Alex Turner’s most cryptic lyric: What does “do you celebrate your dark side then wish you’d never left the house” mean?
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Apollo Lunar Module and made “one giant step for mankind”, the spot on the moon was Tranquility Base. Arctic Monkeys crafted their own musical equivalent of the moon landing with Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, creating various alternative realities and time sequences that perfectly filtered Alex Turner’s complicated world. Delving into each lyric is a minefield, but the broader state of the frontman’s psyche could potentially be best summarised in the album’s title track.
‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ was the follow-up single to ‘Four Out Of Five’, as the band set out to demonstrate the often confusing musical whiplash constructed within the album’s walls. Overall, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino seems like a perfectly blended concept album that reveals new layers with each new listen. However, once separated, the songs exist as individual capsules, with each line of lyricism providing a somewhat Proustian approach to Turner’s train of consciousness.
The issue with the title track was that no one except perhaps Radio 6 Music listeners seemed to quite understand what this new musical direction meant, let alone the lyrics. While the album entirely demonstrates Turner’s own internal journey to self-discovery, making the transition from writing using a guitar to being purely piano-based, the lyrics within ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ reveal more about his artistic excellence than perhaps any other song in the band’s discography.
Once you apply the microscope to certain parts of the song, its pinnacle becomes clear, and the rest begins to revert to background noise. Amid the web of leisure and lounge sounds, soon the bridge kicks in, and Turner is crooning the haunting lyrics: “Do you celebrate your dark side then wish you’d never left the house? Have you ever spent a generation trying to figure that one out?”
Turner, who has demonstrated multiple times that he has a fascination – obsession, perhaps – with generational divides, seems to bring this to the fore by asking one fundamental question about the human condition. ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ was released with the B-side ‘Anyways’, which lamented similar musings. Specifically, the song included the lyric: “How’s your Mum and Dad been doing with the generation gap?”.
In ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’, the singer seems to be tapping into something that all of us experience as we get older: a fixation with generational differences. Although these are clear when we are younger, ageing makes us more susceptible to these changes as we attempt to navigate, no longer being the younger generation.
Most of the songs on Tranquility Base Album & Casino were written in 2016 when Turner was 30 years old. Of course, attitudes towards getting older vary from person to person, but generally speaking, this is the time when most people start to put their lives under the microscope. If Turner was experiencing a similar thing, it’s likely that those specific lyrics are attempting to articulate such age-specific feelings of ambivalence.
In the context of Arctic Monkey’s career, generational perception has been a key influencing factor in the ways their reputation has changed. The band’s evolution of sound is potentially one of the most polarising trajectories in the history of the indie revival, with many holding on to the “old” Monkeys and the way they sounded throughout Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. During this time, the band’s only major life experience was growing up as teenagers in Sheffield, which became the crux of Turner’s lyricism.
With Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, 12 years after the debut album, a lot of maturing had taken place – most of the band were in serious relationships, had children, and were very much on the way to settling down for good. “Do you ever celebrate your dark side?” could be Turner’s way of processing his persona during the glory days, while his wishing he had never left the house could be seen as representing the introspective view he now had during Tranquility Base.
As we get older, a lot of us become more confined to the shadows of our private lives. While we may still feel outgoing, the party days are long gone, and we no longer benefit from the fearlessness of youth. This is also a concept referenced in the album’s ‘The Ultracheese’ when Turner details the nature of growing older versus the excitement of the earlier hype in the lyrics: “Get freaked out from a knock at the door when I haven’t been expecting one. Didn’t that used to be part of the fun once upon a time?”
In the ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’ bridge, the fear that Turner is spending a generation trying to figure out could be the stark differences between the abundant teenage years and adulthood, when everything seems a lot more intimidating. Turner is a natural introvert, so his earlier playful persona was likely played up to conceal his real personality, but the passage of time has caused him to shed that skin in favour of a more authentic presentation of self.
The beauty of the band’s ability to tackle such complicated matters is the way in which it is almost surrounded by a bubble of hilarity. We know that Turner has quite a specific sense of humour, but he has one, and it comes through in many of the lyrics on the album. In this specific one, though, it seems as though the “dark side” in question could refer to putting yourself out there and being social, no matter how small or how prestigious such an event may be. The fact of the matter is that the “dark side” isn’t just making itself known. It’s being celebrated, an action which we will soon come to regret.
And therein lies the contradiction that Turner has become a master of. Let’s say the “dark side” is being extroverted when you know deep down it’s a front: we once succumbed to letting it out, embellishing it, even. But now it’s being pushed aside as we evaluate what it all meant – how can we be happy with our actions one moment, then remorseful the next? The only time we could possibly backtrack so intensely is if one of the versions wasn’t us being our true selves.
And if both of them are true, or were true at one point in our lives, it proves Turner’s theory that we really do spend a generation trying to figure it all out. Earlier in the song, sandwiched between his thoughts on technological advances and magical thinking, Turner poses the question: “Do you remember where it all went wrong?”. While we all collectively search for answers that explain our constantly changing attitudes and interests, perhaps the ignorance of the uncertainty is where we went wrong all this time.
