Unleashing yet another single into the world from LOVE, “To Be Human” is one of MARINA’s most powerful and incisive musical offerings to date, tackling the often unthinkable in a pop song: questioning the nature of existence and what it’s all supposed to mean (which usually tends to happen with songs possessing the word “human” or just called “Human,” like The Human League’s and Goldfrapp’s).
As per the first half of the record’s insistence, it would seem that the one thing all humans have in common–apart from being terrified of one another–is their innate and intense need to be loved (of course, that doesn’t always mean loving in return, especially during the Age of Narcissism spurred by democratized fame-seeking conduits). This, to be sure, is regardless of ethnicity, geographical location or age–something MARINA makes evident in her barrage of stock footage and “vintage vibes” as established by Lana Del Rey in “Video Games” and “modernized” in the video for “Love” (surprisingly, MARINA did not title one of her own songs this for the record).
With retro and au courant scenes of catastrophes and protests that pair perfectly to lyrics such as, “The pagodas and the palaces/Dressed in gold leaf hide the damages/Spot the geisha as she balances” and “From Kyoto, Hiroshima/Watch the black cloud crawling nearer/There were riots in America/Just when things were getting better,” MARINA gradually fortifies her LOVE + FEAR thesis that the human experience must combine pain with happiness in order for both to be comprehended (even as the twenty-first century is supposed to eradicate such outmoded entities as feeling altogether).
Yet, often against all of our better judgment, we try. For it is everyone’s sole purpose during their brief (yet often endlessly lengthy-seeming) time on earth to find some purpose or definition for themselves (yes, even nihilists). Though we are not all united in what that meaning might be (coughs Trump), we are, at the very least, connected in the aches that come with uncovering what the explanation could entail for us as individuals. And as MARINA re-creates some of the nature backdrop looks of her “Handmade Heaven” video while dressed in paisley (for “peacenik” messages are only accepted when one dons the costume aesthetic of the psychedelic 60s and 70s), we can’t avoid taking her earnestness to heart when she assures, “All the people living in, living in the world today/We’re united by our love, we’re united by our pain.” Or is it even simpler than that, still? That is to say, to quote Madonna before MARINA, “Music makes the people come together/Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel.”
