A Blessing in disguise (Adam & the Course - Agnes Obel)

1 year ago
14

Notes:
Agnes Obel wrote this song after reading the 2011 best seller Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. "It's a book about the mind, and there is a chapter in the book about narrative fallacies, and I thought that was really interesting," Obel said in a Songfacts interview. "How we construct these narratives of our own lives, even though so many things, almost anything that happens, is the result of a lot of things outside of our own control and doesn't have any meaning - it's completely accidental. But our minds want to put meaning into everything and to make sense of them."
The tendency for humans to search for meaning can be both a blessing and a curse, which is a theme Obel explores in this song. Art, science and discovery are all fueled by this curiosity, but so is aggression and insularity. In this song, there is a curse that could be a blessing in disguise.

Adam: The Mirror
A group of criminal androids, including one named Adam, follow a mysterious cloaked android figure through a desert peppered with large oil fires.

Once inside, the cloaked figure details how human residents live inside a walled city run by an organisation known as The Consortium. Those who are convicted of felony crimes have their bodies and organs harvested, used to benefit other citizens. Their brains, the only part of their bodies that are “tainted”, are placed within cheap android shells and expelled into the wasteland beyond the walls.
The cloaked android also reveals their memories are wiped, but introduces them to a human-android hybrid named ‘The Mirror’, who can read traces of who they were before their transformation.

The mirror approaches Adam, and reveals that he was convicted for treason and terrorism within the Takoma Walled City, deducing that he was a political dissident.

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