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zubinsedghiwoah · 1 year

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MORE of me talking about The Mind Electric because 1)my obsession with this song is unhealthy, 2)there is nothing stopping me from making a million and a half posts about this song and the album in general and if there is such a force in the world they had better pick a god and beg for mercy before I arrive at their location (totally not armed with a shotgun or anything)

Now. Let’s begin. (Warning, it’s another long one)

The Mind Electric is, as many of you know, the 7th track in the Miracle Musical album Hawaii: Part II. It is one of the longest tracks in the entire album, at 6 minutes long, only rivaled by Dream Sweet in Sea Major, which is just around 7 minutes long.

All of the HPII songs have their quirks, but TME’s backwards segment is what makes it so unique. The segment is nothing mindblowing, it’s simply the forward part of the song, backward. Yet this helps to reinforce the song’s part of the story in a very peculiar way.

Unlike the other songs in the album, whose lyrics are often quite cryptic in nature, describing feelings and moments in time and space and generally leaving them open to interpretation, TME averts this by having some surprisingly straightforward lyrics in some places. Consider, if you will, the beginning verses of the non-reversed segment of the song. The scene of a courtroom is very clearly set for us and what plays out within is very obvious:

-The judge asks Simon to plead his case and orders him to swear to tell the truth

-Simon tries to get all woe-is-me with the judge by pleading insanity

-It works. Too well, however, as Simon is sentenced to an infirmary to be treated for a condition he was likely lying about having.

From there, the lyrics make a little less sense without thinking about them. Whatever the interpretation, however, one thing is for certain: TME is about Simon losing his mind, and the latter half of the non-reversed segment highly reinforces that. Bad (and quite possibly abusive doctors also appear to be speeding up this process).

But what does the reversed section mean, exactly?

Well, TME’s primary motif is insanity. The song becomes more and more chaotic as it progresses. There are parts where Simon appears to be in a moment of solitude and serenity, only to be violently ripped from what were really nothing more than delusions. The voices of the people Simon deems his “enemies” sound strange and distorted. For example:

The judge: When I first heard TME, I thought the judge was congested, or something (lol). As I listened to his voice more it sounded less… …silly and more pretentious than anything. He emphasizes certain syllables and words (granted, it’s a song) but overall speaks in a tone that implies dominance and a general sense of superiority. He isn’t taking crap from anybody and that shows.

The doctor/caretaker: Sounds similar to the judge, but less serious. Take the lines “Here in my kingdom I am your lord / I order you to cower and praey”. Listen to those lines again. He doesn’t sound serious, not at all. If anything, he sounds happy, like it’s all a game to him. We hear him again with “See how the serfs work the ground…”, describing the hapless plights of the others in his care. His voice sounds diseased. It buzzes like old static, it’s sharp as a razor blade, and it absolutely oozes with malice. And once again, there’s no hint of remorse in it. It’s almost prideful, as if he is saying, come and see what I have created.

Simon’s views on these people may affect why he hears their voices in those ways. It’s not just madness, it’s trauma.

If we consider the timeline of HPII being that Introduction to the Snow and Isle Unto Thyself show Simon in his current state, with songs 3-10 being a flashback before Dream Sweet in Sea Major brings us back to Simon’s death, then TME makes much more sense in context.

View TME as though it were part of a flashback. Black Rainbows, White Ball, Murders, and Space Station Level 7, the other “flashback” songs preceding TME are relatively normal, for the most part, but TME is where things start to fall apart. The music for each of those preceding songs is pretty smooth, largely coordinated. Listen to those. Then listen to TME. Notice how in TME how erratic the music becomes is certain places. It glitches all over the place, tone switches are sudden and sometimes jarring. It sounds distressed.

If TME is part of that flashback, think of how Simon views it. Up to this point his memories seem clear. But when TME hits, you just know something’s wrong. The infirmary has to be, without a doubt, a traumatic place for Simon. The “treatment” there cost him his sanity. Thus the backwards part of the song could be interpreted as a series of scrambled memories, while the glitching in the forward segment and the general distressing atmosphere that the song radiates like a Chernobyl rat could be triggered in a bout of PTSD, his fragile conscious fraying at the remembrance of such a horrid place, such terrible people, and such painful moments.

After TME, we get Labyrinth, then from there the album slowly dies down, as if TME was only a bad dream left behind, or a sickness to be recovered from. But one thing is absolutely clear:

Simon reacts badly to TME.

Any remembrance of the courtroom and its judge, or the infirmary and its overseer, the suffering he endured there, only to be swept under the rug when pleading for help, sends him over the edge. We can tell because he supposedly leaves the infirmary at the end of Labyrinth, and from Time Machine onward, the stress and panic are no longer there. His time spent inside the infirmary broke him in a way that whenever he recalls what happened to him there, he dances a sporadic waltz on the fragile line between sanity and complete loss of mind, and the facade he’s put up around himself disappears like it was never there.

But there’s still another big question out there: Was Simon lying to the judge?

Now, I don’t think we can know for certain whether or not Simon was lying. Either he was already insane and was asking to be treated, as the lyrics of “Inside the Minds of Simon” suggest, or he is a genuinely evil, though charismatic individual, an H. H. Holmes-type character whose greatest weapon is his charm.

The is, however, another factor that comes into play here, and that’s religion. In a previous post I discussed the religious allegories that are present in TME, and how they affect the story, but I think that they’re worth bringing up again here. This begins with the judge. This “character”, so to speak, has a name, and has “appeared” before. It’s our good friend Marvin.

As we know, TME was born from a demo known as “Inside the Mind of Simon”, a track that never made it into Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. Marvin is mentioned by name in ITMOS, and though that song never made it into MMMM, Marvin sure did. In “Ruler of Everything” he criticizes a man’s unchecked hubris, telling him that time will eventually pass him by. And in “Spring and a Storm”, he gently explains to a group of children the concept of death and life after death. He is a religious figure of sorts, as I theorized, an angel. (Also note that Simon refers to him as “Father Your Honor,” with “Father” being used in religious establishments, suggesting that Marvin is a man of the church.)

However unlike ROE, where he simply taught a narcissistic man to have doubts, or SAAS, where he explains death in a way so as to not frighten the children, he is very straightforward and serious with Simon. Because, consider, the narcissist was just… that. A narcissist. He doesn’t seem to have hurt anyone, and is simply obsessed with himself. And the children? They’re just curious and innocent. But Simon, as the track “Murders” suggests, is not as innocent as he seems. Simon might have one some very bad things.

If Marvin is some sort of otherworldly being, this could make the court situation much more different. He’s making Simon make an oath of truth, though he likely already knows if Simon is lying or not, which possibly means that he can see right through Simon’s manipulative tactics. If Simon was insane from the get-go, it’s likely he could see that too. Probably what happened Simon was trying to be sneaky and smart like “OH FORGIVE me Your Honor, I’m just SO INSANE you HAVE to help me.” And Marvin, seeing right through that, in response was like “Sure, wish granted” and had him sent off to the Hell Allegory. Either way, though, it’s implied that Simon did something very very bad and Marvin did not like that.

Moving onward, TME is full of references to religion. From the straightforward references: “I order you to cower and praey” and “Nuns commence incanting” (fun fact, in TME’s lyric video, the word “wholly” flashes to “holy” for a brief moment) to the overarching theme of the toils of the sinner, religion plays a considerable part in TME’s narrative, much more than one would expect. As I mentioned before, the infirmary is likely an allegory for Hell and eternal suffering, and the overseer of it all is the adjoining allegory of the devil. Whatever the case may be, whatever Simon did or didn’t do, he still ended up there, suggesting spiritual impurities.

Hawaii: Part II’s story goes a lot further beyond TME, yes, but this one song is a very crucial part of the story being told and ultimately effects the outcome. Maybe one day I’ll make the Post To End All Posts about HPII in a similar vein as this one, but for now, I’ll leave you some time to take this hefty one in haha.

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