Fleet Foxes - "Helplessness Blues" (Part One)

Back in its heyday folk music was all about protesting injustice, so it shouldn't be surprising that the Fleet Foxes, a band with folksy inflections to their baroque pop creations, would write the closest thing to a protest song I've heard in awhile. (Of course, I'm not exactly on the lookout for protest songs, so I'm no authority on such things).

Anyway, the Fleet Foxes' song "Helplessness Blues," released last year and therefore just a little before the Occupy movements got off the ground (and in the middle of the "recovery" from a recession) is a great song that reflects the spirit of that movement.



As we shall see, some of the song is centered around economic issues, but it also goes much deeper than that to question some of the central elements of the modern ethos of which the woes of capitalism are only a part. The song opens with a reconsideration of an extreme notion of individuality:

“I was raised up believing
I was somehow unique,
like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes,
unique in each way you’d conceive."

What is immediately apparent in these lines is the emptiness of this conception of uniqueness: being "somehow" unique says about as much here as being "unique in each way you'd conceive." Each form of "uniqueness" is essentially an empty vessel that has to be filled by real content. found in life in order to be really meaningful. This real content is part of the world that we share with others-the actions, relations, and roles, i.e., the things that we care about and that occupy our time in daily life. Even the distinctness of snowflakes from each other depends upon the overarching similarity of what each shares as a snowflakes (a fact alluded to by the repetition of the word "snowflake" in the line). Likewise, the fact that this song begins as an account of what the singer was raised up to believe, his being raised suggests that any individuality to be had is tempered by the actions and ideas of others

Despite the emptiness of this kind of uniqueness, this conception of it underwrites a lot of our culture's deeply held beliefs about individuality and originality. Indeed, the middle line about "a snowflake distinct among snowflakes" reminds me of something I often heard when I was younger (and would likely hear again if I spent more time around children): adults would tell children that each of them was unique; like snowflakes, no two are identical. This was, I believe, meant to make them feel good about themselves as if their uniqueness was a great achievement worth being proud of (so was everyone else's apparently). The falseness of this idea is evident from the fact that many of the most boring and irritating people I have ever met were people who considered their originality their finest quality-rarely have I ever heard uttered so many formulaic and uninspired declarations as from the mouth of an "original."

While the historical nature of every human life means that we are undoubtedly unique and irreplaceable (contra Beyonce, who reveals a certain callousness in her song "Irreplaceable") in a basic sense, I would hardly rank uniqueness among the most worthy of human qualities. Mere uniqueness cannot hold a candle to courage, intelligence, or humour, for instance. The conception of individuality that puts some form of uniqueness and originality ahead of all else as the defining quality of a person fails to recognize the greater importance these others, perhaps because they do not pertain solely to the individual, but lead outward.

For these reasons the song turns and rejects this individualism in the space of the same verse:

"And now after some thinking
I’d say I’d rather be
a functioning cog in some great machinery
serving something beyond me."

On the one hand, this represents a radical step forward, a rejection of individualism so extreme that it seems to fall into its opposite, some kind of blind and mechanical determinism or collectivism where nothing is anything but a piece of something larger. But on the other hand, it is only a half-step, as the singer is not fully committed to this position at all: it comes to him as the result of thinking, and exists in the form of a preference or a desire, not as something already realized in his life. Furthermore, as with the individualism of the initial lines, there is a lot of vagueness to this position, as we are left with "some great machinery" that is "something beyond me"-not exactly the stuff of great passions and the grand ends of life. Even my recourse to such a vague sentence as the one that contains the words, "nothing is anything but a piece of something larger," to describe it suggests that this position is perhaps not much of improvement. The yearning to be part of something larger, to be connected with the world as a whole, is there in an inchoate form, but it has yet to be realized adequately in thought, much less in action. This is why the song takes its first really dramatic turn, introducing the harmonies for which the Fleet Foxes are famous, as well as making explicit the confusion signified by all of the vagueness and indeterminacy of the earlier lines: " But I don’t, I don’t know what that will be,/ I’ll get back to you someday, soon you will see.”