If you were older than, say, 12 or 13 in 2006, then you likely enjoyed Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” on a strictly tongue-in-cheek level, in the same way that a Bush-era hipster (oh man, remember when it seemed so important to hate on them?) might ironically listen to Prog-Rock or Death Metal or Billy Joel. Certainly the official music video for “Knights of Cydonia” itself–featuring as it does a faux-’70s-style Sci-Fi Spaghetti Western Kung-Fu mini-movie–encourages this ironic reading, and made the whole song seem like a wink and a lark, a joke that the band was in on.
Was the song still fun? Oh, it was a blast, and still is! But again, it clearly wasn’t ever intended to be serious. Hacks like Stephanie Meyer are who took the music of Muse way too seriously (a girl I once briefly dated in the late-2000s said that if you ever read Twilight, you can actually tell which Muse song Meyer was listening to when she wrote each chapter—which, boy, as though you needed yet another reminder that she never revised anything); for the rest of us, “Knights of Cydonia” was just a campy little gallop, one of the playable options on Guitar Hero.
But now that it’s been nearly two full decades since the song’s release, and I think it’s safe to admit that most of us who enjoyed that song were never actually enjoying it ironically–that even when we treated it as a joke, it was because jokes are sometimes the most serious statements we make–that even when Muse themselves treated it as only a silly, bombastic, over-the-top track to round out the end of Black Holes and Revelations, that they were in fact being the most deathly serious of all.
Because what are the actual lyrics, after all? “Come ride with me through the veins of history,” he begins, “I’ll show you how God/falls asleep on the job…” A little blasphemous, a little glib? Yes, of course; but then, it’s also an expression of Malachi’s own complaint–one as ancient as it is modern, and quoted by no less than the Savior of the World himself in the ancient Americas–that “we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.” That is, even Christ himself, the Son of God, acknowledges our frustration and perplexion, that God allows the absolute worst of us to run rampant without any sort of check or balance–a state of affairs to which all of human history can attest, right down to our present moment.
Hence the very next line in the song asks plaintively: “How can we win/when fools can be kings?” Was this line in 2006 written in reference to the gross incompetence of George W. Bush during the invasion of Iraq? Or to Bush’s lackey Tony Blair, back in Muse’s native UK? But then, has there been any shortage of world leaders down to the present moment that this line could not refer to, in all honesty? Has that line not been resonating even more harshly than usual lately?
The song’s sole verse then concludes with: “Don’t waste your time or time will waste you.” It’s a precious bit of stoner wisdom, easy to smile at and dismiss accordingly. But it’s also a brutal fact: there is always less time than you think there is. We dismiss lines like these as clichés, as “stoner wisdom,” precisely because we don’t wish to confront and wrestle with the terrifying truth of it.
Because here’s something else that’s true: if, per Abraham 3:25, that the purpose of this life is to “prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them”–that is, if this life really is a test to determine if we will still do what’s right even when it’s no longer immediately obvious that there is a God, let alone one who will reward the righteous or punish the wicked in the slightest–then it is absolutely vital that we “do not procrastinate the day of [our] repentance.” And we are all in dire need of repentance indeed—if for failing to live up to our rights and privileges, if nothing else.
Hence why the song’s climactic finale features singer Matt Belamy declare, simply and repeatedly: “No one’s gonna take me alive/The time has come to make things right/You and I must fight for our rights/You and I must fight to survive.” None of us are left off the hook here, we must fight to make the world a better place; that is in fact what it means to “bring forth Zion.” If we are not fighting for our rights–as well as to make things right–then we are not proving ourselves herewith, to see if we will do all things whatsoever the Lord our God shall command us. We are procrastinating the day of our repentance, and letting time waste us away. This is the terrible truth barely concealed beneath such an otherwise silly, bombastic, over-the-top song–and we can smile at it all we want, but the truth will never smile back. Whatever we say in jest, the truth grabs us roughly by the shoulder and asks, “No, but seriously—“