thebibliosphere:

thebibliosphere:

My dad and I have a fun little thing we do each year, where the first song that comes on our playlist on the last day of the year will be our “anthem” for the coming year. So I set my playlist to random when it hit midnight and kept working while I waited for the song to load, except because of the way this particular album downloaded it came up with Queen’s Greatest Hits and it’s just a 2 hour mp3 of Queens Greatest Hits with no breaks in between and I am simultaneously psyched and terrified.

Help.

Speaking of Queen, as I sit here listening to it, the line “keep coming up with love but it’s so slashed and torn” from Under Pressure is such a visceral image. It sounds so edgy and gridmark when removed from the context of the whole song, and I do remember thinking it was such a helpless, and hopeless statement the first time I heard it as a teenager. 

But in more recent years I’ve come to appreciate it not because it’s bleak and we’re going through bleak times, but because it’s defiant. 

This is a song advocating for love as an act of defiance in a harsh, uncaring world that would have you believe that love is futile, that caring for others is a weakness, and there’s no point to fighting because we’ve already lost. Our love is battered and torn. Love’s not supposed to be like that, right?

Except…we still keep coming back, battered and torn, we keep coming back. That has to count for something.

And yes, our world is terrifying right now, and it’d be so much easier to sit on the fence and look the other way..but looking away solves nothing. In fact it makes it worse…so in the end we come back to love. Not because it’s righteous or because love will always triumph, but because we dare to hope for better. We will make the world better. We’re under pressure, and it feels like we’re going to crack under the strain of caring, of all the things we have to fight to keep the darkness at bay. 

But still we love. Battered and torn. We love.

Anyway…happy new year.