The world's current situation imposes us
conditions since the end of 2019. Most of the time, we were more or less
confined, depending on the job and the belief in vaccination and other measures
for this pandemic still grassing.
Apparently contrasting with all these, around
twenty years ago, Hoodoo Gurus launched the song "A 1000 miles away"
in 1991. Then, it was a time of some "optimism," near two years after
the fall of the Berlin Wall, and some illusion that Science would solve any
problem. That song fitted to those prosperous days, on the shallow, but in truth
showed a person in a kind of dystopic condition living in nowhere at the same
time that is working a lot flying from place to place.
At the beginning of the song, it is
possible to see that the meaning of "flying" is metaphorical, when the
main character is not yet traveling and the back-in-vocal sing "now you
are flying" as he is in a daydreaming or so. In the end, there is another signal
that the singer is disconnected from the conversation, metaphorically singing
that he is 1000 miles away while someone is trying to say something.
There is also a game with space and time.
In the beginning, there is a mix of work and space ahead to travel: "I got so much work in front of me, it stretches out far as the eye can see."
About time, in the end, he
says that "yesterday is a thousand miles away." So there is a double
sense: yesterday, he was in a distance of 1000 miles away in space and time.
The dream of the personage is
to stop and not travel, in contrary of the most part of people. He dreams of
someday sitting on the fence. This scenario remembers the song of Eagles, "Desperado,"
in an opposite way. In that song, the singer is counseling Desperado to step down
the fence in a symbolic way too.
For 2022, going to the third
year of pandemic, being 1000 miles away is not a nightmare but a dream for many,
in literal or metaphoric meaning. Nowadays, we could say that the symbolic
meaning happens many times by the internet.
Now, airports are restricted,
and the dimensions of the lyrics changed. But we are still in an actual dystopic
situation. All dystopic conditions shown by Arts can symbolize what we are
living with this pandemic.
