A word I first heard on Mark and Lard’s daily afternoon show on Radio 1 (anyone old enough to remember that?) It described one of those songs that gets inside your head that you think ‘you are the only one that gets this’ and you want to sing along to until you realise if you ever see it live or in a club or anywhere else, everyone else is singing along to it too.
I think anthemic songs and tunes symbolise the importance of inspirational art in our lives in whichever form we choose to take that in. Recently I finished listening to Sapiens by Professor Yuvel Noah Harari, this a book that could spawn 1,000 blog posts. The end of the book is especially incredible in its description of happiness and how he ties that into the development of the human race. He rightly points out in the book that we never seem to learn the lessons of the classics or the great artists who have been telling us the answers all along, in relation to the meaningless accumulation of wealth or importance of spending our time in a way which fulfils us instead of eats us.
This is the message that we get from amazing movies like Dallas Buyers Club or Captain Fantastic or even inspirational films like Dunkirk, which I haven’t seen but yet to do so. People have told me how moved they were from this and how inspired they are by it.
So it’s funny, I wrote this blog on the day that I finished work for holiday (I’ll be back by the time you read it) but it was one of those crazy mental days in a crazy mental week of getting ready for holiday which always seems to frustrate, annoy and amaze me. We work so hard to go on holiday, to get ‘finished off’ to ‘clear our desks’ just to return back to another mountain of work. All the time I insist and resolve to not let that happen anymore but it continues to be the case. Today as I worked, it was the same again. Nothing bad happened at all, in fact it was all good, it was just a lot of all good and so I returned home with my head absolutely wasted but yet to finalise my preparations for holiday.
It turns out that I listened to one of my latest and anthemic tunes which is ‘Everything Now’ by Arcade Fire. There is no question that in a very short space of time this has wiggled its way into the box inside my head of life time tunes. Not only because the melody is fantastic, or Arcade Fire are fantastic, or the video is incredible but because the words are so wonderful. So often I think people listen to music and don’t hear the words, but I always try; not to just listen to them but to hear them. Everything now by Arcade Fire speaks to my worldview, it speaks to my principles and it captures my moment right now. It’s not that you need to like it too or it needs to be your inspiration it’s just that I think we all need to find inspiration like this. Something that takes us back to exactly what is it important even after a day when you’ve been grounded down and you can’t see any further than the end of your feet. For one or two of you reading this I hope Arcade Fire falls into your box and for those who it doesn’t then I hope you find something else.
Blog post number: 1373
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