uberreiniger | Digital nightmares in the sensual world

Yesterday I scored a used copy of Kate Bush's 1989 album The Sensual World. I got it mostly for the lead single "Love and Anger" which is just one of "those" songs that gets inside you and stays with you through the years. But it also contains a very interesting song called "Deeper Understanding." This song tells the story of a lonely, emotionally isolated woman who uses a computer program as an escape from her dreary life. She gets so obsessed with it that she stops eating, sleeping, or getting up to go to the bathroom until finally her family breaks into her home and saves her. But even afterward she's changed, habitually talking like she's in her virtual world when trying to interact with real people.

Keep in mind this song was released in 1989, well before most people had any idea what an internet even was. And now we live in a world where what she's singing about actually happens and people wind up dead or in mental health programs because of it. It's hardly the first time someone has written a science fiction tale only to have it come true just a few years later, and it won't be the last. But the way she sings about it just gives it this creepy anachronistic property that makes it the more disturbing. When you read a Heinlein or Aasimov story from the 50's you can tell its from the 50's even though it's full of stuff we see every day now. "Deeper Understanding" just feels a little too contemporary to have been written so many years ago.

Oh, and for extra brutal irony it's this really upbeat, optimistic-sounding song. If you weren't paying attention to the lyrics you'd think it was some happy story about two lovers who have found a "deeper understanding," as the chorus says. No, it is about a woman surrendering herself to a Lotus Eater Machine.

I suppose I could go see if someone's posted the song on Youtube or something and share it but I'd really just rather not think about it anymore right now.