Complex Numbers

It's Beer, Isn't It?

Another blind quote from "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+] -- again, I don't recognize where this comes from other than that it's a song, and I'm responding without looking it up.

"It's the power that gives you the strength to survive."

Oh! It must be about beer!

Not knowing the source of the quote -- and boy am I going to kick myself if it turns out I recognize the song -- I think it's fun to speculate.

A literal reading would lead one to believe the antecedent to "it" would be food. After all, food is power, and if you don't eat it for a while you won't survive, and it keeps your strength up. Or maybe solar energy, because without it, we'd all weaken and die frozen. Or, I know! Money. Money gives us the strength to survive, and with it you can buy food. Still, I like beer as an answer better.

Knowing pop music, though, it's probably talking about love or faith or some bullshit like that. In which case it's demonstrably untrue, because I've lived without love for a very long time and without faith for a whole lot longer and, well... here I am, chugging along just fine.

Maybe it's not pop music, though. Maybe it's experimental surrealism, in which case "it" could be something like the color orange, or perhaps wombat poop. Or would that be not surrealism but cubism? Okay, that's an obscure joke on several levels, but I'm sticking with it.

I wonder what cubist music would sound like (other than wombat shit)? I mean, anything can be surreal, not just art, but cubism is kind of purely a painting thing. And maybe sculpture; I don't know. Maybe someone will need to invent cubist music. I'm certainly not qualified to do so.

"Knowledge" could work too. After all, it's well-known (however clichéd) that knowledge is power, so that could be the answer to the riddle.

People like to make fun of the song "I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)" (written by Jim Steinman, sung by Meat Loaf) because they apparently can't figure out what "that" is, even though it's right there in the fucking lyrics. Just goes to show, people don't listen to lyrics. They should, though. The good ones (such as anything written by Steinman) are poetry; the bad ones mean you're listening to a bad song and you should feel bad for liking it.

In this case, though, the elusive antecedent to the neuter pronoun may be explained in the full lyrics to whatever song that is (I'm sure someone will tell me, or I'll finally get curious and look it up myself), but that's irrelevant to this entry, which is mostly just me writing down whatever thought comes into my head.

Oh! That's it! Thought. Thought is the power that gives me the strength to survive.

Nah... it's really beer.