The Triumph of Defeat: Lust, Wine, and Rock ’n’ Roll

Pick your poison: Either you’re lost in the crumbling maze of your own mind, incapable of articulating anything coherent amid the disintegrated mess of half-formed thoughts; or you can be certain of one thing—that you are a victim, a slave of your own emotions and irresistible urges. That is the entire spectrum of human possibility and psychology, at least as depicted by many of today’s popular musical artists, whose commercial and critical success evinces a broad cultural trend: the triumph of defeat—that is, the near-universal acceptance that we are but confused and helpless creatures.

Take the new album Daniel by the indie rock band Real Estate. On the website Metacritic.com, which aggregates review scores, Daniel has floated between ratings of “generally favorable” and “universal acclaim.” Despite its sophomoric lyrics and basic chord patterns that somehow are neither happy nor sad but statically blasé, the album reveals a key cause of this cultural trend—and illustrates its results. On “Water Underground,” vocalist Martin Courtney sings, “I have a voice inside my head; Can’t figure out what it’s trying to say.” He told Apple Music, “I wrote the whole song without really knowing what I was writing about, but I thought about it later and it came to me: ‘Oh, it’s like your subconscious.’”

The subconscious is, as Courtney goes on to intimate, essential to the creative process. The mind is an integrating mechanism, and the subconscious is like a storehouse for our prior thoughts and integrations, whether these are fully formed and rationally validated, or inchoate and erroneous.

So, should we take whatever material the subconscious throws us and run with it? That’s like running with scissors, but it’s precisely how many people live their lives, treating not only their half-baked ideas but also their shortsighted whims or out-of-context emotions as an inerrant fount of wisdom. Many fail to ask themselves, “Does this idea actually make sense?” or “What ideas and evaluations are causing me to feel this way, and are they valid?” Such people are run largely by a subconscious the contents of which they don’t understand, composing their lives as others do songs, without really knowing what they’re doing or why. They are pulled like puppets, first in this direction, then in that, unable to make sense of themselves—never mind the world—and are thereby doomed to frustration and pain.

This sort of self-imposed nightmare is a common denominator in much modern music, and it’s well concretized in the incongruous lines of Real Estate’s second single from Daniel, “Haunted World”: “The sun is shining through the trees; This haunted world is killing me.” No wonder. That’s the price of misunderstanding and misusing the mind. . . .

About Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey (@revivingreason) is managing editor of The Objective Standard and holds fellowships at Foundation for Economic Education, where he writes in defense of freedom, and at Objective Standard Institute, where he teaches courses and hosts the podcast “Philosophy for Flourishing.”

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