I liked LidoTRK's comment from 9 years ago, pointing out the sincerely utopian asprirations of history's most egregious villains, Hitler, et al., and that they all belieived they were actually doing good. It's such an absurdly simple and obvious fact that seems to rarely be acknowledged. That was an interesting, complimentary angle on this song that had never quite occurred to me before
They (user LidoTRK) mentioned the lyrics seemed stilted or hollow-sounding, until they stumbled upon the cold war-era track's jarring dystopian music video. The way to best appreciate Davies' commentary here is to abandon the literal interpretation in favor of an ironic reading.
I've come to think of "Better Days" as devastating (and still extremely relevant) indictment of the two-party system in the United States, and the duplicitous character of its campaign politics in particular. This album was recorded circa the 1984 US Presidential election; the outro features speech snippets from Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale, and their respective running mates, assembled into sound collage that seems to bitterly mock the over-the-top, almost gloating manner in which politicians compete with one another to seduce the impressionable masses.
In the context of the political sound collage fadeout, the satirical nature of Rick Davies' lyrics is pretty indisputable. It's not the first time Davies turned his attention to this sort of heady subject matter; perhaps Reagan, Mondale, et al. are the"men of lust, greed and glory" who are summoned up in "Crime of the Century" ten years prior.
I liked LidoTRK's comment from 9 years ago, pointing out the sincerely utopian asprirations of history's most egregious villains, Hitler, et al., and that they all belieived they were actually doing good. It's such an absurdly simple and obvious fact that seems to rarely be acknowledged. That was an interesting, complimentary angle on this song that had never quite occurred to me before
They (user LidoTRK) mentioned the lyrics seemed stilted or hollow-sounding, until they stumbled upon the cold war-era track's jarring dystopian music video. The way to best appreciate Davies' commentary here is to abandon the literal interpretation in favor of an ironic reading.
I've come to think of "Better Days" as devastating (and still extremely relevant) indictment of the two-party system in the United States, and the duplicitous character of its campaign politics in particular. This album was recorded circa the 1984 US Presidential election; the outro features speech snippets from Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale, and their respective running mates, assembled into sound collage that seems to bitterly mock the over-the-top, almost gloating manner in which politicians compete with one another to seduce the impressionable masses.
In the context of the political sound collage fadeout, the satirical nature of Rick Davies' lyrics is pretty indisputable. It's not the first time Davies turned his attention to this sort of heady subject matter; perhaps Reagan, Mondale, et al. are the"men of lust, greed and glory" who are summoned up in "Crime of the Century" ten years prior.