Sunday 24 June 2007

Pic of the day: By coincidence, the song is also a great "theme song" for my fictional hero Dark Gold Wielder, from the game City of Heroes. An unplanned visitor from a different reality... Then again, aren't we all?

MIKA: Any Other World

I came across this song by accident, if such a thing as accident exists. I had bookmarked a VOX site that auto-played the Japanese song "Hachimitsu" (honey) by Spitz, another song that I had recently "fallen in love with". (I wrote about this on the 15th.)

The next day I opened Opera, with its tabs remembered from last time, and at once it began playing a song I had never heard before. I loved the song, but could not figure out why it was suddenly playing on my computer, as I knew I had never heard it before. I Googled for one of the unusual phrases in it, and found that it was called "Any Other World" by MIKA (whom I had never heard of either). The phrase, I believe, was "say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in". That is not something you hear often, even on the Net. (It also probably goes far in explaining its appeal to me, although I have to say the music caught my ear immediately.)

So what kind of song is this? It is classified as "pop", and rightly so, for the most part. Catchy melody, vague lyrics repeated not quite ad nauseam. And yet there are a few bars where the music swells toward majestic, and a few lines where the lyrics become pure poetry, meaning that surpasses syntax, like the last words of a dream you try in vain to capture as you wake up. You hold onto the words, which seemed so meaningful in the dream, but now they are trite and cryptic. And yet they are the only thing left, like the photograph of a love lost, and you know the memory should be there if only you could reach it, full of meaning. But the door is closed, the dreamworld gone, and in the end even the words fade. Perhaps I read too much into it because I have been there so often. In all the other worlds. I spend a lot of my dreaming in other worlds, you see. Some of them quite far off.

In any other world
you could tell the difference
and let it all unfurl
into broken remnants.

(From here, it seems to me, the dream - or prophecy - ends and reason starts to reassert itself.)

Smile like you mean it
and let yourself let go

'cause it is all in the hands of a bitter, bitter man;
say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in.
Take a bow, play the part
of a lonely, lonely heart;
say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in
- to the world you thought you lived in.

(The experience of waking up from a dream is not too unlike certain life experiences, in which you "wake up" and realize that things are not, and were not, what you thought. Too rapidly, sometimes over a few words or a glimpse of something you thought impossible, a world ends. And you have to "let yourself let go", because there is no way back, no more than you can return to a dream once you are thoroughly woken up.)

(The song now becomes even more pragmatic. As a matter of fact, it now becomes more pragmatic than I am.)

I tried to live alone,
but lonely is so lonely alone;
so human as I am
I had to give up my defenses.

So I smiled and tried to mean it,
to let myself let go

'cause it's all in the hands of a bitter, bitter man;
say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in.
Take a bow, play the part
of a lonely, lonely heart;
say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in.

(The lyrics repeat for a while here, interspersed with ... riff, is that what you call it? An intense instrumental demarcation. In the end, the song returns to the opening theme, but it is weakened and fading. As well it should be, by now.)

In any other world
you could tell the difference.

So that's my take on it. Perhaps he didn't mean it that way... to which I say, he should have meant it that way. This is the way it is.