Give Me The Answer

St. Vincent “Fear the Future”

I have always felt like an optimistic person. I may be cynical about a lot of aspects of humanity, but I genuinely feel like humans are always fighting towards a better world. Not a perfect world, but slightly better. Somehow, I still feel this way, though it’s been very difficult recently. There’s a lot of emotional wear and tear on keeping up with the outside world – opening Twitter or Facebook now feels like a direct portal to everyone’s undiluted rage, confusion, and anguish. If you can’t turn off your empathy, it’s completely draining. If this is your primary window on the world, it seems like an unending nightmare. Everything in the world is shut out except for the the horror and the screaming and the fighting. It makes you fear the future.

“Fear the Future” is a bit of an outlier on St. Vincent’s Masseduction, though it’s clearly important enough to Annie Clark that the song title is also the name of her forthcoming tour. A lot of the other songs have a sleek, playful quality to them and directly address sexuality, but “Fear the Future” is more about intimacy. There’s panic and drama in the sound of this track, but Clark’s voice seems cool and centered. She’s singing about love in the midst of terror and violence, of shrinking your world down to “me and you” to keep focused on what matters and to remind yourself there’s more to life than chaos and catastrophe. When the chorus ends on her proclaiming “I fear the future” before the bottom of the music suddenly dropping out, I don’t hear actual fear in her voice. It sounds a lot more like she’s bravely staring the future down to me.

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