{"id":9052,"date":"2018-02-19T02:34:46","date_gmt":"2018-02-19T06:34:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/?p=9052"},"modified":"2018-02-19T02:34:46","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T06:34:46","slug":"thought-contagion-a-call-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/2018\/02\/19\/thought-contagion-a-call-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Thought Contagion: A Call-Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly nine months after their last single dropped, the British alt-rock band Muse finally released new content, a single called Thought Contagion. The lyrics revolve around the spread of ideas, holding that if an idea gains enough traction, then there\u2019s no way to stop it from invading everyone\u2019s lives, even if they don\u2019t believe it–and even if it\u2019s a bad idea.<\/span><\/p>\n

Muse is no stranger to heavy-handed lyrics. Their last three studio albums–<\/span>The Resistance<\/span><\/span>, <\/span>The 2nd Law<\/span><\/span>, and <\/span>Drones<\/span><\/span>–relied heavily on current events for their lyrical themes, and their second-to-last single Dig Down included the line: \u201c<\/span>When God decides to look the other way\/and a clown takes the throne\u2026.\u201d It\u2019s nothing if not overt. <\/span><\/p>\n

At first, I was really bogged down by the heavy-handedness of Thought Contagion. Three verses of sentence-fragmented metaphors describing a dismal, apocalyptic scenario are broken by the choruses of, \u201cYou\u2019ve been bitten by a true believer…by someone who\u2019s hungrier than you…by someone\u2019s false beliefs.\u201d Not a lot of subtlety there, and it\u2019s wrapped up in a lot of pessimism, such as, \u201cBrace for the final solution.\u201d Yikes.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s suffocating to focus on these lyrics. We all know what it\u2019s like to have idea after idea crammed into our heads. It\u2019s impossible to get away from hearing the ideology of people who just <\/span>know<\/span><\/i> they\u2019re right. Idea after idea after idea, and they\u2019re in our classrooms and homes and offices, in our social media and news and ads, in our movies and books and art. No one could spend a single day without at least inadvertently encountering the ideas of someone who believes they\u2019re right with every fiber of their being. These ideas could be about religion, politics, science, philosophy, sex, art–if someone can have a belief in something for which they\u2019d be willing to die, you can bet they\u2019ll be yelling it loudly from all platforms of social media in an attempt to get it across to even one person.<\/span><\/p>\n

While there\u2019s nothing more annoying than listening to \u201csomeone\u2019s false beliefs,\u201d some of those false believers are getting through to other people. In a country where polarization is a driving force of media, anyone who was neutral on anything at some point has been \u201cbitten\u201d by one side or the other, shrinking the middle ground and forcing both sides of any issue imaginable to resort to extremes, in both beliefs and in the actions for which they call they call.<\/span><\/p>\n

Muse can do better stylistically than the lyrics of Thought Contagion, but maybe this time they\u2019re not going for poetic–they\u2019re going for a call-out. They\u2019re back on the dystopian track, taking our current situation and stretching it to its logical extreme: if we stop thinking for ourselves and let the momentous force of zealous ideologies take us over, then \u201cit\u2019s too late for a revolution.\u201d Thought Contagion reminds us to take a breath, step back from the inundation of media (as much as we can), and think things through before blindly getting caught up in the storm of shouting matches before the shouting matches turn to nuclear wars. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly nine months after their last single dropped, the British alt-rock band Muse finally released new content, a single called Thought Contagion. The lyrics revolve around the spread of ideas, holding that if an idea gains enough traction, then there\u2019s no way to stop it from invading everyone\u2019s lives, even if they don\u2019t believe it–and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[397,1102,192,837],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9052"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9052"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9054,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9052\/revisions\/9054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}