Michael Guratza - Jerusalem (And Did Those Feet....)|Acoustic Soundtracks

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Lyrics : William Blake
Music : Edward Elgar
Appears on : Monty Pythons Flying Circus, S01E04
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.....Among those “Dark Satanic Mills”.
I distinctly remember the first time I heard the first line of this poem. I was about 14/15 years old and I was trying to get my hands on every single source of Monty Python material I could - which was quite a task in a pre-dsl internet era. I was obsessed with their songs, and this one struck me so hard I had to search for it online. Turned out it was a poem by the romantic poet William Blake, and its musical version is considered the “second” national anthem of England. I had no idea.
I was dumbstruck by the power of the words. This is a poem of overlaying themes, with literally every single line having been subjected of thorough analysis for years in academic/scholarly circles, but the part that immediately stood out for me was the line mentioning those “Dark Satanic Mills”. It sounds kind of cheesy and cryptic at the same time. Trying to do some research, I came to understand that this poem was written amidst the height of the process of industrialization of the means of production, a.k.a the “Industrial Revolution”. The thing is, that the industrial revolution, coincided with the rise of the artistic movement of Romanticism (a.k.a the best art movement ever). Maybe “coincided” is the wrong word here. Romanticism was mainly born out of society’s disillusionment with the environmental destruction that Industrialism brought with it (among other things). So for almost twenty years I was kind of “torn” between taking sides. I was never a person that felt really close to nature, and I always found people who snub technological advances regressive. On the other hand, I love this poem, and romanticism. What am I doing? Am I singing the words of a 19th century conservative hippy? (P.S. Of course not.)
I mean what’s so bad about the industrial revolution? It was the beginning of an era when people would have access to commodities never before available to the common public. The beginning of making our lives more convenient. Making our lives easy. The passageway to modernity; the modern era. Things would become cheap and easily available.
And thus begs the question, 200 hundred years later:
"How easy is too easy? How cheap is too cheap?"
Apparently, there’s no such thing as “too easy”, or “too cheap” for us humans. Is our era Modern? Post modern? Giga-Modern? I’d call it “Porn-modern”. More and more, western society is resembling a travesty of a pornographic film in all aspects, in full view, a real free for all. Human beings have become a bunch of dopamine junkies, slaves to the opioid rush that a social media notification brings to our brain. We’re like the zombie hordes from the film “Dawn Of The Dead”, but instead of going to the super market, when we join the ranks of the undead, we’ll be instinctively trying to unlock our phones with our fingerprints - to no avail. Cheap and easy, cheap and easy. Marshall guitar amps made in China - Cheap and easy. Brand name cars made from scrap metal - Cheap and easy. Why watch a film when there’s an endless supply of pointless 30 second vines and tik toks by shit-for-brains like Jake Paul? Why have intimacy with a real person when there’s an ocean of pornography? Why bother with human relations at all, when there’s an unlimited supply of strangers that feed your dopamine receptors with the push of a button? People are difficult and human relations take way too much effort anyway. Our society is a burger joint, and we get stuffed with fast food all day long, enjoying the fucking dopamine rush.
The aetherial dopamine rush of intangible lies.
I’ll finish off this rambling (brought to you by the internet), which I wrote on my computer, (brought to me by the industrial revolution) with some words from Leonard Cohen (brought to us by… God?), found in the song “Steer Your Way”.
“They whisper still, the ancient stones
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make men holy
Let us die to make things cheap”
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Damn, those mills were pretty fucking satanic after all.
Links:
•poemanalysis.c... (Analysis of themes and structure)
• • Charlotte Church - Jer... (Amazing Version of the song)
•artist.com/art...
(Romanticism Vs Industrial revolution)
•www.huffpost.c... (Dopamine addiction)
• • Leonard Cohen - Steer ... (Leonard Cohen, speaking the truth as always)