Recently I’ve been listening to some amazing music with absolutely incredible lyricism, discussing a variety of topics with beautifully-written phrases. These lyrics often include ambiguous language, allowing the listener to interpret their meaning, but still direct enough to challenge the issue the artist initially intended. To me, this shows music as a beautiful art form, able to communicate ideas in this wonderful thing we call language.
Kezia
In particular, I recently (re-)listened to Protest The Hero’s album Kezia, which discusses a fictional scenario of a girl, Kezia, set to be executed by firing squad, possibly due to being a heretical prostitute. The album can be interpreted as a critique of modern society and its patriarchal roots, with minor themes of questioning authority and morality. In the following paragraphs, I’ll mention a few of my favourite passages.
The opening track No Stars Over Bethlehem follows the point of view of a priest in the prison Kezia is contained within. He has lost his faith, possibly due to the corruption of humanity as a whole. One passage reads
Someone plunged a dagger deep into God’s chest
And when he groaned it laid our entire civilization to rest
When he pulled out that dagger
And marveled in the pain he could create
We stuck another in his back and sealed Creation’s fate
To me, this reads as if humanity has been given this beautiful thing we call life, but became corrupt, throwing morality away in favour of greed. In this metaphor, God gave us another chance to make things right, but we backstabbed him and tried again to get everything with no regard for what’s right.
Probably my favourite track of the album, Blindfolds Aside, discusses the story from the point of view of one of the soldiers tasked with carrying out Kezia’s execution. The soldier tries to justify his task as simply taking orders, but begins to question his own morality: Is it right and just to take a life simply because someone has decided so? The track opens with a simple but hard-hitting
We woke up as men, but tonight
Tonight we’ll sleep as killers
Once this decision is made, it cannot be undone. If Kezia is executed, these soldiers will have blood on their hands for the rest of their lives. The soldier tries to justify the incoming execution with
To atone for a sin I didn’t care for
But a sin that paid my debts
A sin that fed my children
That burned my smiles and cigarettes
He recognises this is wrong, but how else will he feed his family? He questions if he really has a choice in this matter; does morality die in the hands of a failed justice? Can he justify the killing as duty?
Five soldiers forever sedated
With the “No one’s responsible”
Pathological drama of our
Social justice dribble, dribble, dribble
If he pulls the trigger, is he responsible? If he is simply following orders, does that absolve him of responsibility? This directly relates to the officers of Nazi Germany: Many of them said they were simply following orders, but does that relieve them of their horrible crimes? How is this different than what the soldier is being ordered to do?
The penultimate track, The Divine Suicide Of K, is written from the perspective of Kezia herself as she walks to the execution. Throughout this story, she has become at peace with being killed, with the hope that she can become a martyr and catalyse a change in the system. In particular, she describes herself
Like an ulcer in the stomach of the beast
She believes even if she could not fix a broken system, she may have some influence and cause some change. Even if she cannot directly cause the change, she may be the beginning of it:
Resurrected to be killed then maybe born again
I’ll always be Kezia as long as any hope remains
She hopes that after her death, others may follow to fix this system. While the body of Kezia may cease to exist, her influence can remain in the hearts of the rebels to authority. She may die and others too, but her spirit will be regularly resurrected, and Kezia will continue to exist as long as any hope remains.
Architects
Some of my favourite lyrics come from the group Architects. While I’m not particularly fond of their recent music, some of their earlier work contains extremely profound concepts. At the time, their main lyricist was sadly losing a fight with skin cancer. The album All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us discusses acceptance of impending death and making peace with one’s own demise. My favourite track, Memento Mori, directly faces this idea, with excerpts from the late philosopher Alan Watts speaking about embracing death. Specifically, it states death is inevitable, so let it happen. But if death must occur, what then is life but a chance to make a difference? Possibly the most impactful lyric I’ve ever heard is
Was your life worth dying for?
Why live if you have no impact on the world? Did you make the most of your life while you had it to make death worth it? It’s a strong message; live while you can. Don’t let life pass you by. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.
A loss of finesse
With the rise of artificial intelligence, I worry society will lose some of its language finesse. We’ve seen already that ChatGPT overuses certain words and phrases, reducing the linguistic diversity we’ve seen in the past. I’m concerned that with overreliance on these tools, we’ll forget what makes language special. AI has little-to-no metaphorical understanding, but metaphors are the backbone of poetry and storytelling. Likewise with other language tools; AI is far too literal to understand, let alone, execute these wonderful uses of language.
I hope the world remembers its relationship with language and the diversity of words. We cannot allow ourselves to sink into the same words and phrases, and must keep language evolving and everchanging. We don’t want every person to sound exactly the same; that would signal the loss of what makes us human.