The Courtney Barnett song that has grown more depressing with time
Just a cursory glance at the song titles on any given Courtney Barnett release tells you that you’re hardly going to be hearing the most optimistic lyrics or too many songs with upbeat messages.
Names like ‘Depreston’, ‘Everybody Here Hates You’, ‘Pedestrian at Best’, ‘Debbie Downer’ and, surely more than any other song title ever, ‘Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence’ tell you off the bat the kind of lyrics you’re going to hear.
The true beauty of her lyrics lies in the way that those downbeat, or beaten-down, messages can bring people together. Her songs about feeling cut off from the rest of the world, lost in space and time, or feeling estranged even from herself have a surprising way of bringing people hope and together. Her sensitive, witty and disarmingly simple lyrical explorations of her feelings of social isolation can, as a result, make you feel less alone when you hear them. It lets you know that someone else feels the way you do and has been able to articulate those feelings in a way that resonates with you.
Sometimes it takes her a whole song to get that feeling across, and sometimes she can do it in one off-the-cuff lyric, like when she drawls that “your best friend treats you like a stranger and strangers treat you like their best friend, oh well”, on the excellent 2018 track, ‘City Looks Pretty’. Perhaps none of her songs get across that mixture of moods, or better put a name to the contrasting feelings that she sings about and inspires, than another track from 2018: ‘Hopefullessness’.
But, for every song of hers that inspires some hope, there is one that inspires some hopelessness, too, and none capture such an overwhelming feeling of despair, desolation and the dreadfulness of our modern times more so than ‘Kim’s Caravan’. Barnett’s eerie, haunting encapsulation of what it means to be alive, with the unrelenting doom of climate catastrophe hanging heavily over all of our heads.
In 2015, when the song came out, 197 countries signed the Paris Agreement at the end of COP21, pledging to do everything in their power to prevent the global average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. We’re now ten years on from the treaty, and not a single one of the 197 countries is on target to keep their promises, and, in fact, global emissions have risen since 2015.
According to the European Copernicus climate service, 2024 was the first full calendar year to be above the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold that the nations were trying to avoid. The World Meteorological Organisation has stated that there is an 86% chance that at least one of the next five years will be more than 1.5°C, and a 70% chance that they all will be.
If foreboding lyrics about dead seals repeatedly washing up on the shores, oil in the air, watermarks on the ceiling following a flood and the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef were scary thoughts back in 2015, they are each becoming an increasingly depressing reality and recurring nightmare in our post-climate change world today.
Describing the song, Barnett highlighted it as “an apocalyptic tale of our world painted black with oil and soot, painted red with blood and greed. The song was born when blessed with time to reflect, feeling the frustration and helplessness of the destruction of my environment and the litter of humans within it”.
In the lyrics, she takes a sandy seat at the shore and thinks about how she’s at least thankful for the view. It’s something that we all should do while we still have the chance. Despite the death and the oil and the destruction, it’s the best view we’re ever going to get.
