Allatonceness Project: 夜路 Walking into the Night

夜路 Walking into the Night MV

In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, "How horrible it must be to feel like that," instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into — a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.

- McLuhan, p. 61

Walking into the Night is a song Roger and I thought it should be a traditional Jazz depicting a woman walking on the street at night. The feeling of fear being followed or being gazed is something that women still cannot get rid of in nowadays. There is a kind of freedom that women can hardly enjoy.

However, with writing out the lyrics, I realized that this feeling can be generalized to everyone. We are all under the controls of something else, and it could be the governments, society, media, others, etc. The "involvement" drives us into a collectiveness, sharing all of our sentiments, but also deprives people of privacy. It is quite a paradoxic topic that how we should confront and balance individualism and collectivism.

Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psycho- logical responses. We have been left d-a-n-g-l-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us— they refer us only to the past, not to the present.

- McLuhan, p. 63

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