Golden Age

Album: Capricornia (2002)
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Songfacts®:

  • The opening track of Midnight Oil's 11th studio album, this jangly guitar number finds the Aussie rock band harmonizing over an elusive golden age. Frontman Peter Garrett explained the song's meaning in a Listenin.org interview: "Humans have universally always tried to get their eyes and their minds and their hearts wrapped around this idea of a golden age, but in order to do that, you've got to walk away from the digital inducements a little bit. The song is really saying, all this stuff is happening around you, and you can choose to respond to it whichever way you will. We've always fallen short of the golden age, but trying to find it and get to it gives us great moments as people. So find some space to have a go at your own golden age. It's a little bit sarcastic, but with that tinge of hope at the end."
  • Garrett on the lyrics, "Big brother tries to stitch and bend, but channel surfers find new friends": "It's a reference to the Big Brother programs that were running on television in the lead-up to us recording Capricornia. When you'd have a whole heap of cameras in a house and you watch personal relationships gradually disintegrate. It's a particularly perverse and violent form of entertainment for the soul.

    It's just this idea that no sooner can an authority or a power figure or a company or a government design a tool that will enable them to see something more conveniently or look into your life a little more intrusively. You're going to find some free space to do what you want to do, and that's your golden age."
  • The bridge takes us beyond a purple patch of jacaranda heading past the watermark, which, Garrett explains, "would be the security code for the computer programs and the software. Over the hills, going as far as you can see to the golden age."

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