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Life Will See You Now


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Driving back to the office after a client meeting last Thursday afternoon, listening to KCBS (public radio from Bellevue College) in the car – and I heard this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lql7USZG96E.

Mostly, I think it’s a great piece of topical pop & I wanted to make sure nobody here missed it.  But we need to make it sufficiently debatable so the mods don’t punt this to “Social Hall”—so let’s have a bit of substance to get us there.

To borrow from a review by Spin Magazine—

We meet him [singer/songwriter Jens Lekman] right away on “To Know Your Mission,” Life Will See You Now’s first song. It’s 1997, and a Mormon missionary in Gothenburg encounters a teenager “who takes his headphones off and introduces himself as Jens.” The Mormon’s a stand-in for existential certainty, and Jens considers his own. He’s not sure his songs are any good; maybe he’ll be a psychiatrist, or a social worker, like his dad. “I just want to listen to people’s stories,” he realizes. The tempo speeds way up and then slows way down, like time flowing around an epiphany, which arrives in the present tense: “I’m serving you.” It’s the first time Lekman has so clearly defined the organizing ethics always hinted at in his music: that people are funny, listening to them breeds empathy, empathy breeds love, and love is the highest service to the world.  

A Mormon as a stand-in for existential certainty.  Anyone care to defend the sense in Lekman’s lyrics?  (Hint: It sure ain’t gonna be mfbukowski.)  Please, just to keep us out of Social Hall.  
;0)

--Erik

PS.  Apologies in advance to rongo who feels “pop culture” (in which Lekman is playing a part) distracts kids and contributes to attrition from the LDS Church.  But then, maybe he’s right.  Or maybe his objection has already been answered.  Let readers decide. 

____________________________________________

But in a world of mouths
I want to be an ear
If there's a purpose to all this
Then that's why God put me here

--Jens Lekman, 2017

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