But could I really do without them? Probably not. The song captures the tension between the Rousseauian primitivist that haunts so many of us (who tells us that we would be better off with a little less “civilization”) and the hopeless consumer, who will forever crave “cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate chip cookies.” I sometimes think that it would be cool if all these annoying cars, shopping malls, parking lots, discount stores and 7-11’s just ceased, and the flowers covered over everything. The narrator, however, misses the old life (“if this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower”). In this song, the suburban commercial sprawl has, for reasons unknown, been left to revert to its natural state. OK, this is not a “straight” utopian song without irony (and who knows what the heck David Byrne is talking about when he says he was that as an angry young man he would pretend he was a billboard who fell in love with a highway). “Nothing but Flowers,” by The Talking Heads. Davis has taken as the exemplar of one his five types of utopia, one of unlimited abundance fulfilling unlimited desire. Fagan’s retro-future world is less like what Wells calls a “utopia of organization” (in which human problems are solved by means of superior social and political organization) and more like the Land of Cockaygne, the Middle English version of Big Rock Candy Mountain that J.C. Human unhappiness disappears in the plenty that is brought by science, without any thought given to political or social considerations. But it must be said that technology solves all the problems here. The song presents a retro-future vision of a technological utopia, the closest thing that I have found in popular music to an earnest song about a “traditional” utopia. The initials of the title stand for “International Geophysical Year,” an event of international scientific cooperation between from 1957 to 1958. Here Bob Marley taps into this strain of religious utopian imagining. Long before Thomas more wrote Utopia, Zion was a Promised Land that played an important role in many utopian aspirations. There is no better version of the song, for my money, than this Muppet Show duet between Kermit and Blondie singer Deborah Harry. So, for all those who are not quite satisfied with the “way that things are,” who aspire to be more than the hedonistic maximizers of economic theory, this is for you. But, isn’t the vague, never-specified “better world” at the other end of the rainbow a true vision of the “good place/no place” signified by the term utopia? Isn’t the debate staged in the song (between those who think that rainbow’s end is an “illusion” and “the lovers, the dreamers, and me”) actually the perennial debate about whether one should work for a better world, or just work to maximize one’s own gains in this world. “Rainbow Connection” offers no blueprint for a better world, no program of reform, only the hope that there is something better to be had, somehow. This might strike some as an odd pick, being that it captures more of what Frederick Jameson calls “the utopian impulse” than any particular utopia, and also because it is sung by a Muppet. “The Rainbow Connection,” by Kermit the Frog.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |