Pop on Fire

It’s been a while since popular music has turned my spine to custard, well, except for Leona Lewis singing... Anything. Two songs I’ve heard a lot of fairly recently have become, after a few listens, amazing to me.
Human, by The Killers and Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire. Loud.
The loud part is very important.

The former mainly for its lyric “are we human or are we dancer?” and all the questions trailing behind it and, of course, how new wave 80’s it is!

Hunter S. Thompson said years ago that America was raising a generation of dancers, I can only guess what he meant by that, and The Killers have admitted to taking inspiration from his words. Hunter was a writer, famous for his brand of journalism; Gonzo, and his book turned motion picture, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and, of course, his LSD diet. He committed suicide in 2005.

You inevitably ask yourself: aren’t dancers humans? But, think about dancers, they’re focused on only one thing, what they’re doing in the moment, dancing, they’re almost mechanical, almost puppets. Controlled.
Humans are free, supposedly. And we do not have the luxury of focusing only on one thing at a time, doing it perfectly. So maybe what Brandon Flowers is asking is: are we free or are we just puppets on a string? A question with slightly differing meanings but with as much gravity, I think, as Rodney King’s back in 1992, during the Los Angeles riots: can’t we all just get along?
It’s an important question, maybe a rhetorical one; maybe the reason Brandon Flowers doesn’t come to a conclusion by the end of the song is because he can’t.

There are other ways of seeing it of course; it could be the other way around entirely; not all dancing is choreographed. The dancer could be the free one, dancing is joyful and expressionistic after all.
Probably, it’s all of these; nothing’s ever really black and white is it?

This song made me think: maybe dancer is a better way, now, to describe us. And it’s good to think of these things sometimes.

I love Sex on Fire for its voice, simplicity and sexiness. I think it’s just about sex, there’s no pretence of love or forever, no promises and no lies. What grasps me is his voice as he sings “you, your sex is on fire” with an excitement, a fever.
The lyrics are simple and you can read into them as deeply as you want but at the core I think the title says it all about this song: it’s about sex. Good sex. And even though there doesn’t seem to be much romance on the surface if you read the lyrics, there is an under tone of it, you can feel it and hear it in the melody, an under tone of glamour and adventure, there is passion and risk.

And that is why I adore it. These two songs; a curious match.