| Jonathan Coulton – Big Bad World One Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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The protagonist in this song is a wallflower who's anticipation of failure with women is a self-fulfilling prophecy. On minimal evidence he decides to give up and winds up always sleeping alone. Rejection has become a bogeyman he can't face - quite literally he is a quitter, the game of courtship isn't fun, it's filled with trepidation for him (it reminds me of The Smiths lyric of "then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn't ask"). The chorus line "Me: Zero, Big Bad World: One" is a double meaning - on one level it's a keeping score one-nil to the Big Bad World, but he's also saying he is a zero, and the Big Bad World won (homophone!) in that it beat him once again. Succinctly it describes a situation a lot of young men get themselves into - I know this feeling only too well. What he probably needs to do is get a few actual rejections under his belt so he knows that they're not as world-shattering as he imagines, because while he is avoiding the risk of rejection he's ensuring his own failure. It is a big bad world because it frightens him - it's actually the fear he's defeated by. I find this a therapeutic song from that point of view - there has probably been a point in many of the more sensitive males' lives in which they've found themselves in this same vicious cycle, and when you're in it you don't see the absurdity of it, only the tragedy - but listening to the narrator in this song describe his thought process we can see the absurdity and become aware that maybe our own vicious cycle is absurd and how we can correct it. |
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