Inconvenient Truths
With his song „What’s So Funny ’Bout Peace, Love and Understanding“, Nick Lowe posed simple yet hard-to-answer questions.
The road to truth often runs through simple but uncomfortable questions. They may be plainly worded, yet finding an answer to them is often hard. It requires leaving one’s own comfort zone and confronting the shadow. The English songwriter Nick Lowe posed exactly such questions under the impression of the crumbling hippie movement in the early 1970s. In his song, Lowe asks what is so funny about peace, love and understanding. It is precisely in the plainness of these questions, which get by without intellectual over-analysis, that the strength of this song lies.
My esteemed colleague at Radio München, Michael Sailer, recently voiced something very true in his column once again, namely that he „had the strong suspicion that all of life, the whole universe is a single question – and that the meaning of life, and perhaps of the universe too, is exactly that: to ask the right question, or all possible questions, and not to answer them“.
This insight is certainly not new, but hey, evidently we don’t really learn from the experiences of the wise men and women who lived before us, and so we find ourselves once again in a time in which the supposedly alternativeless answers to the pressing questions of our age are screamed at us on a continuous loop over the same old, sponsored-to-death channels.
Without a breather, without reflection, without course correction.
People who ask questions – critical questions, questions that are obvious, questions that simply have to be asked again and again – are, as the case may be, defamed, cancelled, called stupid, naive and ridiculous, or simply ignored, and so we keep stumbling along the wrong track of history, paved with ideology, delusion, collective madness, and fantasies of violence and fear.
The protagonist of my favourite peace song, too, stumbles down this uncomfortable road through life and asks himself why it has to be this way, and in German it sounds something like this:
Original
„Wenn ich so durch diese böse Welt gehe, nach Licht in der Dunkelheit des Irrsinns suchend,
frage ich mich:
Ist jede Hoffnung verloren? Gibt es nur noch Schmerz und Hass und Elend?
Und jedes Mal, wenn ich mich so fühle,
würde ich eines gerne wissen:
Was ist so komisch an Frieden, Liebe und Verständnis?
Was ist denn so komisch an Frieden, Liebe und Verständnis?
Und wie ich weitergehe durch unruhige Zeiten, bin ich manchmal so niedergeschlagen.
Wo sind denn die Starken, und wem kann man vertrauen?
Und wo ist die Harmonie? Die süße Harmonie.
Denn jedes Mal wenn ich merke, dass sie dahinschwindet, möchte ich einfach nur schreien:
Was ist so komisch an Frieden, Liebe und Verständnis?
Was ist denn so komisch an Frieden, Liebe und Verständnis?“
Übersetzung
„As I walk through this wicked world, searching for light in the darkness of madness,
I ask myself:
Is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hate and misery left?
The English singer-songwriter Nick Lowe wrote this catchy rock song in 1973, as the hippie movement was coming to an end, and Lowe had to realise that everyone was starting to take harder drugs and rediscover drinking. His song was a response to the cynicism of that era, a time of unease in which waking from the hippie dream brought with it a cold detachment.
The provocative rhetorical question of the chorus was, for him, the pivotal point of the song, so the task was to set this plain wisdom to music without spoiling the song with „stupid, clever lines“, as he puts it.
Wow, what an insight.
And this Nick Lowe has yet another quality, for he openly admits that he stole part of the melody from Judee Sill, a gifted songwriter who at that time had released a song called „Jesus was a crossmaker“.
Is that actually cultural appropriation too, when you let yourself be inspired by people who impress you, by art that moves you? Another one of those questions …
What’s more, Lowe’s song only became famous when Elvis Costello recorded it in 1978.
So another appropriation, then, or, to put it positively: the passing on of a torch, of a plain, moving insight, of a brilliant song that deserved to be heard.
And so what do we do now with the questions the song poses? Is hope lost? Is there only pain, hate and misery? Where are the strong ones, and who can you trust? How do we get to harmony, to peace and love?
Of course I have no answers to these questions, only further questions:
- Is peace only the absence of war?
- Am I at peace with myself?
- Can I forgive myself?
- How can I be wild and free and yet live mindfully and considerately?
- Do I perhaps find „peace, love and understanding“ silly too…somewhere deep down inside me?
Questions upon questions …
Oh, now a kind of answer has come to me after all to the question: Can wars create peace?
And it comes from Michael Franti, an American poet and musician, who says the following:
We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can’t bomb it into peace.