Late-Stage Capitalism: A Love Story
Metric’s 2003 song “Calculation Theme” appears, at first glance, to just be about two people who are in love but struggling with a variety of things — life in a late capitalist society (as seen in the final verse) and also being generally tired, because life is hard and being a (caring and kind) human is difficult!
But then when you look at the part where Emily Haines says “I wish we were farmers … I wish we were lovers / but it’s for the best,” it’s like! These people are in love! but they can’t be together for some unstated reason — like probably money or convenience. But also those two verses are like, she’s talking about things that seem (and maybe are) so far away and unattainable, like they could never happen in a million years.
And running with how it sounds like Haines and the person to whom she’s speaking are in love until the final few verses… The end of the first verse hints at some dysfunction in Haines’ (or the narrator’s) relationship with the addressee: “I’m sick, you’re tired / Let’s dance, dance, dance / Cold as numbers but let’s dance // As though it were easy for you to lead me / I could be passive, gracefully.” This, to me, is like…like how I was with a guy I apparently kind of dated. The way I wanted so badly to feel seen, and he made me feel like raw meat — but also at times I felt as if he was the only person who cared enough to see me. And the way there are some people who you love so much, or maybe you just know that if things were different you could love them, and you want to be the person they could love in the same way, so you put on a mask and pretend to want them. The last two lines I mentioned earlier (“As though it were easy for you to lead me / I could be passive, gracefully”) also speak of trying to shrink yourself to fit into the box someone (who might love you, or might be pretending to love you to accomplish something) wants you to fit into.
This song also has a lot of lines that seem to be about the horrors of living in an increasingly technological (and late capitalist) society. For example, when Haines sings: “Dizzy when we talk so fast / Fields of numbers streaming past,” I feel like she’s talking about how, like, everything is so tech-based, and was getting so tech-based, even in 2003 when the song was written, that it can make your head spin. Plus “Dizzy when we talk so fast” seems, to me, like a nod to how people expect that you’ll be engaging with people and media, or “plugged in” in some other sense, on a million different levels.
And then the real bit about late capitalism (the final verse) really ties the whole song together — “Tonight, your ghost will ask my ghost / ‘Who here is in line for a raise?’ / Tonight, your ghost will ask my ghost / ‘Where is the love?’ / Tonight, your ghost will ask my ghost / ‘Who put these bodies between us?.’” To me, these ending lines are really just the meaning of the song, or the meat of the story Haines is telling listeners, summed up in six lines. The “ghosts” (the narrator and the person to whom she’s speaking — possibly her lover) have no real life beyond working towards another raise, and so they dream of things like being farmers, or being in love, to alleviate the mental strain of it all. But then with “Where is the love?,” Haines seems to suggest that she and the person to whom she’s been speaking throughout the song are not actually in love, but are instead clinging to each other out of necessity, like survivors of a shipwreck.
An annotation on Genius also made the excellent point that throughout this song, and the whole album this song comes from, and also Metric’s entire discography, their lyrics tend towards hauntological yearning for a lost future. (Hauntology, when used in reference to music, is generally a shorter way of saying that the artist, or, in some cases, the label, explores ideas related to retrofuturism, cultural memory [see: embodied memory], and the persistence of the past.) I wasn’t sure how to fit that into the rest of my (admittedly very circular and aimless) analysis, but I felt it was worth noting.
