‘City Looks Pretty’: How Courtney Barnett predicted lockdown before lockdown was a thing
Great writers don’t only speak to their own times, but to the times that have long since gone and also the times that are to come. If they want their work and their work to transcend their times, it needs to be able to connect with universal experiences and situations. With that in mind, and for countless other reasons, you couldn’t say that Courtney Barnett is not a great writer.
Something that Barnett wrote and released in 2019 especially took on a whole new level of prescience only a year later. How many of us would have related to the oh-so-casually delivered line that “the city looks pretty when you’ve been indoors, for 23 days I’ve ignored all your phone calls” when we were emerging from the lockdown days of 2020 and 2021?
Courtney Barnett has written a lot over the years about social isolation, something that we all would have felt during those strange and disorienting years of disruption, death and dismay, and which made her such a constant companion and comfort when living in a world of social distancing.
The song also contained one of Barnett’s deftest, most cutting and insightful lines about knowing who you can trust or who you can turn to in times of need, as she sang that “friends treat you like a stranger and strangers treat you like their best friend, oh well”. When it became harder to stay in touch with your social circle, who stayed true to you and stepped up? Who made the effort to make you feel less alone when you were spending months apart from everyone you cared about and loved? Who did you turn to for comfort when comfort was in such short supply?
Something that wasn’t in short supply in the age of Covid-19 though, was disinformation. It didn’t help that we found ourselves in a world with leaders like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, who had long waged a war on honesty, decency, decorum, truth and respect for scholarly and scientific institutions. It would have been bad enough in any age to be saddled with such selfish leadership, but was especially catastrophic when faced with such a crisis.
As the social contract was worn away and broken down entirely during the era of minimal social contact, a particular kind of loutish insolence was born from our collective insolence. A righteousness was born by those who felt that any security measures imposed to stop the spread of the virus were a personal attack on their liberty; those who believed that “compliance is violence” and that wearing a mask or keeping two meters apart from one another was some kind of mindless, complicit and subservient behaviour that needed to be ruthlessly torn down. Or, as Barnett put it, much more succinctly in ‘City Looks Pretty’, “everyone’s soaked in animosity”.
Barnett had another lyric a few lines later that offered up both a level of understanding and a simple solution to all the anger that had brewed over those long, lost years. “Sometimes I get mad, it’s not all that bad. Pull yourself together and just calm down”.
Something else she sang in an earlier song would have really rung true that year, too. Surely we all would have felt when the world was tentatively opening back up (but when the virus was still raging, perhaps during that fateful summer where Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak decided the economy was more important than people’s lives and dreamed up the hair-brained “eat out to help out” scheme) could be well summed up by another brilliant Barnett lyric: “I wanna go out but I wanna stay home”.
