Annotations for Knights of Cydonia

Lyric: [Instrumental Intro with Vocalizations]
Annotation:
Aside from the song’s official studio release, they also play another intro in live performances with Chris playing  Morricone’s “Man with a Harmonica”.

Lyric: Don’t waste your time, or time will waste you
Annotation:
We will all die eventually. We have two choices in that regard: to either focus on a purpose, do something noteworthy with the time we are given and have our name live on (whether in big ways or small ones), or do nothing worth remembering and having our legacy obliterated by the sands of time  This line is also a reference to King Richard’s soliloquy from  Act 5 Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s  Richard II: I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

Lyric: No one’s gonna take me alive
 The time has come to make things right
 You and I must fight for our rights
 You and I must fight to survive
 No one’s gonna take me alive
 The time has come to make things right
 You and I must fight for our rights
 You and I must fight to survive
Annotation:
While the odds feel stacked against him, Matt intends to fight for his fate and humanity’s betterment. In Matt’s own words, There is this feeling of waking up and trying to fight back, or it’s time to actually try and change yourself and the things that are going on around you. I think to me that’s very optimistic, this strength […] at the end of “Knights of Cydonia,” when I’m just saying, ‘No one is going to take me alive’ and all that kind of stuff. I think it’s the strength of the human spirit fighting against the forces that are manipulating it. The album’s final outro chorus’s repetition resonates strongly with the opening track’s plea for malevolent power to “ Take a Bow”,  for which Matt mused, You can hear the people who are at the bottom of the pyramid, who haven’t got any power, and they have this feeling of powerlessness, a feeling I have quite often, about some of these events – this sense of, ‘What can I do about this?’ It seems like no one is listening. A million people protest, and nothing really happens…" (Both quotes above are derived from the magazine “Under the Radar” in an interview by Marcus Kagler.) During the tours for this album and even bigger tours to come, the opening track “Take a Bow” and closing track “Knights of Cydonia” interchangeably would begin or end each show. Their themes and sonic tapestries extended directly to their next studio album’s globally successful single “ Uprising”,  amidst the super-massive U.S. banking crisis, a global invective in full-throttle by Winter 2008. the oppressors in “ Uprising” expanded to bankers and global corporations. And by the time of this heavily extended annotation?: It’s February 2021, as the effects of climate change and COVID-19 yield more profit for the oppressively rich and powerful. Long live the revolution!?

Lyric: And how can we win when fools can be kings?
Annotation:
How can humanity ever hope to truly succeed as a group (it’s hard enough succeeding on an individual basis) when we often seem to elect, appoint, or end up with idiots in positions of power? From the time of writing beginning in a tour bus through Texas and Arizona, to the song’s recording in NYC in 2005,  to note  Matt Bellamy’s political views  were tilted against the U.S. POTUS G.W. Bush and the U.K.’s P.M. Tony Blair would be a huge understatement.  See the album’s opening track, “ Take a Bow”. Humanity’s past, present (and future?) tendency towards manipulative forces in power (via manipulation or in line with the Lord Acton maxim that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”) is exasperating.  It becomes a moral imperative for the strength of the human spirit to object/ oppose/resist/extricate oppressive forces in power. Matt views the song as an optimistic call-to-arms, avoiding cliché given the scope of its landscape expressed musically and visually in a retro-futuristic pre and/or  apocalyptic inter-planetary Earth to Mars Sci-fi Spaghetti Western drama (watch the music video and its beyond-cinematic scope of histrionic, down-to-earth space-time dimensions). 16 years later, this theme resonates as more prescient during COVID-19, the ravages of climate change, and the post-Trump era: how can we win?   (And the key is not via the love of power, but the power to love; ask Matt.  Empathy reigns in his world …).

Lyric: Come ride with me through the veins of history
 I’ll show you a god who falls asleep on the job
Annotation:
Matt Bellamy has often criticized the concept of organized religion both in his music and in his private life. In this line, he invites the listener to look back on the summation of human history, see all the tragedies and carnage that we have inflicted upon one another, think about the fact that, if a god or gods really do exist, then it is/they’re doing a  really lousy job of looking out for people, as prayers go unanswered, and uncared for.

