3 Different Songs With Extracted Wisdom
Updated: Feb 24
Hello audience, and welcome to another post. This post is going to be different from what I usually provide here on Philosocom, mainly because exhaustion has hit me again, intensively this time. I am disabled from being productive like I want to be as a philosopher.
However, I did come up with an idea for an article you might find enriching to both your musical knowledge and to your contemplations. This will be a list of music I like that I also find philosophical, that I'd like to share with you. I hope you will enjoy this list, both musically and intellectually. Hereby are 3 songs we could learn from on the wider scale of things:
Death is largely undesirable, even to those who had enough with life. This is why acts such as suicide were but attempts - they ended in failure because the attempters were to afraid to die, because death usually means to things: life-taking pain and the unknown whom we might permanently find ourselves in.
Nonetheless, death is often romanticized in ways we might be too afraid to genuinely admit: the deaths of national heroes, heartbroken men and women who find the pain of heartbreak too overwhelming to endure, and life-long sentences of convicts who may never see the light of day.
In his song "Death Death," modern-day Voltaire celebrates death in a story about a ship with a huge hole that is inevitably doomed. Instead of struggling for life, the crew accepts their fate and drowns themselves in a form of collective suicide.
In the final verse, the only crew member who tries to save himself by swimming to a raft is knocked unconscious by the other crewmen, who are all eager to die together.
This shows us something important about conformity: that it can often glorify an idea at the cost of masochism. In Hebrew, we have the term "as sheep to the slaughterhouse," and indeed, conformity can lead individuals to devastating consequences, whether or not the end result is ultimately worth it.
Therefore, if you consciously conform, remember that following an idea can often be counterproductive to your own survival. Consider whether your sacrifice is truly worth it, because it could be a waste and an avoidable misfortune.
This is a crucial song in these times of physical and, often, social isolation. For non-Hebrew speakers, this is basically a story that takes place over a day, where the protagonist finds himself agonizing over his inability to attract good-looking women for love, intimacy, and marriage, while his only true company is his deep, intense emotion of melancholy.
A companion so dominant, the singer describes it as his only "love," "wife," even. Failing to even interact with the women of the external world, he leaves for his home; his melancholy being his wife, sadness his atmosphere, and sweetness his blanket.
The reason I decided to add this song to this list is because of a question I was asked once: can one be alone while watching TV?
And this is what I have to answer: We can manage and even thrive within a life of relative or even major solitude, even within the company of other objects, other so-called "entities" that we interact with, even if they are not other people, AKA, "actual" company, as definitely presented in Rodner's song.
Those who claim that a solitary life is one of nothingness are technically far from the truth. Whether a positive or negative experience, solitude can still be felt as if it is the company of any person you interact with. We do not live in complete void, and no attempt should be made just for solitude to be reached, for the path of solitude can be much simpler and shorter than we may believe it is.
And finally,
Next to the "Happy Birthday" song, John Williams' Imperial March is likely one of the most recognizable songs on Earth. It is commonly used to describe the concept of evil, a critique of an over-militarized regime, or mockery of the nerdy.
However, less is taken into account the possibility that this is first and foremost a tragic song, lamenting the metaphorical death of Anakin Skywalker, and his descent to "the Dark Side," a state of being that is fueled by hatred, rage, passion, grief, and vengeance. It is a state that also consumes the entity's life force like a vampire, and often leaves a permanent effect like the Mark of Kaine.
This is not about being "edgy." It is like a funeral march for the life before the descent into moral darkness and constant suffering, due to whatever motive caused said descent. In Darth Vader's case, it was the death of his wife and his defeat to his former master, which caused him to be one of the strongest, yet pain-feeling, beings in the galaxy at the time.
Therefore, before you consider something or someone to be evil by default, like Darth Vader and his well-known theme song, consider giving them the benefit of the doubt. They may not necessarily be evil, or malicious, for they could have something deeper which serves as their motive. Even if you don't know for sure, or at all, of said motive. This applies to a competitor, an annoying neighbor, a rude driver, and so forth. The cover of a book is often insufficient to determine its content.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this longer-than-usual article, and I hope it has contributed to you in some way or another. At least remember the following: theoretically, everything can contain learnable wisdom, as long as we contemplate enough.
