"Achilles Come Down" - Gang of Youths - Alternative/Indie - 2017
The Guardian.
Ellen Chen, Loomis Chaffee '25
Cello.
The cyclical rhythm of the cello, like a runner’s breath, breathes life into the lyrics sung in “Achilles Come Down.” Before all the philosophy, and Greek mythology, and 1942 French philosophical essay excerpts, I will praise the cello.
It’s a beautiful cello.
“Achilles Come Down” is a song about Achilles (yes, the one of Illiad and weak-heel fame) deliberating over committing suicide. The two instruments in the song are the two voices in Achilles’s head: one, (speculated to be the ghost of Patroclus, Achilles’s closest companion) who begs Achilles to “come down” and persevere, and the other, (perhaps intrusive thoughts, or even Agammemon, the hateful general of the Greek army) who goads Achilles to “jump off the roof” and surrender.
Achilles has no motivation to live. He is the invulnerable hero, but that figure is a facade. Achilles is painfully mortal, isolated, and weary. The other voice tells him that he is worthless, a hypocrite, a “rat in the gutter,” living a hollow life. (Read: Nihilism) The first voice protests, encouraging Achilles to “find one [meaning] and seize it,” to fight and survive with courage, because the best weapons against existential gloom are love and reckless, audacious hope.
Or something.
Excerpts from Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus are played at intervals throughout the song. Camus’s essay explored Absurdism, the philosophical theory that there is no higher power or meaning in life, making life itself absurd. Instead of collapsing under the futility and pointlessness of living, The Myth of Sisyphus encourages us to “revolt” and find our own free purpose in a world without meaning. Monsieur Camus could probably explain “Achilles Come Down” better than I.
But forget about the lyrical content. No one carefully observes or researches song lyrics unless they have to write an opinion article, or something. Sometimes all you need is sound. Sometimes all you need is a cello.
Cello. The song starts with cello and ends with cello, the same rhythm and pattern, over and over again. If the singing in “Achilles Come Down” is the rambling deliberation of the mind, then the cello is the steady respiration of the lungs. The six notes run up and down, up and down, like cresting waves on an ocean or a marathoner over forest hills. The meaning does not matter. We are alive and moving and we will stay alive and moving.
Listen to the song. It’s a pretty darn good song.
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