“Beds are Burning” – Midnight Oil
(Words/music: Rob Hirst, James Moginie, and Peter Garrett, available on Diesel and Dust, Columbia 1987)

Contradictions fascinate me, especially when I find them within myself.  “Beds are Burning” presents one I particularly find fascinating; I find myself completely at home in this song yet still feel like a stranger to it.  I’ll start with the familiarity.  Without fail, the first three notes of this song cause me to stop everything and exclaim “Midnight Oil.”  Depending on the context, friends and acquaintances treat this semi-involuntary response with a mix of bewilderment and reluctant respect.  I can’t play the song, I can’t identify the chords or the progression, and I don’t know a lot of the words, but those three notes immediately trigger recognition in my brain.  For whatever reason, years of sporadically hearing “Beds are Burning” seared those three notes into my brain, attaching a permanent association that earns me little more than odd looks from friends and the occasional point in a trivia competition.

Still, even if those three notes mean that I recognize the surroundings, I still feel like a stranger.  Midnight Oil wears their Australian heritage proudly, using their songs as a way to address issues they feel strongly about.  In particular, “Beds are Burning” rebukes the Australian government for their forcible displacement of Aborigine people in the 20th century.  They even used their performance of the song during the closing of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney as a soapbox, performing their best known song to their largest worldwide audience with the words “sorry” on their chests as a reference to the Australian government’s refusal to issue a formal apology.  While I can identify with the general call-to-consciousness in the chorus, the song’s finer details only highlight that I know little to nothing about the Aborigine people or the Australian government’s mistreatment.  I’ve never been to Australia, but I imagine the experience of feeling like a foreigner in a place where I speak the language might feel (granted, on an entirely different scale) somewhat like the conflicted way I feel about this song.  Regardless, it’s a reminder that I still have a lot to learn about the world.

More on Midnight Oil: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm