I don’t know anyone that seems to have their priorities straight, who hasn’t also had to manage significant grief in their life. The people squandering their time on cynical entitlement and petty power struggles are not typically living in the same stark world as the rest of us. Death is such a game until it’s suddenly very real, and then nothing is quite the same.
It invokes yearning, something that’s been out of fashion for some time, but maybe it’s coming back. Millennials were never big yearners. Gen X had a reputation for being apathetic, but a lot of that apathy was brooding yearning in disguise. Some of us Kevin Arnold 90s kids inherited the feral yearning of our younger boomer parents before they aged into paranoia and helicopter parents for the the Millennial generation.
That generation took what I considered to be the default state of human being: impassioned yearning with a slow growth of personal development based on working on one’s self and life experience- and cut it out of the soul of the zeitgeist. It was instead replaced with its bookends: a state of pure matter-of-fact acceptance (hello doggo, I am human), and a state of completely impotent indignation. Angry at the world, unable to do anything about it. Natural feelings of inadequacy, converted into an external loci of Society’s Fault, Ackchually- further converting learned helplessness to more anger.
The worst deal Millennials ever took was trading shame for anger.
Because it’s OK to yearn. Damn fine. Better than anything, in fact. But it starts with admitting what you lack. Take my girl Ella here:
The musical theory at play is pretty clever. The song is in the key of B, and if you know anything about how music works and why it maps so well over our minds and emotions, you’ll know that like a conversation (“Good day Sir!”) the way it begins HAS to be the way it ends for us to achieve satisfaction (“Good day Sir.”). The song starts with a B note, in the key of B, before the first note of the lyrics- which opens on an F flat. As the first verse goes through its motions, its ups and downs, our ear is waiting for it to resolve back to that first B note we heard in the beginning- but when we finally get that long awaited resolution note with the first “so Bad” after the first chorus, it’s not QUITE the B we are hoping for- but rather another return to that F flat, which resolves the lyrics but also creates a structural yearning to hear that final B- because it’s almost there, but not quite- just one step down on the scale- and then she drops a couple more “bad”s, that finally do resolve the initial B note.
A very clever overlap of structural yearning, with lyrical yearning on top of it.
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