Style
"Helicopter", could be seen as a song addressed to George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. It has the lyrics: "North to south, empty, running on, bravado... He's gonna save the world... Just like his Dad... (the same mistakes), Some things will never be different... Are you hoping for a miracle? (It's not enough)" In response to this issue, Okereke said in an interview, "'Helicopter' isn't about Bush; it's a song about waking up and realizing certain things. I hope what people got from that song wasn't a critique of American life. I got really worried when I started reading our message boards; there was an American who had read the lyrics of "Helicopter" and had come to the conclusion that we were advocating that the European way is the ideal. But that wasn't it at all. Europeans have their own set of problems.″
Nonetheless, for the second album A Weekend in the City, he chose more personal and political subjects for songs. A family friend, Christopher Alaneme, had been murdered in a racist attack, while David Morley, a London bartender, was beaten to death in a possibly homophobic "happy slapping". Okereke has claimed that these events, combined with the 7 July London bombings "galvanised mindset", prompting him to make the lyrics "dark, bigger and quite abrasive".
Read more about this topic: Kele Okereke
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)
“A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.”
—Coco Chanel (1883–1971)
“Style is the man himself.
[Le style c’est l’homme même.]”
—Leclerc, George-Louis Buffon, Comte De (1707–1788)