Cold War Kids - "First"

Ok, so speaking about the difficulty of changing oneself and all of the factors outside of our conscious control in the previous post leads me to the next song I want to discuss, “First” by the Cold War Kids. (I specifically write “conscious control” in order to indicate that not everything that poses such a problem is outside of ourselves—at least not as long as what counts as ourselves is fairly broadly construed a la what Daniel Dennett captures with the ironic statement “If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything” and his endorsement of its opposite, “You’d be surprised how much you can internalize, if you make yourself large.”)

Anyway, the general theme of the song is expressed in the chorus:

First you get hurt, then you feel sorry.

Flying like a cannonball, falling to the earth
Heavy as a feather, when you hit the dirt
How am I the lucky one?
I did not deserve

To wait around forever, when you were there first.

First you get hurt, then you feel sorry.

Structure-wise it’s a little ambiguous whether the “First you get hurt, then you feel sorry” (and its variations like “First you lose trust, then you get worried,” and “First you get close, then you get worried”) belong to the chorus or not, but they certainly do thematically. Just as the “First….then….” clause denotes a sequence governed by cause and effect, the images of falling objects (cannonballs and feathers) likewise indicate a kind of mechanistic trajectory. The idea is that there can be a certain kind of causal determinism to our emotional lives that can be incredibly difficult to escape from once it starts. That is, I think, the tragedy of “first,” not just in the sense of the “First…then….” where once it starts you can’t stop it, but also what it is like”To wait around forever, when you were there first.” Being first is also a mark of the dyssynchrony that comes from such a lack of control over’s ones emotional life: there is always the possibility that one person is lost to the other in being swept up and away.

Indeed, the first lines of the song outline just such a situation and the powerlessness of ours attempts to do something about it: “Cheated and lied, broken so bad / you made a vow, never get mad.” While the song doesn’t indicate who cheated and lied, whether it is the “you” who everything happens to or the person they are in love with, I’m not sure if that matters. After all, the important thing is that the situation is one of broken trust, and the implications of that inevitably weigh upon cheater and cheated upon in ways that neither can necessarily control or repair, no matter how much they would like to. In fact, the whole drama of the song is focused on how broken trust has a causal power of its own above and beyond what we might try to do about it (“You made a vow, never get mad”—we shall see that this vow won’t hold up). The rest of the first verse details some of the self-destructive ways that we react to this kind of betrayal: cynical rationalization (“You play the game, though its unfair. / They’re all the same, who can compare?”); and being driven to distraction/forgetfulness/oblivion (“Night after night, Bar after club, / Dropping like flies, who woke you up / On the front lawn, sprinklers turned on / it’s not your house, where’d you go wrong?”). It is this aspect of the song that ties into my previous post about choosing what to worship. At issue here is the impossibility (or at least difficulty) of choosing to trust—you can go through all of motions and want it ever so badly without ever being able to bring yourself to it, or without being able to resist the force of mistrust.

After the chorus we get a short section that just confirms the seeming irreversibility of the course of the broken relationship in the very attempt to repair it through forgiveness, attempting to begin again by rewriting the old problems as a “dark night of the soul”:

There comes a time, in a short life
Turn it around, get a rewrite
Call it a dark night of the soul
Ticking of clocks, gravity’s pull
First you get close, then you get worried

What interests me is the alignment of the “dark night of the soul” with the “Ticking of clocks, gravity’s pull.” As the embodiment of time and space, the latter are the embodiment of the mechanism and determinism already suggested by the cannonball and the feather—we’re talking about a kind of psychological law of gravity here. (Incidentally, I wonder if the pairing of cannonball and feather is meant to hearken to Galileo’s famous contention that a cannonball and a feather would both fall at the same rate in a vacuum—or maybe its just that we are unstoppable in our falling, but then unlikely to just remain where we fall.)