(My Name Is) Human - Comparison

Dear Blog,

I've been thinking of writing up some formal thoughts on two music videos. With regards to my commentary on both of these, there is a good deal more going on in the songs and videos than I will mention. They are art, and I could never hope to fully detail their contents. I don't claim to have anything like a definitive understanding of the artists' intent with their work. I believe all listeners share enough experience to be worth some discussion. With regards to both artists, go check out all their stuff. To quote High Fidelity, "It's really fucking good."

Human, by Dodie:

My Name is Human, by Highly Suspect:

The lyrics to Human:

I wanna pick you up and scoop you out
I want the secrets your secrets haven't found

Paint me in trust
I'll be your best friend
Call me the one
This night just can't end
Oh

Will you share your soul with me?
Unzip your skin and let me have a see

Paint me in trust
I'll be your best friend
Call me the one
This night just can't end
Oh

Oh, I'm so human
We're just human
Lean for me, and I'll fall back
You'll fit so nicely, you'll keep me intact

Paint me in trust
I'll be your best friend
Call me the one
This night just can't end
Oh

I want to give you your grin
So tell me you can't bear a room that I'm not in

Paint me in trust
I'll be your best friend
Call me the one
This night just can't end
Oh

Oh, I'm so human
We're just human

The lyrics to My Name is Human:

Okay

I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling myself
Fuck everyone else
Gotta remember that nobody is better than anyone else, here
(Do you need some time to think it over?)
Look what they do to you
Look what they do to me
Must be joking if you think that either one is free, here

Get up off your knees, girl
Stand face to face with your God
And find out what you are
(Hello, my name is human)
Hello, my name is human
And I came down from the stars
(Hello, my name is human)

I'm ready for love and I'm ready for war
But I'm ready for more
I know that nobody's ever been this fucking ready before, hey
(Do you need some time to think it over?)
So figure it out or don't figure it out
I figured it out
The bigger the river (the bigger the river)
The bigger the drought (the bigger the drought)

Get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your God
And find out what you are
(Hello, my name is human)
Hello, my name is human
And I came down from the stars
(Hello, my name is human)

Fire world, I love you
Fire world

I'm up off my knees, girl
I'm face to face with myself
And I know who I am
(Hello, my name is human)
I stole the power from the sun
I'm more than just a man
(No longer disillusioned)

(I'm not asking questions)
('Cause questions have answers)
(And I don't want answers)
I came down from the stars (so I'll take my chances)
(And what are the chances)
(That I could advance)
(On my own circumstances)
(Said "what are the chances?")
Hello, my name is human (and what are the chances?)
(I don't want your answers)
(I'm not asking questions)
(So you keep your answers)
And I know who I am (so you keep your answers)
(I'm not asking questions)
(I'm taking my chances)

I find some notable contrasts between the two songs and videos. Obviously the musical styles are drastically different with Highly Suspect's use of distorted, tube amplified guitars and pointed, aggressive lyrics against Dodie's gentle harmonies and indie acoustic, whispered verse, love song vibrations. Also it jumped out at me that Dodie uses very minimalist make-up, and in some of her other videos, I suspect none at all. Compare this to Johnny Stevens' body tattoos, gaudy apparel, piercings, time consuming hair and general air of 'LOOK AT ME'. I find this to be an interesting gender role reversal. The overall color tones of the sets, costuming, camera angles and panning, all play into these starkly different approaches of organic and neutral against highly artificial and visually aggressive. I find each complements the associated music extremely well.

Then there are some similarities in the way in which the songs change meaning in the context of the corresponding videos. To listen to Dodie's Human without the visual, or just to read the words, there is just a love song. Humans are feeling animals, it is human to fall in love and be super curious about another human. But then in the video, the object of Dodie's affection is a construction. It plays into the question of where human connection is real or manufactured. It reminds me of such explorations as the world of Data in Star Trek, The Next Generation, the question of the rights of people with sufficient brain damage to have capacity below lab rats, and the extent to which we can compare a text based friendship abroad with an in-person friendship (especially as automated bots are fooling more people for longer periods all the time).

I am no longer in regular contact with the person who shared that video with me, but I was able to take an old recording of their voice, sing a harmony over it and sync the tracks. Listening, I was reminded of this video. Manufactured human connection. We never harmonized that way. It wasn't real. But it sounded real. It would be hard to detect the forgery, you would have to know a thing or two about analyzing recorded sound. Just as automated conversation programs are getting harder to catch, as their caches of natural sounding responses grow and their algorithms dive deeper into what components of a passage of text make it 'flow' with another.

Similarly, My Name is Human, to just hear it or read the lyrics, is just a pointed rock song about the nature of human existence. 'Get up off your knees, stand face to face with your God, find out who you are...I came down from the stars.' Humans are natural things, derived of stardust. We grapple with our nature. In the face of something bigger, we fall to our knees. Here again, the video brings in robotics, sets a contrast of human from the stars and manufactured human. Can a robot stand face to face with its God? Again, Data did face his creator. Robots are being trained to identify those who made them. We're a few major breakthroughs away from anything worrisome, but the questions and potential are there.

I find it remarkable that two songs that deal so heavily in the concept of humanity, but such different aspects of it, both chose in their visual component to set a contrast with humanoid robots. Neither song on its face deals with the boundary cases of humanity in comparison with hyper-human approximations like Data or advanced AI conversation engines. Neither in their verses ask the question of how something made always seems to fail to measure up to something born.

I'm face to face with myself. I know what I am. I ate poison to destroy death running around my body. I have stripped away every part of myself that I did not want or found unwholesome and rebuilt myself to my imagination's specifications. I've stared into the abyss of myself. This aspect of me strides triumphantly while listening to Highly Suspect loudly in my headphones.

I want to give you your grin. I know of myself that I can't be whole without another. I don't currently have a life partner and I feel like a two-legged stool sort of tilted up against a wall of antidepressants and working towards a better future for myself...or something like that. I can never feel the presence of God except through the conduit of deep human connection. That part of myself listens to Dodie and lays quietly.

I am Human.

-Ian Hogan, PhD

Purification by Fire and Stories with No Point

Dear Blog,

Another sweeping set of life changes has intervened. There is no chance at an exhaustive reckoning, but some that come to mind quickly: I decided to separate from my wife last month. The short story is that she didn't make me happy. The long story isn't much longer. I also lost my job this month. I quit drinking in March. I'll be quitting my chorus in June. I've lost two good friends in the last year. I'm putting in time with those who are left. Most of my life is being stripped away right now. Nearly everything I have is potential. What I have that is manifest is a highly functioning body, an educated mind, a good set of coping strategies, and a growing relationship with my daughter.

I find there I have no one in particular to tell all my stories to. I have this tremendous urge to pour out the ideas in my head. How things work, what I saw here or there and then. The lack of an ear, an interested or at least fairly captive human to dump all these ideas upon, I find strikingly difficult to manage. There's also all the parts of being completely alone that normal humans have to deal with, but you all know about that quite well I'm sure.

So I'm going to put some stories on here. Apparently, no one will read them. Just as I logged in today I noticed there is a view counter on this blog and my last entry got 3 views. Several previous that I had sent links to friends and family only got 11 views. Quantities that show me I am somehow violently ignored. Regardless, I already feel some of the comfort I have always derived from talking on end, so I will persist.

Three years ago I set a goal in life to bike through every county in Ohio. Since then it became clear that it wouldn't take anything like my entire life (I will likely pass the half-way mark this summer), and so I've added that I would like to bike through every state in the US, and if that target is met, I'll set to biking on each continent. The rules aren't strict and no one is keeping score but myself. I don't count it if I merely bike extremely closely to a county (once a bike path ended, I later learned, precisely on the county line, and so I biked back and around a corner to catch the next county over). I also won't do anything silly like drive to each county with my bike and do a tight loop at a gas station. I have counted counties that I merely clipped a corner of on a long trip, but I generally try to find at least one town or other marker within the county to make a good deal of it. I like to have something that I remember of the county, of the ride.

As of now, the states I have biked in include (in order that I got to them) New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.

The Ohio Counties I have biked through, in approximate order are Cuyahoga, Lorain, Erie, Athens, Greene, Clark, Warren, Butler, Hocking, Portage, Summit, Trumbull, Ashtabula, Stark, Geauga, Lake, Franklin, Pickaway, Fairfield, Licking, Knox, Richland, Morrow, Delaware, Mahoning, Fayette, Montgomery, Clinton, Madison, Miami, Ross, Pike, Scioto, Adams, Highland, Brown, Clermont, and Hamilton. Tomorrow I intend to bike to Champaign, and in a few weeks, another seven from central to western Ohio. I made this info-graphic earlier this year.

I learned to ride a bike in New Jersey. I remember that I only ever fell off my bike in the early days once, and that I didn't hit my head. I didn't get hurt at all. I fell into some leaves and grass, and I was only 6 or 7, so it wasn't very far to fall.

In fact, given that I have biked approximately 10,000 kilometers in adulthood and perhaps 1000 in youth, it's remarkable that I've only fallen about a dozen times, and among them my injuries included only two or three scraped knees, one scraped shoulder, and a strained neck. My last helmet was damaged enough to replace merely on the basis of how many times I had dropped it on the garage floor. I even crashed my last bike into a parked van and its handle-bar column snapped in half. The car had not a mark, and my neck was a little sore.

I love covering new ground. Seeing what a place has that I've never been to before. I love the sight of hot yellow sun on acres of trees. The smell of green, yellow, purple, and pink of the outside barely tamed by man. The rhythm of the peddling and typically quiet backdrop of insects and birds, some crunch of gravel and the punctuation of a passing car. It's a calming, familiar sound. I love the roads less traveled and the crumbling infrastructure of things you can't even tell what they were once. Knowing that some old local could say, 'that was a such and such, my friend's dad worked there. It got bought out and then closed...' The hot sun beats down, its rays breaking down the bonds, the rain breaking down the bonds, the roots breaking it down, and you can feel it slowly crumbling as you roll by and wonder. I love rolling through some minute town so far from anything and wondering, 'what in the world do you DO here?' I love stopping to rest and drink water under a gnarled old tree on the side of a farm that was planted to break the wind on that field a hundred and fifty years ago. The hard rides calm my body with that runner's high. I wrote a poem about it last year or the one before.

Thirsty by a cornfield on SR 42
between nothin' much and maybe some good ribs
yearning for what's lost, what cannot be gained?

(Was me supposed to fill in Simple Ranger)

The black eyed susans and asters
fields of sunflowers at the quarter acre
a creek yonder, once poisoned, now?

near, some city, some widgets are made.

(My shoulder all jangled there)

Fields of purple-pink flowers that grow like weeds,
forests and hills, potholes, penitentiaries,
blown out husks of human endeavor on backroads no longer frequently traveled.

(And who could play! Delirious dreams)

In future posts, I may share my memories from each county and state. Looking at the lists, I'm sure I remember something from every single one. Or I'll forget all about it and not post for another year. Feel free to ask, all three of you who'll read this. That's 39 or so stories right now. We'll need some coffee. 

Your Obedient, 

Ian Hogan, PhD