Today’s pick, Eyes Wide Open by Gotye
This is a good one, this whole album deserves the kind of recognition that Somebody That I Used to Know has. It has always amazed me that Gotye dropped this gem and then just moved on from making music.
It’s upbeat and airy with lyrics about how we are actively destroying ourselves, fully aware that our actions and choices are burning the world up around us. The line:
“And the saddest thing, is all of it could’ve been avoided. But it was like to stop consuming’s to stop being human and why’d I make a change if you won’t”
is pretty much perfect for how I feel right now. We were sold the lie of individual action to stop all this environmental destruction while living in a capitalist nightmare that requires constant growth and consumption to keep from collapsing, constant growth pushed by a collection of monopolies that control all the resources, land, media, and governments via a unending stream of money thrown at any resistance that can’t be crushed outright. Knowing that things could be better, could be changed to save the world as we know it, must be changed by dates that are rapidly seeming past and having nothing to do other that argue online or consider eco-terrorism, it can be all a bit much. Can we save ourselves? I really hope so, I’ll likely be dead before things really kick off if we can’t change the course we are on, but I need to believe that a change can happen so that Jack doesn’t end up dying defending a Rogers store against the Americans when they invade to take our fresh water.
The song itself also pulls me to a time before Jack was born, of me listening to this album while walking my old dog Zoey through the park. The afternoon summer sun coming through the trees as we walked the stone trail that follows the creek through Sunnidale, through the swampy stretches with their forests of cattails and clouds of bugs. My girl, just two years old then, walking happily beside me, stopping to sniff at the larger trees and in the leaves and pine needles along the path. We’d go up and down the trails, emerging from the woods like lost explorers finding their way back to civilization. We’d do this walk daily, different paths through the area but always together. It was something I wish I was capable of now; the girls don’t get walked much since my spine exploded, there is something so healing about walking a dog through some woods with good music in your ears. Zoey was good at listening; she’d walk off leash with me out on the trails outside town. I can’t imagine either Mipha or Samus listening well enough to do that, I haven’t been able to train them like they’ve needed and the Wife and the Boy have been too busy picking up the slack in every other part of our lives since I can’t to do it for me.
If you have only ever heard Somebody That I Used to Know, please, do yourself a favour. Listen to all of Making Mirrors. You know, before the world ends.
Early Frost Warning 