Songfacts®:

• Broken Social Scene are a Canadian indie rock musical collective. This surging anthem is the opening track from their fourth studio album, Forgiveness Rock Record. Founding member Brendan Canning explained the song's meaning to The Sun April 30, 2010: "World Sick is about getting ploughed from all directions and what you may or may not need to hear. Do I need this information as soon as I wake up? No. Do we need to do good by the world - YES!!!"
• Canning explained the album title to The Sun: "Forgiveness is what the world needs. It's what you need, it's what your brother needs, it's what your mother needs, it's what the Catholic Church needs, it's what Margaret Thatcher needed. You get my point, right! Simple human equation."
• Canning expanded on the song to The Aquarian Weekly: "The lyrics and song title are very much in line with death and dying. You open up your morning paper and you're confronted with so much sadness. It's a petty problem for us living in the privileged Western world. But there's a helpless feeling of, 'My God, what am I doing?' I encouraged Kevin to go deep and discover the lyrics because it was a long work in progress getting words right. But the guitar licks came quick. The last thing we added was the loopy guitar preceding the tribal drums. That was the one missing element we filled in."
• Singer/guitarist Kevin Drew explained how the band came up with their name to Spin Magazine: "I went on tour, like, ten years ago playing keyboards for a friend's band," he recalled, "and I had this really elaborate set-up with lots of different keyboards. I was a keyboard freak back then. When the tour was over, I came back to Toronto and played a Sunday night show under the name John Tesh Jr. and the Broken Social Scene. The John Tesh Jr. part was because of the keyboards. The Broken Social Scene part just sort of popped into my head, I think. But Brendan [Canning] said that the Broken Social Scene was a great name for a band and that's what we went with. A writer friend of mine told me to drop 'the,' though, and just have it be Broken Social Scene."