The song was catchy, and that was
all. Then I watched the music video, and it seemed weird, but somehow meaningful.
I did some research and all interpretations were intriguing. I couldn't get the
song and video out of my head. In their popular song, “Pompeii,” the English
alternative rock band Bastille
had gripped my attention by a song that resonates with human experience.
The music video begins with
Bastille frontman Dan Smith on top of a building overlooking the city of Los
Angeles with glazed eyes. He walks
through streets littered by trash and grime. He encounters people who seem
soulless. Their eyes are black pits, which seems to point to lives empty of vitality
and meaning, pitifully wasting away. Smith’s character begins running. A panic hits him to try to
escape the city. He makes it to the desert, only to discover his own eyes being
blackened as he looks in the rearview mirror. The sickness caught him too. He
ascends into the beautiful mountains only to be overcome with the same soul-emptiness
signified by his now fully black eyes.
In interviews, Dan Smith says the
inspiration for “Pompeii” is imagining a conversation between two people being
buried by the lava in the historic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Merely
listening to the song might allow someone to only picture the historic Pompeii,
but in the music video, Smith clearly brings the significance of a city’s
destruction to present day.
Smith says he likes the historic
stories because they resonate. “When I’m writing, I want the songs to be
good—and memorable—but also to have a level of depth to them as well, and
thought that goes into them.” Smith cares about his lyrics. Starting
with a classic story, he gives depth of meaning and metaphors for what we
experience in our world, such as the encounter with hedonism as told in “Icarus.”
Bastille isn’t a shallow pop band.
The music is popular worldwide, but the meaning and thought behind the songs is
profound, often ironically contrary to the crowds dancing to them. Dan Smith is
a thinker, and many of his other songs and music videos also reveal a gloomy
reality.
Every song on Bastille’s breakout
album Bad Blood acknowledges human
depravity. From “Flaws,” “Icarus” and “Pompeii” to “Bad Blood,” “Things We Lost
in the Fire” and “Weight of Living,” the band feels the brokenness and pain of
the world in which we live. The somber realism is revealed openly by even the
song titles themselves, but deceptively concealed in catchy rhythms and tasteful
melodies.
Last October, Bastille released
another song displaying the painfulness of reality. Though it is a mashup of
two 90s dance songs, “Of the Night” by Bastille is shockingly somber. The music video for “Of the
Night” is maximally depressing. Tracking a crime scene investigator through
numerous scenes of homicide and suicide, the artistic work portrays a message
of gloom in reality and interprets “night” both literally and figuratively.
Dan Smith has a deep grasp that this
world is dark, painful, bleak.
“Of the Night” ends with the
protagonist sitting in his own blood, a gruesome picture of another victim and
leaving the viewer with a message of hopelessness. You can’t escape the rhythm
of this world, of the night.
Smith’s outlook on life resonates
with me. I want to think we’re getting better at being humans—that is what the
Enlightenment taught us—but I keep seeing destruction around me. We are so
deeply selfish as human beings, and we ultimately find the problems we face in
our world to be, yes, partly our doing. We cannot escape our own selves.
Oh where do we begin? The rubble or our sins?
Smith’s question surprised me when
I heard his mention of sin. The term isn’t popular today. Most people think of
picketers holding signs against homosexuality. Or if you’ve grown up in the
church, you could think of how you’re not supposed to drink, smoke or chew or
hang out with those who do. For me getting a degree in theology, the study of sin
(hamartiology) is one of the richest topics. Whether you call it inherited dysfunction
or original sin or collective insanity or maya
or dukkha, something reigns in
our being that isn’t pleasant, loving or generous.
Smith sees problems and destruction
in his world. Our modern-day “Pompeii” is plagued by being “caught up and lost
in all our vices.” If you descend and
look at the streets, they’re littered by trash and inhabited by people wasting
their lives unawares. We’re self-destructive.
Dan Smith offers two starting
points to work against the problems: clean up the rubble or attack our sins.
Anyone thinking deeply about his question would see that he is pointing to sin
as the root cause. The rubble comes from our sin, and we cannot clean up the
trash and help the soullessness if we are corrupted.
The significance of the black eyes in
media normally points to demon-possession, a sort of loss of humanity as the
soul is overtaken by an evil force. I interpret Smith to be showing how
inescapable human selfishness is. Even if we do try to fix our sin as a root
cause for the destructive eruption, we’ll find we cannot escape ourselves.
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
In “Pompeii,” Bastille sings a
request for optimism, a question asking for any hope in the midst of such
gloomy circumstances. My initial response is to fight for optimism and not
despair. The world’s not that bad, Smith! But the correct answer to the song’s
central question might be, “don’t.”
Don’t be an optimist about this.
We are completely selfish leading
to self-destruction. Sin is pervasive, corrosive and ruinous.
Pompeii doesn’t stand a chance,
because we’re all part of the problem. Even if we think we’ll escape the lava
and burning ash in the city of vice, we will still lose our souls to the
internal pandemic. Our human race is individually and collectively wretched.
But God,
who is rich in mercy,
made us alive in Christ even when we were
still dead in our transgressions.
The great transition in one of my
favorite chapters of the Bible, Ephesians 2, comes with the astonishing
involvement of God in a bleak situation. The author Paul has acknowledged that
we were all dead in our trespasses and sins, completely without hope. But God. Like the sun breaking through the clouds after a long thunderstorm or the first buds of green after a dreary winter, the two simple words show the only way I can “be an optimist” about this world.
I don’t mean to overly spiritualize
a pop music video or smack condemnation from the Bible, but for me, this truly
is the only source of hope. I’m only 25 years old, but like Dan Smith, I profoundly
connect with stories illustrating the death and destruction we find on the
earth. The best answers I’ve found have been in the Bible:
The heart is deceitful above all things and
desperately sick. Who can understand it?
There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.
Only in Christianity have I found
an adequate explanation for the pain we experience in life and an infinitely marvelous solution—that
God Almighty, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, would send His only
Son out of His infinite love for us, and save
us.
How do you save Bastille’s Pompeii
while “great clouds roll over the hills bringing darkness from above”? How do
we save ourselves from our own devices? How do we escape a society where we are
“caught up and lost in all of our vices”? Look for intervention from a source
outside ourselves. The transcendent God who made us became one of us that he
might save us—save us from spiritual death, from pervasive sin, from eternal
punishment. Wow. God is good.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only
Son,
that whoever believes in Him should not
perish but have eternal life.
For God did not send His Son into the world
to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved
through Him.
