The Kids Are Ready To Die

"This isn't an anti-war song, it's an anti-going-to-die-for-no-good-­f***ing-reason" - Mikel Jollett, Lead Singer of The Airborne Toxic Event (Montreal 2011)

While trying to figure out what I should write for my media blog, The Kids Are Ready To Die by The Airborne Toxic Event came onto my Pandora. So let's analyse this. This is one of T.A.T.E.'s more emotional songs. Not only does the use of an acoustic guitar draw me in but also the story that the lyrics give. It talks about how people make one action and it can lead to another. It uses the fallacy hasty conclusion. In the beginning of the song it talks about how there is a group of kids sitting on a wall, where he got his first taste of danger, not knowing where to store all of his anger. From this event, it just got worse and worse. It then goes to when people were trying to changed and fix them, "You could burn our clothes/ you could wash out the ink and the die/ but you can't look me in the eye/ and say you don't feel like a little destruction." It is addressing how everyone has a part of anger built up in them that they cannot escape. When there is outside pressure for you to be good, it is hard because you know that the outside pressure is also experiencing some sort of anger inside of them. There is also a line later in the song (3:18) "He had a gun in his hand/ and I thought what could you say to make it ever make sense to his mother/ "well ma'am he was excitable /we were just trying to make him a man"." Not only does this address the problem of how a rebel child got worse, it also shows the assumption of men. When they are explaining to his mother that they were just trying to make him a man, like the only thing that could make him a man is a gun and the idea that he has the power and control. It also hits the need to nurture when it talks about this rebels mother. We never realize that when we hear there is another bad guy who just got locked up what his mother could possibly be thinking. No doubt she would be ashamed but she wouldn't know where her precious little innocent boy went wrong. What is also noticeable is the music video. This whole music video is shot on a stairwell in a tight space with completely dark lighting. It is acting as a parallel to the song.