| The Knife – You Make Me Like Charity Lyrics | 1 year ago |
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The key to this song is the time period when it was written/released: 2003. Younger folks might not remember how 9/11 and its vengeful aftermath turned the world upside-down from what the Western World had believed (for a whole decade!) was going to be more-or-less permanent peace after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the de-fusing of the war-to-end-all-wars, the Cold War/WW3. So nobody in 2003 would really think of "war" in figurative terms; the horrors of the Afghan & Iraq Wars were all-too-real and on the news 24/7. Nobody back then would throw around the word "war" lightly, just like how today nobody would throw around the word "fascism" lightly. Otherwise you run the risk of being criticized for diminishing all those real horrors. The "war" being spoken of here is therefore LITERAL. Once you figure out that grounding point, the song is fairly obvious. This is either (because good songs are always a bit ambiguous): 1) A song about a particular type of privilege common in the Western World: advantaged people exeriencing ennui (see: first verse), that some try to alleviate by engaging via 3rd-world tourism, and sometimes disaster-tourism-posing-as-humanitarian-aid (see: 2nd verse, and first-half of the 3rd verse). Of performative do-gooding ("I took a cab there to hold her") and self-gratifying "empathy" ("I took a plane there to feel what she felt") that people with means do instead of actually using their means to do real good. Then the judgement/knife-twist about these people: "you make me like charity... instead of paying enough taxes". Effective altruism as a fig leaf that allows rich people to rationalize-for the selfish things that they want is not at all a new thing. 2) Alternatively, the "knife twist" can instead be interpreted as a criticism of government and their involvement in the war, and the feeling that taxpayer money is are being misused. However, I think this is only valid from the perspective of the people being depicted, as the phrasing "instead of paying ENOUGH taxes" and the rest of song makes pretty clear that The Knife is ridiculing these people. |
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