Disaffected Youth: Analysing the Bloc Party song inspired by Bret Easton Ellis
Kele Okereke of Bloc Party has always written lyrics with literary and philosophical references. Take, for instance, that the voices heard in ‘She’s Hearing Voices’ are “Cartesian” in nature, a reference to the seminal French philosopher Rene Descartes. This makes perfect sense as before Bloc Party released their debut album Silent Alarm in 2005, Okereke had studied English literature at King’s College London before dropping out to focus on music.
Of the several literary references across the Bloc Party back catalogue, perhaps the best comes on the opening track from the band’s second studio album, A Weekend in the City, ‘Song for Clay (Disappear Here)’. The track is heavily indebted to and inspired by Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel Less Than Zero, published in 1985.
Less Than Zero tells the story of a young, affluent college student who has returned to his native Los Angeles during his school’s winter break. While Clay’s life on the surface is rosy, he is alienated from his excessive lifestyle and those around him. He experiences profound depression and disaffection from everything that ought to give him meaning in life.
Ellis’ novel begins with a paragraph that shows the inspiration behind the ‘Song For Clay’ chorus lyric: “People are afraid to merge on the freeway,” he states. Ellis writes: “People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, ‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.’ Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter.”
Later we are introduced to a sign that inspired the song’s title: “I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is ‘Disappear Here’ and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.”
Then a few pages on, the billboard crops up again in Clay’s lived experience: “As I pull onto Sunset I pass the billboard I saw this morning that read ‘Disappear Here’ and I look away and kind of try to get it out of my mind”. Evidently, these two things – the billboard and the fact that people are afraid to merge on the freeway in Los Angeles – are of particular pertinence to young Clay, even if he cannot quite figure out why.
While the primary influence of Ellis in Okereke’s lyrics is the chorus line, “People are afraid to merge on the freeway, disappear here”, there are also several other clues within the words that show us that he had Ellis in mind when writing them. For starters, the kind of disaffected attitude that Clay either displays or is afflicted by is undoubtedly present in Okereke’s ambivalent narrator. We know that they “enjoy and devour flesh, and wine, and luxury”, as does Clay in his affluent lifestyle back at home in Los Angeles, but just like Clay, Okereke’s narrator is “lukewarm” in the heart – nothing really affects him. He consumes drugs and luxury food and drinks with “complete disdain”.
By transferring the action of Ellis’ novel to London, Okereke put forth the argument that we in Britain had also begun to suffer from the tedium and ennui of modern living “as though the [excess of] the ’80s never happened”. Furthermore, A Weekend in the City‘s album cover is suggestive that we Brits are also afraid to “merge on the [motorway]”, perhaps implying that we are so accustomed to the constant pursuit of pleasure that we are afraid to die and, therefore, afraid to truly live.
In that light, it is understandable that Okereke would have felt that East London tended to “suck the joy right out of” him, disaffected from the success of Bloc Party’s first album, having still felt dissatisfied from what life seemed to offer: pretentious “magazine launch parties” where people pretend to look bored in order to appear cool. But he used Ellis’ novel to wonderous effect in a way that distinguished Bloc Party from their 2000s peers and, in doing so, created a song that holds literary merit as well as musical brilliance.
