Lenina Crowe

For a song about unrequited love in a dystopian novel ("A Brave New World"), it's oddly upbeat and catchy.

Lenina Crowe is an attractive young woman and model citizen of the "World State"--the quasi-authoritarian government that maintains control of the population by flooding them with distractions like drugs, sex, and cheap gadgetry. She secretly grows tired of the loveless sex without attachment and longs for the sort of emotional passion that an exclusive relationship built on love ("all the world's dancing together, but she wants to be alone"). But when she meets a man, Bernard Marx, who shows her the world outside their protective bubble and tries to convince her to develop a sense of individuality by embracing her emotions ("she's only a girl, she's got feelings you know/you could show her some emotion, you could show her where to go") and becoming "antisocial" like him, she freaks out, rejecting him and racing back to the comforts of conformity.

But once Lenina is awoken to this desire within in her, she is aware Bernard has "stolen" her blissful ignorance from her ("oh, what have you done to her? / You robbed her"). She falls in love with a man from outside of the World State, but when his values do not permit him to accept her freely-offered sex, she discovers the sort of negative emotions ("your Brave New World carved out the lines between her eyes, where Lenina cries") that lead her to act irrationally--the very things the World State attempts to deny its citizens in order to maintain peace and order.

I can't tell if the song is admonishing Bernard to forge the personal relationship with Lenina, or John to set aside his moral purity and self-flagellation and let himself love her--the title drop of "Brave New World" comes from John's insistence in quoting Shakespeare's "The Tempest", and his beliefs represent a new world compared to what Lenina grew up in. But both men seem like funny choices--since Bernard ends up exiled, and John kills himself.