“Light the Fire” by Search the City, Monday, February 6, 2023
“Light the Fire” is a stand-out track on Search the City’s 2013 record Flight. The song begins with a cheap-sounding recording; an acoustic guitar accompanying a group of singers led by Search the City’s frontman gives way to a fast punk beat and gang vocals. The lyrics call out an antagonist, mixing metaphors to describe the listener (the song’s you) and his actions and attitudes. The speaker of the song, though, speaks in terms of “we,” a collective who was victimized by the listener. The listener has been found out for his lies and the speaker is “done with [the listener’s] speeches . . . [and] reasons.”
YOUR SECRETS CAME ALONG AND WE SAW YOU FOR WHAT YOU REALLY ARE. Last night, I got some news that a coworker I had struggled to work with for the year would not be renewing his contract. It had been a year of mind games in the office, yet had tried to present himself in a good light to higher ups. But he couldn’t keep his laziness a secret; he couldn’t keep his racism a secret. He couldn’t keep his allegiance at work. There are times when I am done with people. It doesn’t happen often, but after that point, I am completely divested from any conversation I have with that person. With this co-worker, one afternoon when he wasn’t planning for classes —the norm for this coworker—but rather reading the news and trying to engage my other co-worker and I in a distracting conversation, he just casually asked to himself, “What’s marital rape?” His question came after months of establishing himself as sexist/racist/homo/ trans-phobic machismo bro, belittling the experience of anyone who was not of his persuasion. I was done with him, but I still had the majority of the year to try to tune out the conversation. And he never got better, just worse.
YOUR BIGGEST STORY LEFT NO SCAR. “Light the Fire” is a confusing song. First of all, what does fire represent in the lyrics? To me, it seems that it is either passion or destruction in the context of the lyrics. “Lighting the fire” could mean destroying the bonds that the listener has placed on the speaker or it could mean destroying the lies, burning them up. It could also be interpreted as a passion that had been suppressed by the listener. Under the listener’s lies, the speaker has put aside his or their desires because of the mind control the listener had them under. And when the speaker comes to that realization, he won’t let the listener stifle the passion, which ultimately grows like a fire after the hindrance is gone. Today, I’m thinking about passion as a fire. Last month, I was kind of on hiatus with my blog, reposting so many times because I was too busy to take the blog seriously. I wondered what the blog really meant to me and whether or not I should fight to keep it going. But today I realized that this is the fifth original post that I’ve written for this month—pretty good considering my track record. Of course a lot can change when school starts, but I feel like there’s a season three around the corner in which I hit a stride, hopefully writing content faster. But I need to develop what that season of my writing looks like. It’s probably less well researched posts and more daily-life reactions. We’ll see. Time to light the fire again.
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