I came across this song a few weeks ago while I was working. As soon as the song started, I put down whatever I was doing and just listened. Then I played it again. And again. And again, until I had memorized every word.
The song is about surveillance and lack of privacy in the age of the internet. Vienna Teng writes about how our lives are reduced to facts, and how those facts no longer belong to us. I googled "Acxiom" and found that it's actually the name of an online database that collects information through private computers using "cookies" and sells that information to corporations to use for advertising purposes.
(At this point I should mention a wonderful irony - as I went over to the tab where I have the lyrics open, I was immediately faced with a huge pop-up ad from Amazon featuring a product I'd searched on their website only minutes before.)
The song is from the perspective of the software that controls us. The first lines establish the creepiness of the song: "Somebody hears you. You know that, you know that. / Somebody hears you. You know that inside." In the first line, it seems like reassurance. However, when she adds the word "inside," all of a sudden it seems like a threat to me. The fact that somebody hears you is something that you suspect, and not in a pleasant way.
That's the way the whole song is - at first it seems comforting, but then starts becoming more and more threatening. Especially when the last verse begins with a ton of voices screaming, "NOW WE POSSESS YOU!"
My favorite line in the song is, "Now we will build you an endlessly upward world / Reach in your pocket, embrace you for all you're worth." The words like "endlessly upward" and "embrace" sound like positive ideas, but when you realize that "all you're worth" is referring to how much you're worth as a consumer (reaching in your pocket!) the line becomes frightening.
The lyrics maintain a delicate balance between being comforting and unsettling, which reflects the nature of the topic matter. We live in a world that's endlessly interconnected, where the bounds of privacy are no longer so strictly defined. It's interesting, comforting, and scary all at the same time.
I think that any song that makes you want to listen to it over and over definitely has some of the aspects of poetry, and often convey emotion even better than a poem. Like when you said that they start screaming "Now we possess you," the emotion hits home. The song I picked has a similar chant towards the end and it is part of what drew me to it.
ReplyDeleteI love how you found your connection to the song right away with the amazon ad... The lack of privacy you're talking about validates our extreme paranoia in such a techy-age. Nice use of your link with "every word" :)
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