Concern

I’m digging this entirely too much more than I should. But dammit, it’s only for sale on vinyl (the podcast version having damn intros and outros). I want my iTunes instant gratification.

I remember the songs and videos from INXS’ Kick when I was growing up (this is teenage years for me, so don’t feel too old). I recently bought that album (maybe again, I think I had the cassette — remember when we all bought cassettes!?!?), and I still really love it, maybe more than I did. About half the album is plain awesome, and the other half is just pretty good.

Something I really remember is the line from Need You Tonight:

What you gonna do?
Gonna live my life

And for some reason these lyrics and how they were sung really disturbed me. Around that time in my life I was kind of hitting a real existential crisis: I somehow trapped myself where I couldn’t believe in either eternal life or oblivion — neither option seemed like it could work out, and I was on occasion really disturbed by this. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like I saw the finiteness of my life, that I could visualize that I will experience the rest of my life up until my death. This somehow really frightened me. It’s weird because it wasn’t just death that I feared, but the whole passage of my life until death, which I knew I would see and experience the entirety of.

So anyway, that lyric triggered this for me back then. It doesn’t now, kind of in the same way that Superman 3 frightened the living shit out of me when I was a kid, but now just seems stupid.

I mean, I’m still fucking freaked out about mortality, and death and the universe and all. Just 80’s pop songs don’t evoke it.