3. 'I Support Coal Mining (All My Friends are Gone)'
FREDDI's new song maps the aburdity of the age onto policies of power.
The power of a song can exist in ambiguity and irony. Where music often says too much and we can’t find the words for what we hear, in lyrics one can often say more by saying less.
For example, the opening line of this song says, ‘ I support coal mining, I love to dig coal out of the ground’? Who would say that? The singer, in saying something so wrong, has confessed a radical detachment from the normal. I mean this is socially unacceptable talk. So does he really believe this, or is there something else going on?
Click the arrow below to watch the video of 'I Support Coal Mining' written and performed by Jason Freddi
Irony works because the simple folk language of ‘I love to dig’ in the ironic comment doesn’t speak of the violence that underpins the statement, ‘dig coal out of the ground’. One thought is so contradictory to the other, as to move consciousness, like a switch, back and forth across the chasm of ambiguity unable to settle in either conviction.
Taken to an extreme irony can be the enemy of meaning in its merciless undermining of the rules of direct speech.
The third verse of the song opens with, ‘I love uranium, especially when made into a bomb’, which could be a factual statement if delivered by someone in the missile business. But even then, it is difficult to imagine a context in which that speech could be delivered without an ironic component.
Stanley Kubrik attempted to exploit this kind of world destroying ironic potential in his 1963 film, Dr Strangelove, subtitled, ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’. It required the director to do little more than deliver plotlines from strategic defence doctrines to terrify, amuse and bewilder. The irony defeats all meaning and in the end, one does not know whether to laugh or cry. Perhaps irony only ever establishes that which remains to be said.
Where much of scientific thought attempts to reconcile opposites into a larger positive project, irony is said to ‘swallow its own stomach’. Irony entails endless reflections and reversals, and ensures incomprehensibility at the moment of speech.
Some have seen irony as the zeitgeist of the post-truth age. David Foster Wallace views the pervasiveness of ironic and other postmodern tropes as the cause of ‘great despair and stasis in U.S. culture’ The generation of people in the United States who grew up in the 1990s, Millennials, are seen as having this same sort of detachment from serious or awkward situations in life, as well. Hipsters are thought to use irony as a shield against those same serious or genuine confrontations.
And I wonder how it is that the western societies have suffered most from the all pervasive irony. Our thought leaders have been captivated by the thought of nothingness. What began as a moment of self-reflection, momento mori has resolved itself into a vision of self-immolation and total annihilation. The momento mori now subsumed in a nucleur holcaust in which man can no longer see himself.
Listen to the song, ‘I Support Coal Mining’, by Jason FREDDI -
DREAMING AUSTRALIA
New album available now, www.jasonfreddi.com
