We used to play this song as a gentler, lighter, almost pop kind of song. In the tiny following that we had, one of our regular audience member used to scream out and request this one. He even went and carved the title somewhere in his faculty. It's flattering but also a little absurd. Somewhere there is a piece of carved graffiti in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney wherein it is inscribed 'Plankton of Love'.
People would have walked by this thing and probably never stopped to wonder what the hell it was about. An insignificant cypher of something from another age.
"What the hell?" they might ask themselves. "What the hell is the 'Plankton of Love'?"
From all the previous entries one might be led to think we were a humourless bunch. All these seriously anguished songs about the injustices and the civil inadequacies of government and business, the ever impending doom of a consumerist society eating out the planet and crowding out the eco-system; these were the songs we wrote in earnest because we felt what we felt and what we felt had to be given some shape.
We didn't always take ourselves so seriously. Occasionally we indulged in nonsense lyrics.
Like this one. I really couldn't tell you what the hell we were thinking with this song.
Everybody has to have a ballad somewhere in their catalogue. This one's ours.
The ballad was de rigeur in a set. Somewhere you had to slow right down and croon and strum out a song of professed love and devotion to some love interest. I didn't like this unspoken rule we inherited from other bands. Some bands did their ballads really well Cold Chisel's 'When the War is Over' is a wonderful ballad that fits seamlessly into their sonic landscape. Paul McCartney's 'My Love' in 'Rock Show' is like the pinnacle work where the slow number just reinforces the richness of his song writing.
Of course there's lot of temperament issues to do with this sort of thing. As I've written on many an occasion, I'm not great with love songs, partly because romanticism died in me pretty hard in my 20s. Life in its raw reality is pretty sobering, and once you sober up from love, you just never come back to it with the same abandon of a romantic. You judge your distance, and just how far you're willing to jump before you make your running jump. You don't give your heart away so some maniac can put it on a spit and eat it ("...what are you crazy?").
Ultimately, slowing down for a bit of romanticism just wasn't my temperament back then. All the same you end up writing one of these things pretty much in spite of one self because man does not rock out at 145bpm alone. We sing things we would not admit to in plain prose.
And somewhere deep in the heart, love resides in spite of all our hurt feelings (they say).
We live on a continent of drought and fires. That's the catch-cry of conservative politicians who always seem to get so much mileage from visiting affected areas and giving handshakes and hugs to the people whose lives have been crippled by the effects of droughts and fires. It's no exception today, same as it ever was in the 2000s, the 1990s, and the 1980s - just a little worse.
The astounding thing is that Climate Change was always a factor in each drought as they progressively got worse and longer. And each time a politician from the National Party would pipe up and say this was not the time to be talking about Climate Change, trying to hose down serious discussion about perhaps-maybe-possibly Australians having to radically re-orient how they interact with this continent. Nothing that could threaten our feeble self image could be allowed on the table for discussion.
This time with these droughts and fires, we heard Michael McCormack with the tried and tested "now-is-not-the-time..." rhetoric early in the bushfire crisis but he was quickly confronted by the reality that the combined terror of these drought and bushfires were unprecedented and firmly pointed a finger towards the impact of global Climate Change. He had to recant and he had to mention the unspeakable reality. It's a notable moment in Australian politics, long overdue.
It's a sad state of affairs for the Nationals because the one thing the National Party is supposed to be doing is siphoning off the fruits of government to unfairly help rural constituents, and yet the help they probably needed the most was to acknowledge reality for what it was. And each time there had been droughts and fires, and the issue got swept under the carpet, it passed the issue on to the next generation of politicians. The hand grenade got passed along and finally exploded in the face of Michael McCormack.
Heaven only knows how many farmers lost their farms waiting for the skies to open and for the drought to break when odds were, they would be waiting longer than the previous floods or be subjected to larger, ever more unthinkable fires. And you have to think about that moment when the farmers saw the black imported car driven by the bankers, coming to take their homes.
This is a song about that moment that kept happening all over, and somehow the rural constituency kept voting in the National Party.
There is no curing stupid except through death and disaster.
This song is about the jungle and the people who move beneath the canopy with their guns.
My generation didn't have a great cause. As ironic as the demographic Generation X is, part of the identity is the utter lack of conviction in protesting that existed in the mid-1980s. No Vietnam War protests for us. No great conflict in society to overcome except our own consumerist consent into the globalised neo-liberal ideology - which of course seduced us all with an array of consumer goods. Politics had been replaced by the aestheticisation of commodities. It has to be said it is in this vacuum of great causes that allowed the next generation of deplorable right wingers to creep their way back into the picture, but that is almost by-the-by.
And yet great evil was right there had we only looked and paid attention.
Perhaps it was a marketing move by the US Government that they stopped having overt acts of war headlined by their own troops. The era instead saw something more bizarre in the Iran-Contra affair where the US Government was implicated in smuggling guns into Central America to rebels to fight a proxy war against the leftist Sandinista government. When it all blew up, it seemed obvious that the Reagan Administration should take responsibility and be consigned to history, marched out of the White House. instead, they came up with the expression 'maintain the fiction' and carried on into the first term of George Bush Sr.
The funny thing was howAmerican society in general did not get up in arms about the Iran-Contra affair. It sort of made its way through the headlines but overall, the American population still maintains the fiction to this day that the US President was above all this criminality - and they let Reagan sail off into the sunset as if he were some great moral leader of the nation. And if American citizens weren't going to fight, why should the rest of the first world really care? That was the vibe.
All the same we thought that very apathy, was crap.
I guess it's appropriate to reflect back today in an era when US Republicans circled the wagons to protect their lame-duck law-breaking inept-as-fuck Prez Donald Trump to hark back to an age when Republicans did exactly the same thing in protecting Ronald Reagan. Evil shit is perpetrated by those in high offices all the time and they expect to get away with it at our expense ALL the time.
If nothing else as artists, we wanted answers so we were asking questions in our art.
And still, the questions continue.
There was an arcade game way back when by the name of Kiki Kaikai.
Kiki Kaikai is a Japanese expression meaning "Stranger-than-strange world". It's set in a kind of medieval Japan and involves a bunch of adventures trying to save the Daimyo (lord).
For about 3 weeks, our nascent band really go into it and we were throwing our coins into it like there was no tomorrow. The imagery was kind of absurd and the handicap of getting monkey on the back of your actor was indeed stranger than strange. It even seemed counter to vjedeo Christian beliefs that the protagonist had to try and save 'the Lord'.
Around that time I was reading a book about Kunlun, which is the basis of Shangri-La and also the place where Iron Fist goes as a child to learn his amazing Kung Fu. A legendary place that supposedly does not exist where everything is wonderful and hey, that's worth fighting for even with monkey on your back. Somehow the mysticism inherent in the Kunlun story made its way into the bridge of this song.
Our drummer then was Al, who was really in to the idea of "East Meets West", and thusly he was very motivated to go travelling in Asia. I think it might've been him that wanted a syncretic pan-Asian lyric as part of a conceptual unity for this song. I found it a stretch but when you're young, you're sort of scratching around for ideas to stitch together so you do it. Arcade game Medieval Japan with ghosts, monsters and monkeys, and Holy Lands in Chinese mysticism, all in the one song with no particular relationship to one another.
There's really not much more to it than that. Sometimes a song is a song is a song, just like Gertrude Stein's rose.
We had these premonitions of a terrible future where climate change would ruin everything and humanity would end up living in domes underground. It's largely crap and while the vision has been made into films and TV shows there's still no sign we're at such apocalyptic ends. That's not to say we won't end up there.
In any case, cheesy Sci-Fi fodder was our bread and butter so we had this little number we whipped out when we wanted to be 'down and heavy' during our sets. We had a drummer who used to milk the half-time and double-time changes like he was playing for Zeppelin, and that made for tremendous fun.
It's hard to say why we had such apocalyptic visions but I do remember seeing the distant horizon to the west at dusk when crossing the Gladesville Bridge one night on our way home from rehearsals. There had been bushfires and the smoke had created a layer of green light in-between the twilight inkblot black-blue and the ding twilight orange over the horizon. It was an eerie sight which stuck in my mind.
Now that Australia's up in flames it seems incredibly quaint now that such an ephemeral inkling of an image made its way into this song. It really was there for a brief moment and by the time we had crossed the bridge it was gone.
When I quit (*ahem*) Med School, my chief band mate was distressed. I was traumatised over other things so I couldn't tell at the time but he was distressed that I'd gone and flushed down a whole career that other people would dream about. He was shocked in a way that ran completely tangential to my own feelings about the situation, as to make conversations about it with him very stilted and strange.
To be frank, nobody got it. It's a bit like that song 'Too Many People' by Paul McCartney on Ram where he sings
That was your first mistake
You took your lucky break and broke it in two
Now what can be done for you?
You broke it in two
You're not supposed do that shit but I was actually at the end of my tether with the faculty and my conversations with the faculty about my state of mind and engagement with them had reached a nadir. When you throw in a bad breakup and then betrayal by friends in the faculty that destroys your faith in people, you kind of have to shut things down and have a deep think.
While I was having my deep think we kept jamming and my chief band mate wrote out the words to what became this song. I think it was an expression of him trying to wrap his head around my predicament. It was like a protest song, but the protest was deeply personal. There was no Vietnam War going on, and the renewed military adventurism of the USA was still some time ahead. The world was still largely at peace, even if the Cold War was stifling and the USSR still had some credibility as the counterpart to the charade. History, was in a lull.
You can't really undo your fuck ups. I don't regret quitting Med School at all, but the fuck ups that happen, you kind of have to own. You convince yourself it's all for the better, that you're headed to a city of gold. It's probably crap, but to fight through the terrible moments, you have to muster up courage somehow.
And so you go looking for your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
It's not exactly the way things worked out.
Back in the day we had this little ditty that we had written about being on the dole and going up to the local DSS office - the precursor to the modern day Centrelink - to hand in the form in exchange for unemployment benefit payments. It's long ago and from the era when Australia had such things as recessions and economic downturns and 17% youth unemployment. It was a certain way of life. It certainly was grungy and presaged Nirvana and all that grungiest alienation. Nobody thinks at the time it lasts for ever but I know some cases where it's gone on for a long time. Should one judge? Depends on how wedded you are to capitalism and neo-liberalism, I imagine. If you can make it last, maybe that's an eminently epicurean way of life? Not everybody's built for this capitalist, dog-gets-mortgage sort of world.
Anyway, Chatswood was the centre of this kind of stupid existence being a NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) and just living an indolent lifestyle. It wasn't exactly me, but there were people in our orbit living that dope-smoke-filled life of the indolent ne'er-do-well, living in mum's basement, turning it into an orc's den and just skating along on this thin ice of government and social largesse. The easy consumerism of Chatswood was sort of enticing as well as laughable. Hence the original song, which, this is not that song.
Fast forward a few decades and I found myself working in Chatswood and of course everything has materially changed. It's simply not the town in which I grew up any longer. It's very alien and exotic. I can see some of the structures but they are buried in the mass of newfangled developments that have doubtless helped commerce but not so much the culture.
Okay, I complain because I'm a being obtuse. But this song, I assure you, is not.
In the wake of 'Blade Runner', we were really into the writings of Philip K. Dick. Before the internet, information took a long time to circulate the world, and even then was all very uneven. You kind of had to hunt down books, read them, lend them and then discuss them. It's a far cry from the instantaneous superfluous opinion generation in the era of YouTube and Facebook.
We were particularly drawn to this book 'A Scanner Darkly' which depicted a near future where the drug culture kind of permeated everything and nobody seemed to be quite straight. The 1970s counter-culture vibe of the book stood in stark contrast to the protestations of a Reagan USA. And so we set out writing this song which largely describes the psychotic elements the book.
Had we been inundated with everybody's bloody opinions about Philip K. Dick like we are today with any particular topic on the internet, we may not have embarked on such a venture. We even added in gags of our own. I guess you had to be there to understand the dynamic.
In the 2000s, Robert Linklater made his rather interesting film based on the book and of course we were surprised that he chose to concentrate on the other details that we didn't put in the song. Maybe Barris was miscast. Maybe Charles Freck was miscast. Winona Ryder as Donna most certainly seemed miscast. It's a fun movie but we had already experienced the transmogrification of trying to make sense the book and then explaining it in another medium.
Anyway, this song comes from a time way before the internet made everything so overly explained.
Happy New Year peeps. Hey Happy New Decade even.
Okay, we're all sad in Australia what with the terrible apocalyptic bushfires which were neither unforeseeable nor unpredicted. The government was warned. Scomo the Denialist PM was fully warned by everybody with a brain this was going to be a killer summer for bushfires. And what happens? Exactly what was predicted. What can you do with that kind of obstinacy that has so much caused death and destruction? And guess what? We voted them back in. We are such suckers for punishment.
The screams of Koalas are burnt into my ear and I'm very unhappy about our politicians, even more so than normal.
Might not be the best time to reflect on one's misspent youth, but this whole album 'Monstrous Gaussian Regression' is exactly that kind of venture. These are the songs that have been rattling around inside my head for decades and have kept me tied up on some level. Without doing these I can't get past my own history, so to speak.
They're songs from the band Satellite City which was the band I was knocking around in back in the late 1980s. Somehow through a process of attrition, I ended up being the custodian of the intellectual property, mostly though dint of remembering them, and holding on to old cassette tapes. Yes, it's that kind of archival thing.
The drawback being the repository of this ancient music is that you have to do something with it, and really, I couldn't not do them, given that I now had the means of production. Until you get this out of your system, it just goes around and around in your head. You can't imagine what that's like but when you have like a whole band's catalog in your head, it can drive you bananas not to get it out.
I mean, this is it, the emotional record of how I chased dreams right over the edge.
Don't try this at home, as they say.
We always wanted to write something deeply romantic without it being just about love. A song that could convey the kind of universal, unquestioning love for all living things. Grand visions, grand aspirations, and in the most abstract way. At the same time, perhaps make it sound as grand as the ambitions, like a Bond movie theme song. And while I'm not about to get up there and be Shirley Bassey or Tom Jones, the aspiration was to be grand in posture. A bit hard when you're just this ill-equipped teen in the 'burbs in a 3-piece band.
Most of the time when we played, we had big finishes. Like an eternal yearning for the most sublime climax, the finishes would be a reach towards an orgasmic crescendo of sound, probably modelled on the last few bars of 'Wont Get Fooled Again'. So just for once we had this song that didn't end on a mounting sequence of ever bigger thumps on the open strings of the cranked guitars.
Of course, when you do things that are not to your natural inclinations, it tends to work against you putting it out to the world well. The song slowly faded from our early repertoire and ended up in the bottom drawer... until now.
I kind of like the soft denouement. I don't know if anybody really writes songs like this anymore.
As I keep writing here, it's hard enough writing any song, let alone about love. Writing about the first kiss is an impossibly delicate task. You have to temper it with a sense of distance and yet capture the overwhelming rush of hormones without being prosaic, nor overly poetic. Naturalism and hyperbole are both extremes you want to eschew as you sneak up on the topic. Sometimes the hunt takes years. Fortunately songs can afford to wait. It is utterly unlike the challenges of capturing that moment in front of the lens with actors standing in and having to direct them to the perfect moment on film.
If your song writing fraternity consists of Arts faculty graduates, the task gets even more self-conscious in an attempt to stamp out lines that betray your base instincts to the Freudian critic, while presenting the right kind of archetypes for the Jungian to find. Then you have to go and find the objective correlative - or so I've been told - that fits the mood and nuance perfectly and portray that as a kind of transference of meaning.
Yeah right.
At least, those were the kinds of obstacles we had to negotiate in order to write the somewhat abstract kinds of songs we used to write where by nobody understood what the hell it was about in the first listen. And maybe that was good way back when.
There are days you wonder if we're actually seeing the end of civilisation. Maybe it already has ended. There's certainly not much civilised about the Trump Administration and the on-going LNP Coalition Government in Australia is totally of the end times. I never thought things would get this bad. Some things are beyond the imagination.
Unlike Genesis who thought the Apocalypse might play out in 9/8, we had the theory it would play out in a dumb 4/4. I think we were right to that extent if EDM and Hip Hop and Top 40 is anything to go by. Music doesn't get more sophisticated, it gets less sophisticated in order to appeal to ever more people and chances are that ever-more population is less literate than the previous generation because that's essentially how dumbing down of society goes, and really, how else do you explain the Trump Administration or the LNP Coalition Government in Australia without the concept of an extended period of dumbing down? Let's face it, were not waltzing to our dooms, we're marching.
We live in terrible times, really. May as well enjoy what you can while you can.
And In The End, The Grief You Give, Is Equal To The Grief You Get
This one closes out the trilogy of love-gone-wrong songs.
We finally get to acceptance in the stages of grieving.
I was going to write a bit about grief and trauma and the need to heal and all that but you can probably get that elsewhere on the internet from people who are much better qualified. All I've got for you is a lousy song. You know how it is - it's hard to continually live up to our best intentions and that's why relationships fail.
Look, I'm sorry I couldn't really give you something meaningful to do with this song, apart from the fact that it's fiction. The dude in the song isn't me and these aren't my experiences, so there's that.
I tell you what gives me grief these days is not some old relationship breaking down or my friends having bust ups and divorces. It's actually how fucked our politicians have been at addressing climate change a.k.a Global Warming. I keep flip-flopping between disbelief that our leaders are so inept and lacking in spine and vision, and anger where I think they should all be lined up against a wall and shot, for all their crimes against humanity. We can't seem to negotiate anything with these politicians while our country burns with historically bad bush fires.
The land is burning.
Just how the hell are we to accept our politicians and their so-called 'leadership'?
This is the second song in the trilogy of bad breakups. Of course, after the anger and denial comes the negotiation. God, where does one start? I used to think my breakup was terrible but really, it had nothing on the drama that befell some of my friends.
Quite coincidentally, I have three friends by the name of Darren, and all three have had divorces. One of the divorces was protracted and was a result of years of arguing and bickering. Another happened after years of trying to have a child and having failed, it destroyed the meaning of the two being together. The hurt was too much and so was the backbiting and belittling that followed - truest expressions of sincere resentments were exchanged, like gunfire. The third Darren broke up recently and as far as I can tell they split because they stopped even talking to one another in ay meaningful way.
And with each one there was this cloud of unhappy recrimination that hung over them and their ex like a personal rain cloud. I helped one of them move out of his house and vividly recall the rigmarole of getting the van and loading it up and driving it to the storage place for safekeeping while he looked for a place to move in. And the ex came around to make sure he didn't run off with the furniture she wanted to keep and the conversation was civil but devoid of compassion or empathy. They're the things you remember and think "yeah maybe I'll write a song about that."
Life can be underwhelming at best of times times but the mistakes we make on the back of our relationships can truly suck. Like I said, I can write about those bits such better than about love.
This is part 1 in a trilogy of love-gone-wrong songs. As noted previously, I'm not great on love songs. It takes a special talent to write love songs and sing them with a straight face and mean it. You have to be like Paul McCartney or something but try as I might, I don't really have the earnest-ness nor the un-ironic belief in love. They make a stage show out the Beatles' music and it's titled 'LOVE'. The Beatles wrote exhaustively about the condition of love and even told us that the love we take is equal to the love we make, and by golly I'm not even sure what that bit of rhetoric means in real life.
It's very strange when something moves you deeply and yet you don't relate to it. I've been listening to the 50th anniversary re-mix of 'Abbey Road' and I tell you, it's a very different world we live in today, and it's a different kind of cultural landscape we inhabit. A lot has happened since then to re-contextualise all those fab songs. It actually is really hard to "get back home" as Paul sings in 'Golden Slumbers'. And yet one basks in the glory of the testament to love that is 'Abbey Road'. It's great, even though I'm now convinced Paul McCartney might be insane based on the psychotic emotional detachment of 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer'.
I tend towards Frank Zappa who wrote broken hearts are for assholes ("yes yes!"), and I feel far more equipped to exhaustively survey that emotional terrain than others simply because I am wired the way I am. I am also sensitive to the manner in which people talk about love but go in hard for self-serving platitudes or downright selfish acts. There's nothing like a break up to demonstrate how awful human beings can be, and for some reason I have an eye for it. The various divorces and breakups that happened to the people around me have fed plenty of grist in to this mill. We are all capable of being such assholes when things go south - and in the end the grief you get is equal to the grief you give.
In the five stages of grief there's Denial and Anger as the early stages of responding to bad news.
This is the song that covers those bits. The overriding thesis will of course forever be "broken hearts are for assholes"
I know Jimi Hendrix said may you never hear surf music again but if you play guitar long enough, you poke your head into the rich world of surf guitar. That's just the way it goes. You run out of things to do in rock, and you go to the blues, go to jazz, go to Latin, or go flamenco, or even go all African. Some, go to the mystical lands of surf guitar.
There are ins and outs to the surf tone and when you do get into it, there is a treasure trove of very cool guitar moves to be found in the surf lexicon. Of course, you kind of have to put away your Distortion pedals and learn to play clean and listen to the decay in the reverb. It's a very rewarding area if you're a guitar player.
So way back when we were kids, we went into doing a surf-tinged number without really understanding the rich history or the various schools of thought or the tonal considerations. We just wrote what we thought was a pastiche. This song isn't really a surf guitar track, it's just a collage of surf-y ideas and a shark movie thrown in. Maybe we had too much Jimi Hendrix running through our minds to do it properly and respectfully, and we were into irony because that's what a liberal arts education gives you. A taste for more irony than is proper in polite, conservative, company.
Just another song about longing. We wrote a lot of these back then. We longed for the whole world, in a way.
I'd like to pretend this is a personal kind of song but it's not. It's more of an in-joke about things that go on in a band and you accuse other members of the band for wanting to stray from the tried and true rock music you're working towards. It's a sham, really. My bandmate wasn't wanting to go play country music. He just really liked it, and I was the tone police saying "no."
So the longing is probably more about wanting to express yourself in the way you see fit. Sometimes being in a band is tough.
I wish I could write a straight up love song, but it's never really been my forte. I don't know why that is, given how many bloody love songs I've listened to along the way. I really can't do a straight love song, I can only do a love-gone-wrong kind of song. It's probably because I just don't believe in the big, all consuming love any more and haven't done so for many years. I hold to Frank Zappa's adage, broken hearts are for assholes, and I can easily admit I'm as big an asshole as any that way.
Still, from time to time you permit yourself into thinking you have love licked - and really, you don't - but you think you do, and you write something that captures a feeling. You try to catch that butterfly and stick it in the jar of self analysis, and really end up killing the feeling like you do most things you catch and stick in jars.
I once liked this girl. I was ripe for that moment. As these things go, she wanted something else in life that was not me. So all I was left with was the fleeting moment of hope. And for once I managed to write parts of it down. I had it in my drawer for years and then accidentally threw it out when I did a big clean. I knuckled down and tried to remember the words and I couldn't. All I had was the faint recollection of a vague feeling I had years and years ago.
Hence the song here isn't really the song I wrote. It's more like a delicate facsimile of that song. You fall in love with people but it doesn't work out. That's one of the most common things in the world. And yet it feels very different each and every time.
Way back when, in the olden days of the 1980s when they struck the deal to return Hong Kong to China, my friends and I got interested in the historic weird problem of Hong Kong. So we started to write a song about Hong Kong without really understanding it. It's weird because so much of the city rests on the historic injustice of the Opium Wars and if you've ever read the history books about that, you're left wondering about the naked aggression of capitalism and colonialism as practised in the 19th century. The song itself sort of went nowhere because for one thing it was hard to play live and for another thing Hong Kong seemed a world away form the suburbs of Sydney.
Years went by and I got to have a first hand look at Hong Kong in 1996. I was there on contract for 5 weeks at the end of which I was made job offer to go permanent, but because the handover was looming, they didn't want to give me the kind of juicy ex-pat deals. So I declined to stay on.
Though, the other thing that worried me was the presence of the PRC (read, mainland communist China) police officers and the utter gap in perception to do with what Hong Kong had become. The were there to reclaim the place as if all of its glory and wealth naturally belonged to China. It's not true - it was a sad little fishing village until the British came along. What Hong Kong had turned into was the magic fruit of capitalism and colonialism as practised since the 19th Century into the late 20th. Rightly or wrongly, the British who were 'leaving' could lay claim to Hong Kong as an achievement. None of it would have happened without the British. Which, of course was not a popular view in Hong Kong 1996.
Thus in 1996, I was meeting a lot of local people and telling them there was going to be a terrible upheaval and their way of life would lead to conflict with the expectations of their new PRC overlords. It might not happen that year or the next, but it will happen. The answer I got was, "as long as we're all making money, nothing will change. It will be business as usual."
And so it remained for many years after the handover. It was as if they really were Freewheeling down History.
As I watch the news today about the ongoing riots in Hong Kong, I have to say I'm feeling pretty vindicated. Leave things long enough, the reductio ad absurdum reveals itself; the contradictions inherent in the compromises will erupt as a force. The Hong Kong people of 1996 were way too optimistic about what it meant for Hong Kong to "go back to China". Frankly I thought it was deluded sentimentalism. You don't really get to go home in History. There's something historically necessary about the youth of Hong Kong rebelling against the prevailing rule of the PRC proxies. I get it - it's real as it gets. It's like something straight out of the lyrics of 'Won't get Fooled Again' or 'Street Fighting Man'. It's no accident it's going on and maybe there are inevitable things in history.
Not that it helps them any for me to point this out.
As for the song itself, it harkens back to that moment in 1996 when amazing things seemed a lot more possible than they turned out to be.
