7/26: Territories

Let's welcome in the Olympic Games with a song about border strife.

The whole wide world, an endless universe
Yet we keep looking through the eyeglass in reverse
Don't feed the people, but we feed the machines
Can't really feel what international means
In different circles, we keep holding our ground
In different circles, we keep spinning round and round and round.

Today’s the day—the opening of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris! While I’ve never been much for football or basketball, global sports competitions just bring out the super-fan in me. Just crank Slayer and I’m rarin’ to go:

In honor of the Games, I went with “Territories,” one of the better songs off Power Windows.

I find “Territories” to be one of Rush’s most evergreen tunes; the line, Don’t feed the people, but we feed the machines, hits just as hard as it did in 1985.

This is a song about our innate need to define groups and self-select into them, which leads to exploitation, colonialism, war-torn borders, conquistadors, and strife. There’s a particularly poignant bit of poetry about tourists and colonists traveling to all these marvelous places, yet only wanting to bring with them whatever they missed most about their home:

We see so many tribes overrun and undermined
While their invaders dream of lands they left behind
Better people, better food, and better beer
Why move around the world when Eden was so near?

Lyrically, “Territories” isn’t a particularly optimistic song, yet there’s something about the chord progression, as it crawls up the scales, that instinctively makes me feel hopeful anyway. I think it’s because the song fuses a lot of different sounds and styles: the gong, the darbuka, the strings, the synth… all united by that driving, train-like drum line. Musically it just feels like the song must be about plurality, diversity, discovery—all the good parts of globalism. Yet the lyrics are much darker.

Maybe that’s the point Rush is trying to make: That is, mid-1980’s platitudes about globalism might have sounded great on the surface, but if you listened closer to them, you’d hear the dark undercurrent hiding underneath.