Rhetorical questions are more than a manner of speaking, they are an essential element to having us think about issues we might otherwise skip past. Those questions belie our assumptions, and point our minds in directions where the light may be too bright for us to voluntarily look. It's easy for us to assume we know more than we do, and that we have everything figured out, but we need to have people who challenge us if we are going to become the best versions of ourselves. No matter how good an idea you might have, or how true a moral compass, someone else might be able to show the calibrations aren't as accurate as you have always believed.
VK Lynne this month tackles this task, with her latest song asking us who we want to be as people.
She asks us if we want to be the kind of people who take from those who already have nothing, the kind of people who would take a soul from those who feel they have no love, the kind of people who would give a smile that covers up the edges of a sneer.
We are complicated creatures, and our issues of morality are often complicated. One thing is not, though, and that is whether or not we want to be good people. It doesn't take a philosophical treatise to understand everyone should be treated with kindness, lest we find ourselves on the wrong end of that venom. It also doesn't take a genius to see that neither pain nor love are finite supplies, and we do not have to give one to save the other for people we hold more special.
Some of us have one-track minds, and some of us are the whole damn railway. That is who VK is, as she sheds her usual skin on this song for a more synthetic vibe. This is synth-rock with an electronic edge, not in the industrial sense, but more akin to bands like The Birthday Massacre. As the people we present ourselves to be are usually plasticine versions of the truth, the backdrop is a fitting one for this song. VK is usually a blues baroness, but she proves here she can fit in no matter the landscape.
The authenticity in her voice plays off the synthetic music in interesting ways, altering our perception of what the sonic landscape truly is. Humanity can be artificial at times, but not when art is being made and presented. VK shines through with her performance, streaking a mist of pink notes through the gray atmosphere. Are they the refracted rainbows of optimism we see in the sunlight? That's a rhetorical question, I suppose. What is most interesting here is having a blues song presented to us through a mechanism, proving that while artificial intelligence may one day understand the form of the blues, it will never be able to replicate the feeling.
The point of all this is to say that we all have dark sides, and it is tempting to give in to them at times. When it feels like the world is working against us, we might be entitled to take what we can when we have the chance. Still, it is our ability to see this in ourselves, to fight the urges when they rise, that defines whether we can call ourselves good people.
I am a cynic, and this year especially I have found it nearly impossible to think of humanity as being inherently good. While that might sound depressing, I look at it the other way. If we are selfish creatures, and yet we find it in our hearts and minds to push that aside and be kind to one another, it is a sign of the triumph life can be. Good people may not be born, they may be created, we may choose to be them.
Don't you want to be one?
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