11.22 Lima
2023.11.27 Montevideo