Song Meaning
Robert Pollard, the ever-prolific bard of Dayton, Ohio, returns with "Do Something Real," a track that feels both immediately familiar and unsettlingly cryptic. The insistent demand to "do something real" acts as a goad, a pointed finger directed at a world increasingly saturated with the artificial and the performative. The opening images—sidewalks chasing citizens, bloodhounds on the hunt—paint a picture of societal anxiety, a relentless pursuit that leaves little room for authentic experience. Is Pollard suggesting we're all just running in place, chasing illusions? The juxtaposition of "crows like rats, like cats on vacation" is classic Pollard: a bizarre, almost Dadaist, image that hints at a world out of joint, where even the natural order feels corrupted. He's trapped at the station, perhaps a metaphor for being stuck in a cycle of inauthenticity.
The "small claims courts, community snorts" verse offers a glimpse into the mundane realities that often mask a deeper emptiness. The line "It's fine when it's so concealed" suggests a societal complicity in this charade, a willingness to accept superficiality as long as it remains hidden. "Extra special happiness / Defined by an endless field of nothing real" is the crux of the song's meaning, a devastating indictment of a culture that equates happiness with manufactured experiences and material possessions. This "endless field of nothing real" becomes a sort of psychic wasteland, where genuine connection and meaning are replaced by empty gestures.
The repeated exhortation to "do something real" in the face of this manufactured reality is both a challenge and a plea. The almost nihilistic couplet "You'll die or you won't / You try or you don't" acknowledges the inherent uncertainty of existence, but it also underscores the importance of agency. Even in the face of inevitable mortality, Pollard seems to argue, we have a choice: to succumb to the allure of the artificial or to strive for something genuine, something that transcends the "plot of rockets holy ghost markets." "Do Something Real" then, isn't just a catchy tune; it's a call to arms, a demand for authenticity in a world drowning in simulacra.
