Now, I say this as a preamble to bashing Our Lady Peace's song "Somewhere Out There." Like so many Canadian teens in the 90's I was a fan of Our Lady Peace (and I do still like their early work); they could rock, their lyrics, if somewhat inscrutable, were still interesting and the vocal style of their singer, Raine Maida, if unorthodox, was capable of delivering an honest and powerful delivery of emotion. That might be a lot of commas and ifs, but they were one of the first bands I got into when I was getting into music and they were the first concert I ever went to on my own (unaccompanied by my parents that is, I went with friends), so they hold a special place in my life for that as well. Their first album, Naveed, still holds up as a really good post-grunge rock album, and their next two albums had some great moments too. Their fourth album, Spiritual Machines, is where things started to get a little dicey (in retrospect, their interest in Ray Kurzweil, faux techno-prophet, on that album says that something isn't right) and their work after that has been, as far as I can tell, a steady slide in radio rock mediocrity. The song that I want to talk about now, "Somewhere Out There," fits into that latter period.
Now, given my dislike for vagueness and indeterminateness the title admittedly looks like a bad sign. But I'm actually not going to trash that aspect too much, the song works with themes of outer space and the alienation of distance (it might be a drug thing, there is an early line about them being "strung out," though its not really developed) that makes that vagueness appropriate, although still way too overwrought. No, my beef if with a particular image from the chorus that just gets stuck in my craw every time I hear it. Here's the chorus:
You're
falling back to me,
You're
a star that I can see, yeah
I
know you're out there
Somewhere
out there
You're
falling out of reach
Defying
gravity, yeah
I
know you're out there
Somewhere
out there
What
I don't understand is the movement being described here. At first
this person is "falling back to me" but then they are
"falling out of reach," and this second falling is
"defying gravity." I suspect that the two directions to the
falling (back to and also out of reach) is
just a matter of muddled
writing, but it is the relation between falling and defying gravity
that I find really puzzling.
Maybe there is some arcane
principle of physics I am missing?
If you are orbiting around something and you escape from its orbit
does that count as falling? It always seemed to me that falling was
something largely passive on the part of the one falling and involved
being pulled towards a gravitational centre, whereas escaping orbit
is something active and requires a force opposing the gravitational
one. If this person is falling out of reach because they are being
pulled by some other force (say, drugs, if that's what's going on
here) then they aren't really defying gravity, they are succumbing to
it from another direction. Yeah, it drives me crazy because it's not
thought out at all, it must have sound poetic and that was enough.
Seriously, if Our Lady Peace wants to get a clue about what it means
to defy gravity they should do a little more research,
there are better songs that explore the relation between liberation
and the defiance of gravity.
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