After writing the review of Boy A, I have been thinking a lot about the tremendous hurt we are bringing down on boys in our society. The clearer I see how deep it goes, the less capable I become to adequately express how sad it makes me feel. So when I heard my colleague play a song at work today by Swedish band “Ingenting” about the experience of being a boy today, it really hit home.
He sings about how when he was little, his female teacher warned him to “do what she said, otherwise you’d be sent to a class you don’t want to be”. Then he went to church and the parish priest warned him to “do what he said, lest he end up somewhere he did not want to be”. Then a woman wanted him to buy her a gold ring and then she warned him to “shape up and stay home”. (“My love turned into a prison cell”).
The chorus goes “it ended up with them saying, you’re Satan’s right hand man” and concludes with him reflecting on all the news of global warming and how if it gets as hot as they say, maybe they all will have turned out to be right – that he’s Satan’s favourite child.
This is the burden of the more sensitive of the boys and men out there. “It ended up with them saying you’re Satan’s right hand man” is an allusion to the feeling that the boy integrates, not the actual words spoken. And yet somehow, he just doesn’t understand why the world hates him so and towards the end of the song, the young boy sings “But Dear Lord, I’m doing as well as I can. Yet I’m Satan’s right hand man”.
It’s an incredibly moving song if you understand the Swedish language and what it really points to (the man who sings the song still sees himself as that young boy who is Satan’s favorite child, and thus he cannot grow up to be a man for fear of the consequences). Click the link below to listen.