Anthem
This is an anthem for the girl that got away
This is an anthem for the world of yesterday
This is an anthem for the rebel of my youth
This is an anthem for the risk of loving you…
Yesterday my accountant told me her son got dumped by his girlfriend. He’d moved to New York in search of success, they did the long distance NY/LA thing, but she found someone else. He took it really hard. His mother had to fly to NYC for a week to comfort him, to keep him together, to help him get through.
I told her I took breakups hard too. You share so much, more than with any other person, then they’re gone. Some say you can remain friends, but that’s usually the dumper speaking, not the dumpee. As for breakups being mutual, that’s hogwash, someone always wants it more, that person is the instigator, their partner accedes to the termination, but secretly would have hung in there, maybe forever.
But you can’t have a real relationship unless you give it your all. Makes me wonder if those couples who remain friends are truly able to connect, reveal and be honest. You can go to dinner with a friend, but not with a lover, you can’t stop thinking about lying in bed, touching, hearing them breathe while they sleep. You ask them how their parents are, their siblings, but you don’t want to know too much about their life today, because you’re not a part of it.
I don’t think of old loves every minute of the day. You can only be in pain that deep for a limited time. You end up bouncing back, or committing suicide. But then you hear a song on the radio and you’re jetted back to yesterday, your body aches for the connection.
I was listening to Sirius late last night, pushing the button up the dial. And once you get past 30, I’m hazy, no one knows all the satellite radio channels. Suddenly the genre switched from rock to…dance?
Rather than working my way back down the dial, risking hearing "Free Bird" or another rock tune-out, I decided to listen, to expand my horizons.
And the synths are popping, at a very quick speed, befitting the name of the station, BPM. I envisioned Ibiza, stoned dancers popping up and down involuntarily. I could see myself getting caught in a trance, I understood it.
Then the track broke down and became a weird amalgamation of Spandau Ballet, Elton John and all the sensitivity of the seventies. The key dropped and someone with a pristine voice started singing the above lyrics. It was like the action froze at a rave, and a mindless bopper turned to the camera and started riffing on what he was truly feeling, what he was trying to escape by getting high and dancing like this.
Love is a risk. If you’re not willing to get your heart broken, you’d better not play.
Then there are the heartbreakers, possessing some advantage the rest of us don’t, beauty or bucks, who flit from boy to boy or girl to girl, like a celebrity.
Then there are the self-conscious, who have to gin up their gumption to even speak with a member of the opposite sex.
If you want insight into the truth of this world, you’d be better off studying the imperfect, whose lives don’t follow a constant upward trajectory, their seemingly insignificant victories may seem minor to you, but they’re the tent poles of their lives.
You look backward and see your past littered with lovers. You wonder, should you have moved on? What would life be like if they’d stayed? How come you never truly get over anyone, how come the older you get the more the attrition takes a toll, preventing you from playing, leaving you in the corner licking your wounds.
Research tells me Filo & Peri’s "Anthem" was a hit. In a world most of us don’t inhabit. But to listeners, it was everything. A hit is not something anointed by the media, but something that touches your heart, that you need to hear again and again.
You can listen to the entire original seven plus minute track here:
But if you’re a casual listener, I’d advise dialing up the abridged take, the official videoclip:
You can watch the images if you’d like, I didn’t. But WHATEVER you do, hang in there until 1:40 when the song changes dramatically.
This is an anthem for the girl that got away
You can research her on the Internet, even though it might be difficult to find her, because she’s changed her last name, to match that of her husband.
This is an anthem for the world of yesterday
You can make contact, but that would be a mistake. What would you say? You might be melancholy, you might be looking for something, but chances are they are not. You want to marinate in your memories, you’d rather dream about what could be than be confronted with what isn’t.
This is an anthem for the rebel of my youth
I didn’t think I’d get old, I didn’t think I’d barely recognize the person staring back at me in the mirror. I was rebelling against so much, now the school administration doesn’t care about me, the same people don’t even run the academy.
This is an anthem for the risk of loving you…
We’re all riskers in the life parade today. We’ve been set free by the institutions, not only the educational system, but the media. To what degree can we stray from our preconceptions, test limits and new ideas in the hope that we can not only be stimulated, but end up somewhere better? Living in the past can be fun, but it’s not satisfying on a regular basis. Radio might want you to listen to the same old hits forever, throwing 20 plus minutes of commercials at you all the while. Or you can go on a journey, via satellite, your iPod, there are so many avenues. You’ll hit more dead ends than open skyways, but you don’t love every person along the way, you’re looking for someone special, with a strange brew of characteristics that are just enough to hold you, hopefully forever.
