Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Alright... before I get going on this post, I'd like to start with a quick anecdote that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of what I'm gong to write this evening. I went into the bakery across the street this morning to buy my bakery for the day. I ended up having to wait a minute or two for someone to be available to take my order, and when someone finally was it was one of the bakers who had come out of the kitchen to lend a hand in serving people. We ended up talking for a minute or two, aside from my ordering, and almost immediately he asked if I were French... If this were an isolated incident I probably would have laughed it off and not have thought about it again, but this is at least the second time somebody thought I was French. On the Air France flight from Newark to Paris the flight attendant thought I was too - he started coming down the isle speaking English to everyone, until he got to me when he proceeded to start speaking to me in French... (to which I responded with a slightly confused, "I'll take the beef tips, merci). So in the end I ended up chatting with the baker about where I was from, where/how I learned my German, etc. But what I still can't wrap my mind around is why people would think I'm French! I'm not wafer thin, I don't wear tight pants, I don't walk around in black sweaters smoking a pipe and spouting existential philosophy (well the philosophy part maybe). But seriously - What part of chubby kid wearing an American T-Shirt, American-cut jeans, Puma tennis shoes, and speaking German screams "French?" Not to bash the baker, actually he's a super nice guy, and I can't say enough good things about the bakery/konditorei. (I've actually gotten a couple ideas for bread/rolls that I could make when I get back).

Now, on to what I've been thinking about for the past few days. I pulled the title for this post from the Daft Punk song "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." The song is an electro-pop song where the band slowly builds up their only verse from individual scattered words to an entire verse - "Work it harder, make it better/ Do it faster, makes us stronger/ More than ever, hour after/ Hour work is never over." It struck me the other day how good of a piece of "pop" art this really is, and how it subtly shows what they feel to be a problem in modern society.

I have no idea who's reading this, but let me make a suggestion - this next part will make a lot more sense if you do this first, and you'll probably have a slightly better appreciation for whats being done if you try this first yourself. Find a copy of the song - \its one of the songs I have playing on the blog "playlist" you can get to it directly by using clicking the button to make it a pop out player. Following the directions to make that work, and then selecting the song from the list (its relatively near the top)... oh yeah, and be sure to hit the stop button on the blog player... just so you don't have two things playing at once. Take the time and listen to Harder, Better, Faster Stronger, a few times and try to decide what it means ---> I promise there's a meaning there, it may be a bit tough to coax it out of the song, and you'll have to think about everything going on in the song to really get it, and then read on. (and I'm going to say before hand too, that this isn't entirely original criticism of the song... In other words, I'm not the first person to say most of this stuff, and I'm not claiming to be... If I knew the first person to flush this out I would give him/her their just due).


If you just read the single verse that I pasted in, what I just said probably doesn't make much sense, but I'll try to explain. The song starts with a filtered melodic beat that acts as the rhythmic engine that moves the song along. After about 50 seconds of looped beat, an electronically filtered voice starts saying words that will make up the completed verse. It woudl read roughly "Work it, make it, do it, makes us harder, better, faster, stronger. More than hour, hour, never ever after work is over." What's interesting here is that, although the voice is filtered and is speaking in relatively broken sentence, the work being done ends. Also the work makes the workers "harder, better, faster, stronger."

Now, as the song goes on, more words are added into the mix in a very mechanical way. As words get added, the beat changes, as does the filtering on the voice. As the voice progresses towards building the verse, and begins singing it over and over it becomes more and more distorted, until it begins to fragment and become dehumanized (for lack of a better word), and in the end only a few of the words are understandable --> most notably "(h)our work is never over."

So, I said this has do to with pointing out a problem in society. At this point the fairly obvious answer is that as we work more and more we go crazier, and crazier. This is definitely a message in the song... but its a partial one, and you've really missed the heart of whats going on if you just leave it at that. Here's where it seperates itself from petty drivel, and puts itself into the realm of legitimate (or semi-legitimate) pop art.

If you follow the progression of the song you start with the work being done enriching the workers - it is something that makes them Harder, better, faster, and stronger. However as the very mechanical way that it builds continues forewards, the work is never over, and the product and the process rather than the worker becomes "harder, better, faster, stronger." Thats the main inversion that this song works on, work defining and enhancing the life of a person, which as the song becomes "industrialized" the speaker is caught up in a whole process that ends up dehumanizing everything, and the work becomes our main goal rather than living our lives. Finally, in the end the only thing left in a splintered, and fragmented existence is the work that's never over.

The question that we then have to ask is whether this is an accuratate picture of what goes on in society, and then, if it is, what should we do about it. Although it may not be true all of the time, and for all people living in the developed world, a lot of times our way of life is based on people doing work that can do this to them. So the question then becomes what should we do, and therein lies the rub.

There's no easy answer to the quesiton. What do we do when our quest for profit becomes damaging to others, when there is a clear looser in our "competition" for market dominance, when we pay monetarily little for our products but the toll in human misery can be great. Obviously starting a Marxist society has been proven to not work... (yes, I realize that may be the understatement of the year), but at the same time if we have an ounce of Christ's compassion we can't turn a blind eye to the suffering of those who have gotten the short end of the capitalistic stick. My hope, really, is that this would become one of the jobs the church takes on in the 21st century, that we would be willing to look at these kinds of problems, not with the eyes of American, or western socio-economic interest, but with the eyes of Christ and in doing so come up with inventive ways to help people where they are doing what they're doing.

That being said, Daft Punk, (So far as I know) are in no way christian, or any other religion for that matter. And I'm not holding them up, on the whole, as being a bastian of great art. I honestly don't know their other stuff well enough to say much of anything about them. And I'm not trying to hold this up as one of the best examples of contemporary art... but this song is one that does do a good job of showing, rather than blatantly telling, and showing us something that we'd rather forget about what it can sometimes cost to live the way that we do, and that is why it is worthwhile to listen to/pay attention to.