Playlist: Enter T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” from a 21st Century Lens
Known for its fragmented construction and grave content, “The Waste Land” may seem inaccessible to casual readers. However, it transforms into a timeless beacon of despair when paired with contemporary songs about desolation and disillusionment.
Written by Janie Bickerton
Photos courtesy of John Gay and Ebru Yildiz
Content Warning: This article mentions sexual assault.
“April is the cruellest month.”
One hundred and one Aprils ago, T. S. Eliot’s epic poem “The Waste Land” collected the voices of lost souls amidst the rubble of World War I. Men returning home from the war displaced women who had established themselves in the workplace. Religious reckonings ran amuck. True emotional connection fell to the wayside as people attempted to handle trauma and feign normalcy in the growing cityscape. This unfeeling desolation permeated the Early Modernist poem, a work that defined the livelihoods of many urbanites unsure of how to move on from years of sanctioned violence.
Although modern onlookers face their own cruel April, one can find unlikely connections to the present in the broken conversations and evocative, unfamiliar diction of “The Waste Land.” Each glance at one’s phone echoes with war. COVID-19 lurks just as the Spanish Flu did in World War I. In a post-#MeToo era, standing up against sexual violence is slightly less taboo but remains just as unsettling as it was in the 1920s. The politically, environmentally, and emotionally broken American landscape isolates an overflowing population. As 21st-century readers struggle through “The Waste Land” and their lives, music can bring the consolation and clarity they might need.
From the mythological allusions of Hozier to the digital desperation of SZA, today’s music can elucidate the intricacies of Eliot’s five-section poem. Take “I. The Burial of the Dead,” for example. Mitski’s “First Love / Late Spring” matches the section’s linguistic multiplicity and romantic disconnect. Hozier’s “Wasteland, Baby!” may seem like a given, but its all-seeing speaker resembles Madame Sosostris’ grim clairvoyance. Phoebe Bridgers’ cover of Bo Burnham’s “That Funny Feeling” speaks in disjointed phrases of a modern disillusionment similar to those “undone” by death.
“II. A Game of Chess” features unclear speakers, connected by a common sexual unfulfillment, who converse but fail to listen to one another. The nihilistic sexuality of “Nothing Matters” by The Last Dinner Party gracefully encapsulates the trauma-stricken character who says and feels “Nothing again nothing.” SZA captures this character’s empty desires and inability to focus on anything but the “Shakespeherian Rag” by asking, “Can you distract me from all this disaster?” in “Ghost in the Machine.” Shifting from the unfeeling character to a conversation between women regarding being nothing but beautiful baby-makers for their husbands, Eliot has one woman ask, “What you get married for if you dont want children?” Paris Paloma enrages modern listeners just the same with her gut-punching diatribe against men seeing women as reproductive machines in “Labour.”
Eliot centers his poem around the sexual assault of a typist in “III. The Fire Sermon.” After her violent yet eerily mundane experience, the woman can only think, “‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over,’” as she “smoothes her hair with automatic hand.” Mitski sings of routine and an all-consuming tragedy that Eliot’s typist denies herself to acknowledge in “A Burning Hill.” As more scenes of sexual violence coalesce in the section, Blondshell’s “Salad” concedes that not much has changed for women in its rageful reflection on how assault ruins the life of the victim but somehow leaves the abuser unscathed: “And she took him to the courthouse / And somehow he got off / Then I saw him laughing with his lawyer / In the parking lot.” Doused in classical allusions to Philomel’s rape and Dido’s burning of Carthage, the third section becomes even more tragic when augmented by Hozier’s “Swan Upon Leda,” which opens with Leda, a maiden raped by Zeus in swan form, “pushing a child into the night.”
Shorter but just as stirring as the other sections, “IV. Death by Water” witnesses the sea rolling over Phlebas the Phoenician’s bones, who once was “handsome and tall as you.” Bridgers’ “Moon Song” fits the “nautical themed” epitaph for Phlebas, as it depicts a relationship stuck in time like the sailor’s once beautiful bones. Phlebas begs to be remembered as a hero in a “profit and loss” that no longer matters in death, just as Lana Del Rey repeatedly entreats, “Don’t forget me,” in the vulnerable “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd.” Finally, Florence + the Machine’s “Mermaids” sonically reflects the waters that move past Phlebas with booming undulations.
“V. What the Thunder Said” concludes the epic poem with reverberations of agony, dehydration, and anger. Paramore manifests this frustration in the angsty lyrics and percussive thundering of “Decode.” Paired with the section’s scenes of “sterile thunder without rain,” “mudcracked houses,” and a lustful mirage of water, Beyoncé’s “Love Drought” suggests unfettered connection as the solution to such barrenness: “you and me could make it rain now.” The final section’s environmental disaster and lingual cacophony ends with “Shantih shantih shantih,” the ending of an Upanishad, a religious text in Hinduism. Eliot roughly translates “shantih” as “‘The Peace which passeth understanding’” in his footnotes, opting to end his vast poem with a claim that there is serenity in not having all the answers. Rina Sawayama offers a similar resolution in “Fuck This World (Interlude),” where environmental injustice and egregious power imbalance prompts her to “start a new life on Mars.” Just like Eliot, she ends with vague hope: “This is our mission impossible / May be unlovable / May be unstoppable / But it's worth trying.”
So, dive into T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” with modern music as your aid. Resist the urge to hit shuffle, and let this playlist guide you through the “Unreal City” that has drastically changed over the past 100 years yet still remains just as desolate.