Sic Semper Tyrannis

The Beauty of Midnight Oil's "Blue Sky Mine"

One of the great side benefits of my current exercise program is that I get to listen to A LOT of music on my ipod throughout the week. On your average morning I get to drift in and out of conscious attention to whatever is entering my ears. One song that I have on my playlists has really struck me, lyrically-speaking. You know how you can hear a song twenty or two hundred times without really listening to the words? (Maybe that only happens to me.) Well, the depth of Midnight Oil’s “Blue Sky Mine” has recently registered for the first time. Here are the lyrics:

Hey, hey hey hey
There’ll be food on the table tonight
Hey, hey, hey hey
There’ll be pay in your pocket tonight

My gut is wrenched out it is crunched up and broken
A life that is led is no more than a token
Who’ll strike the flint upon the stone and tell me why
If I yell out at night there’s a reply of bruised silence
The screen is no comfort I can’t speak my sentence
They blew the lights at heaven’s gate and I don’t know why

But if I work all day at the blue sky mine
(there’ll be food on the table tonight)
Still I walk up and down on the blue sky mine
(there’ll be pay in your pocket tonight)

The candy store paupers lie to the share holders
They’re crossing their fingers they pay the truth makers
The balance sheet is breaking up the sky
So I’m caught at the junction still waiting for medicine
The sweat of my brow keeps on feeding the engine
Hope the crumbs in my pocket can keep me for another night
And if the blue sky mining company wont come to my rescue
If the sugar refining company won’t save me
Who’s gonna save me? Who’s gonna save me? Who’s gonna save me?

And some have sailed from a distant shore
And the company takes what the company wants
And nothings as precious, as a hole in the ground

Who’s gonna save me?
I pray that sense and reason brings us in
Who’s gonna save me?
We’ve got nothing to fear

In the end the rain comes down
Washes clean, the streets of a blue sky town

As we come up on Labor Day in a few weeks, (and as I come up on vacation next week!) this song is quite of the moment. As I’m thinking about all the things this song is saying, the words of old grey Karl Marx are ringing in my head “All workers experience alienation.” First of all, how awesome is it that a song exists that expresses something more than “I love you” or “I don’t love you” or “I want to dance” or “I am dancing at a club?” I can answer that. Totally awesome!

This is a song about a conflict of mostly unseen forces. A guy works for some kind of vaguely environmentally destructive company. Bad. However, this job pays the bills. Good.

But the lines that just kill: “And if the blue sky mining company, won’t come to my rescue/ If the sugar refining company won’t save me, who’s gonna save me? Who’s gonna save me? Who’s gonna save me?” (I recommend you actually listen to this song to get a feel for just how impacting this moment is in the song, introducing a new melody that will stick with you for awhile.)

Which brings us to the second big idea hinted at in this song- salvation as a physical phenomenon. There is a materialism at work here. The sugar refining company is your savior because it puts food on the table and makes survival possible for one more day. Wow! Anybody who wants to hear that message, please raise your hand! No one? Really?

Those of us of a more spiritual bent might point to some of the earlier lines in the song of a wrenched gut and a tortured psyche to show that the provision for physical needs just isn’t enough. This is a voice still in need of saving. And that’s what I personally like about this song. It asks great questions and just leaves them unanswered…

…Until the very end of the song.

In the end the rain comes down and all is made clean. That’s a faith statement. I like those--even if or especially if they are non-specific.

posted by Mike @ 3:04 PM