God-ish as a Hymn from The Heart
The lyrics start by laying down the plane the text stands on by inscribing it into the limits of love and temporality. A break-up is the end of a romantic relationship, this means that death is not, necessarily, the end of love. I will put on the mask of an impartial interpreter. The last line of the first stanza links “dance” and “-ish”. Through this, it sets up the ludic, game, non-serious, etc., attitude of a young person who discovers ‘cool’ existential memes on reddit.
The first stanza shows that the word God (kami) here means just ‘cool, wow, so deep’, without religious connotations. This is also mentioned by Pinochiop in the song’s description on YouTube. Thus, one narrative line of this song is irony towards ‘the edgy existential quotes aspiring teen’ who falls in love with another teen — presumably — who is erudite in such quotes. The other narrative line is about the tension between Eros and Logos, between the intoxicating power of passion and the rational dictates of reason. The third narrative line is about the uncomfortableness of reason, about the unavoidable isolation produced by thinking.
§1. First narrative: the irony towards edginess. It is easy to spot in lyrics such as “Your mind, it’s tiny, it’s tiny/Lonely because of your genius. How cool…how cool…” or “That quote, that opinion, that review”. Since this narrative plane does not offer rich interpretative resources, I will jump to the next dimension.
§2. Second narrative: love throwing the lover outside the comfort zone of reason. The key lines for this thread are “I want you, want you, it’s like my IQ’s going down/That’s evil-hearted, ultimately. That’s evil-hearted”, “My God”/I hate you, hate you, who’s the pest now?”, “That charisma, that gag, that taste/That’s God-ish, unfair/How “-ish”, “-ish”, “-ish”. I’m so jealous!”. Passion, affect, thrusts the lover towards the beloved without any possibility to remain sited at the desk of neutrally derived judgements. The timbre of this affect or pulsation stems from admiration as adoration of the beloved’s “gag [and] […] taste”. Through the ‘That-ish’, by comparison, the lover views themselves not nearly as 'cool' as the beloved. This leads to jealousy. Between eros (passion) and logos (reason), and between adoration and jealousy, an ambivalence reigns supreme: “That’s disgusting, that’s disgusting/I’m becoming a fan on the contrary”.
§3. Third narrative: 'reason', an eye elevating one above comfortable conformism and illusion, and thus, as a curse, but also as a rationalization of authority. The elevating aspect of logos is the following: “Is the nature of meta-thinking malice? Artifice that looks down on others/It’s hard to survive in idleness. A flickering light consumed by authority.” Simultaneously with expanded horizons comes increased threat visibility. Authority when seized upon in its essence, as that force immobilizing free movement, one sees one’s idleness for the first time.
Until here, the lyrics depict a rationalistic picture retelling Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” — dare to think for yourself. The next line turns this on its head: “Pretending to be God by denying God. Fools who change suddenly on the throne” — indeed, authority is still scorned, but God’s death is not imprinted as rationality’s sign. Instead, it bursts as a masked compulsion to secure authority through secularization. If God is, for Enlightenment thinkers, authority’s face, then God’s death brings liberation. However, no liberation took place since authority jumped to its new home, that of political secular discourse. Man as the creator of tool, as the wielder of reason, converts the surrounding world into his playground — i.e., the Anthropocene. This is not an argument for religion, it is merely a reminder for authenticity as the self-awareness that authority as domination is a disease. Order helps a society thrive however this depends on the kind of order applied. The lyrics name this “a prayer of self-discipline” yet it is an ill-suited wording since discipline is authority, as clearly described in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.
The lyrics hum the ‘mantra’: “Gott ist tot” (translation: “God is dead”). Nietzsche’s said, in Joyous Science, that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?””. Through this, Nietzsche emphasized that in humanity’s new era, God — a hallucination born out of fear — has no place. Nevertheless, the lyrics do not affirm as such since, as Pinochiop stated in the song’s description, it has no religious message. Reason’s curse is that of bringing to light not only one’s imprisonment, but also unrestful painful truths. The song’s conclusion, after closing up the circle by repeating that love is “Breakup-ish” and life is “Death-ish”, is this: “I understood everything and suffered/I just wanted to dance without knowing life”.
Thus, the lover is not animated mainly by reason, but by feelings. Obviously, reason has its place, after all, meta-thinking enables one to escape authority. Yet, reason cannot alone heal our hearts. This is so, since forgetting one’s finitude allows one to enjoy one’s life, affects play a higher role than rationality in establishing what matters for us. Repressing emotions to achieve ‘perfect rational behaviour’ is a key to perpetuate that which one avoids — replacing repression with healthier mechanisms has been the job of psychology since Freud. However, the passion’s content is partially created by the mixture of emotion with reason. When one is feeling in a manner, X, one can usually relate that feeling with specific thoughts. This is the reason why Cognitive Behaviour Therapy exists. One’s mindset plays an important role just as our hearts do.
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