Lane Alexander Post #6
Dance Fever by Florence + The Machine is a captivating album featuring songs expressing Florence Welch’s relationship with God, womanhood, and her work as a creative. Listening through the 14 tracks, I couldn’t help but admire her candidness, particularly on the subject of spirituality; her journey from finding God through her art to the experience of feeling rejected by God and trying to find that spiritual connection elsewhere is something that I connected to, from my own similar experience a couple of years ago.
Prayer Factory encapsulates the creative rift Florence was feeling at this stage in her life. As seen from the songs in the first half of the album, Florence views her music as her way of connecting with God or heaven, but in this time of creative drought she laments: “Why don’t you give me a call? Open my mouth, yes, I’ll take it all. And all this work gone to waste. You make me climb, then you shut the gate”. I believe a struggle that all followers, of the Christian god at least, have to contend with is the apparent silence of god in their lives. Especially when I was a child, it felt like prayers were useless. Why was I sitting alone at the foot of my bed with my hands clasped and eyes closed asking someone I’d never seen to give me something I wanted and probably didn’t even deserve only for it not to happen? In high school, I settled on the fact that praying, in my eyes, is little different than hoping as both required the absence of action toward satisfying the desire. Prayer versus action. It felt as if God punished the act of going out and getting what you wanted, but approved of you waiting to take whatever shit happens to come your way, good or bad. For Florence, prayers are a pursuit of god despite the silence, but that pursuit is exactly what shuts her out from the connection to God she seeks.
Heaven Is Here was my favorite song on the album. It’s powerful, chant-like, and a declaration against the rejection of God. “I went to the water, drank every drop. I’ll turn your sea to a desert”. We go to church, read the bible, and pray to foster our spiritual connection to god. We trust that he will make the land rich and bountiful and so we drink the lessons he gives us. But what happens when we consume all there is for us to take? What if we’ve gotten all that he is willing to give? When we feel the connection to god has been severed it’s like a light has gone out, life gets sour, and the lake turns to dust but the most humiliating aspect of a crisis of faith is when the flow is stemmed we incessantly crave more. For me, I couldn’t understand god, so I sought out different avenues of spirituality. Other mythologies, wiccan, Zoroastrianism, but nothing fit. Then I tried examining God itself. What stories were the priests not telling me? What was the true nature of God? But knowledge without faith is useless. I understood the mechanisms of belief, but I still couldn’t conduct the action belief myself. Florence consumed everything God had given her but was left wanting, and in that abandoned state turned to an alternative: “Hell, if it glitters, I’m going”. If she couldn’t get the artistic answers from god, she would turn to another he had cast out. If she couldn’t find respite in God’s silence, she could try the one thing that’s always calling her name.
I would like to note that the style of the song is much more intense than the others on this album. In the Spotify notes, it highlights an interview with Florence stating that when she was writing it, she wanted to channel the malevolence of horror, to recognize feeling scared, and that “one way to resolve this is to make yourself scary”. Like Lady Macbeth’s “fill me from the crown to the toe topful with most dire cruelty” Florence is transforming. It’s not the passive transformation that you notice over years of your life, but the horrifying, sudden transformation in which you witness what you were shatter against what you’re becoming. This transformation is an act of cruel horror.
Finally, In My Love, Florence sketches the frustration of not knowing where to put her faith. “My Arms emptied, the skies emptied. The billboards emptied. So tell me where to put my love”. At this stage, Florence has nearly given up. She’s looking for guidance, in herself, from God, from the world, but there’s nothing to be found. Her love has no place to go. Is a very existential position to be in, to be honest, Florence has realized that there is no outside force that can give her guidance out of the place she’s at, where to put her love. I just recently learned of this condition in my philosophy class, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, when we have this realization we’re experiencing the despair of reconciling the fact that there is no predefined plan for any of us. The upside of facing this despair is that you are able to transcend the facts of your situation to find your own meaning in life.
Dance Fever is a wonderful album. It’s hauntingly familiar to anyone who found themselves in crises of faith and moments of transformation. It’s also cathartic Even though, like God, it gives the listener no answers, the mere declaration of rage and identity is enough to validate the audience and the artist alike.
