Russell Bennett ([email protected])
Fri, 15 Jan 1999 15:07:33 -0500
U2 - MANY VOICES
Listen to "Playboy Mansion" carefully and you will discover that there is
more than one voice singing the song. There is the voice that speaks the
irony of living and life today, the one that proposes that "perfume is
obsession and talk shows, confession". But that voice still wants to get
through the gates of the playboy mansion. Then there is the voice that
"never bought a lottery ticket" or "parked in anyone's space". But he
still waits for the big win at the lottery terminals. This voice is
convinced that once through, there will be no time for sorrow or shame.
This cannot be the same ironic voice that listed the fallacies of modern
society with such irony and insight. It is na�ve. It thinks that once the
lottery has been one, everything will be just fine. It is a song of
conscious ironies in its first half, hypocrisy in its middle (the 'turning
point' where despite a vow not to gamble, gambling is seen as the only way
into the mansion), and unconscious irony in the last section.
The pathos in the song comes from the fact that this last voice is
expressing a dream - the dream of peace and wealth and relaxation; the
dream of freedom from the sorrows and hardships of life (the dream of the
afterlife in this life). We hear a voice that wants to believe (and to
some degree has succeeded in believing) that there can be salvation in, and
from, this life. It is a warped life ("and a fucked up world it is too" -
Dead Man). It is a life where all its ironies seem to go unnoticed. The
last irony goes unnoticed by the singing voice (but not, of course, by
Bono, songwriter. That voice tells us he has "got to believe" in order to
keep on going, though he "can't say why". Our feeling goes out to this
voice not because what he says is true, but because it is untrue - it is an
impossible dream; and we feel for someone who needs a dream to live. We
feel for them more, and see the tragedy in it when that dream is not true -
cannot be true. The pathos comes from our sympathy for his situation, a
situation we all share to some degree or other, because we inhabit the same
world of ironies as the 'singers' do. We dream of a world without sorrow,
pain, or shame - but the world seems so warped that the only way to do it
seems to be to get rich and live the life of luxury.
At the end there is a hint of knowledge by another voice, a much more
cynical voice, seeing things with far too much comprehension of the ugly
truth. It knows that the way to get rich only has to do with who you know
- with class, with the old boy's network. That plaintive voice refrains
again about the peace of the playboy mansion, but as they sing about than
great monument to riches, free sexuality, success and fame, the background
vocals hint at another truth. Instead of saying "playboy" mansion, they
sing "play-dough" mansion, implying that it is not something real, but
constructed, fake - a toy to be build and crushed. The mansion is not
real. It has been built by a child. It is a thing of fantasy. It is only
a dream, and hollow at that.
MonkeyBoy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Fri Jan 15 1999 - 12:11:22 PST