Human Too
I spend a lot of time listening to music. Thirty-five-thousand minutes last year according to Spotify. In the morning, while I cook, exercise, shower, study, write, eat, sleep. I am hopelessly, pathetically in love with music and its singular ability to make me feel. Well, duh. I am dedicating an entire semester to music, to transforming those feelings into words. Listening to the same songs over and over and over. All except for one.
The album was so close. Just one song away. In my opinion, that’s pretty damn impressive. But I knew it from my first listen. Ten plays and one skip. But why? I don’t often put much thought into why. I like a song because it feels nice in my ears, it’s great for dancing, it reminds me of a moment. When something is good, you don’t have to think about why it’s good; it just is. But it feels odd to consistently skip one song on my favorite album, especially when objectively (as objective as music can be), it is not a bad song. Slow? Definitely. A bit boring? Maybe. Pitchfork describes it as “stunning.” So what’s the deal? Why can’t I bring myself to press play?
“Human Too” is the outlier of Being Funny. It is melodically stripped down, sleepy, and all together, not that memorable. Sandwiched between the convivial “Wintering” and the monumentous “About You,” I tend to scoff when it begins and forget when it ends. Maybe I just don’t resonate with the style. Historically, my music taste does demonstrate a preference for cool tones over warm, fast tempos over slow. But I feel like it's something more, something deeper.
Maybe it’s the lyrics. There is not a surplus of them, and the majority feature the same word: “human.” That’s really what the song is about, humanity and its universal burdens. It definitely echoes the album’s persistent motif of honesty, which is illuminated through demonstrations of love, loss, family, and reflection. But it differs from the other tracks in composition. The other ten have more words, more instruments, more rhythm, more story. This pariah stands off to the side. Its posture is timid, its dress is modest, and its bones peak through its skin. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. Human.
“Don’t you know that I’m a human too? / You know that you’re a human too? / And darlin’, that’s what humans do, so tell me you’re a human”
At first glance it just seems repetitive. But why requires a deeper look. Why so persistent? Sometimes we just need a reminder. An incessant, unrelenting reminder. Because sometimes we forget. We mess up, we tear ourselves apart, we feel guilt, shame, and forgiveness feels impossible. Sometimes we forget that others are just like us. Even people we idolize, people we will never meet or touch, voices we will only hear through a recording. They’re human too. Stripped of excess, this is our reminder.
So maybe I’m the problem. I prefer music that is shiny and less honest. Music that allows me to escape ubiquitous existential anxieties. “Human Too” is not a vacation. It is a confrontation so candid it makes me uncomfortable. Aesthetically, it just doesn’t tickle my brain like the rest of the record. But it does what any meaningful song should do. It makes me think. It makes me feel. And somewhere deep down, somewhere subconscious, I felt its influence from that first listen.