“Charlie Darwin” by The Low Anthem – Trying to Find Meaning Despite the Artists

“Charlie Darwin” is a seductive, ethereal, and extremely vexing song on the recent album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin by The Low Anthem. (Consider this trio to be a “folk” group, but that label doesn’t tell you much.) The titles alone drew me in. But I have spent the better part of a week struggling over the words and music to just this single song, avoiding any exegesis of the rest of the album for fear of a neurological overload.

I have found the song irresistible, but I still don’t understand it, though I have some ideas about what it might mean.

Upon first hearing, I was struck by the astounding vocal, the song is a lyrical hymn. Yet, I initially saw little reason to think that it was in any meaningful way really about Charles Darwin. Charlie Darwin? (Perhaps, I should just have stuck to that position.)

My usual stance is that a work of art stands alone, separate from the life of its creator, or, even the creator’s thoughts on what his or her work might actually mean. I don’t ignore this information, I just prefer to form my opinions before being contaminated by others’ viewpoints. But, finding the song’s lyrics to be ambiguous, I felt in need of some help.

Bob Boilen, host of National Public Radio’s All Songs Considered, has asserted that the album “has underpinnings of Charles Darwin's history, all set in a folky and sometimes hymnal quality." [Link here.] Okay, though I’m not quite sure what “underpinnings of Charles Darwin’s history” means, Boilen is pointing me toward that Charles Darwin after all. (By the way, Boilen considers “Charlie Darwin” one of the three best songs of 2009, so far.)

I paid a visit to the official The Low Anthem web site. It’s pretty obvious that evolution is on the agenda – there are these legged Jesus fish appearing in places. (The lyrics cited in this posting are from the group's web page.)

Then I made the mistake of reading some of the comments made by the two core members of The Low Anthem, composer and singer Ben Knox Miller and bassist Jeff Prystowsky.

Miller has said, "Darwin's ideas are the liberator of the individual from different false structures of meaning; obsolete ethical codes . . . . He challenges us to look at where our codes have come from. Structures of meaning have been and continue to evolve much the same as species.”
[Jonathan Bastian, The Many Layers of The Low Anthem, Aspen Daily News Online, August 15, 2008.]

Uh oh, I seem to have fallen into the deep end of a pool full of what? Social Darwinism? Be careful how you extend Darwinian evolution into the social and moral sphere.

Also troubling is Prystowsky’s comment, “What does love mean if survival of the fittest is actually the way that everything came to be?” Adding, “. . . it’s such a cutting theory to think that maybe our feelings of love and connection to our fellow man are somehow in our own interest, that they’re selfish . . . . That has a significant impact on the art that you make and the way you live your life.” [Carolyn Gregoire, The Low Anthem Inspired by Dylan & Darwin, BlackBook, June 30, 2009.]

Not sure I want to contemplate what that means for the way he lives his life.

I really hoped we’d put some distance between Darwinian evolution and Social Darwinism which has used the idea of the survival of the fittest to justify a mélange of unappealing doctrines and movements such as laissez-faire capitalism, imperialism, militarism, and eugenics. Not an honorable track record.

Given where my exploration had taken me, I was tempted to relegate the song to a dark recess of my iPod. Yet, I continued to play it and mull over the lyrics, while trying to put some distance between what the artists have said and any meaning I could construct for the song.

I’ve ultimately concluded that “Charlie Darwin” (the song) is not, to me at least, a Social Darwinist tract. If pressed, I’d say the essence of the song is this – adherents of the old order (read creationists) call on a god (yes, lower case as Miller writes it) to save them as they sink into an endless sea, even as Darwin launches a new vessel on a new journey. Anti-religion, perhaps.

The opening stanza signals a journey to a new age (“Set sails I feel the winds a’stirring/Toward the bright horizon set the way”) and toward a new social compact (Cast your wreckless [sic] dreams upon our Mayflower”).

I wrestled with the syntax of the first part of the second stanza – “And who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin/Fighting for a system built to fail . . . .” It only makes sense to me if Darwin’s words are being ignored by those “fighting for a system built to fail” – that is, creationism. The creationists’ vessels are sinking. The song speaks in the first person at the end of the second stanza when the speaker seems to suddenly realize that “As far as I can see there is no land . . . .” Is this speaker despairing because Darwin’s theory has somehow caused the creationist vessels to spring leaks with no land in sight? Seems so.

The chorus of “Oh my god, the waters [sic] all around us” is ironic. A lower case god that has left the speaker in an endless ocean even as he appeals to it for help. Darwin’s Mayflower in contrast seems to be set on a journey with a destination.

The third stanza is problematic, beginning “And who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin/The lords of war just profit from decay . . . .” Again, I have to assume that the actors in the second line – “The lords of war” – are not heeding Darwin’s word as they take the spoils of war. But, wait, might these not be the very agents of the Social Darwinism, rooting militarism in natural selection and the survival of the fittest, that The Low Anthem confounds with Darwinian evolution?

And why “Charlie?” Using a nickname like this is usually a disparaging tactic. I don’t get it.

In the end, I threw up my hands in defeat. A BBC reviewer called the song “pretty opaque.” A wonderful description. Yes, maybe it’s just a sophomoric muddle that sounds pretty, though it leaves me a bit uneasy.