Dancer
One of my guiltier pleasures this year has been my recurring enjoyment of the album ‘Day and Age’ by The Killers. It’s actually more like half the album. I listen to the first three songs over and over then I skip to ‘Paper Tiger’ and the title track. The music feels slight and insignificant but it also feels fun and I do really like Brandon Flowers singing voice.
At any rate, the hit song on the record, as many people know, is the song ‘Human’ and along with ‘Spaceman’ I’ve listened to it a couple hundred times this year. Mostly because I like to run to it. [ed note: a couple hundred times this year? really? that's just really weird]
Anyway, the song is ridiculous and fun and I love the delay on the guitar and the tone of it. It’s great sounding.
The most frequent criticism levelled at the song is that the chorus is inane and silly (which I guess is more probable than not) and that Flowers doesn’t use the plural of the word ‘dancer’ so the line is ‘Are we human or are we dancer?’ which sounds bizarre to most people. And, again, I concede that it might be. Bizarre and maybe just plain stupid.
But, the game I like to play is that I imagine that Flowers is actually being clever (he comes across as weirdly intelligent in what I’ve read of him) and that he’s using ‘dancer’ not as a noun but as an adverb. Imagine if he sang, “Are we human or are we faster?” or “smarter” or any other modifier of the word human. In that sense, the question is (I can’t believe I’m writing this) more profound, right? He’s sort of articulating a baseline human condition and then wondering if we might be something more than ourselves and, in that sense, the question is almost aspirational and quasi-religious.
Because maybe we’re dancer than human.
We’re imbued with rhythm and grace and movement and are, in a sense, and maybe he means when we listen to this specific song or maybe just when we listen to music, we are more than human. We are dancer. We’re not dancers. It’s not a separate thing. We’re just dancer than your normal person, under certain conditions.
Ok, I’ll stop now.
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Jeremy
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theflyingchange
