#honestly analysis of music is prob my fav form of esay to write

[this-should-do]

Firstly, here is a link to the song so y’all can listen to it because it is so good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWIjavxGNcc

Also tagging you @peepaw-william-says because you so kindly expressed interest in me writing this analysis essay yesterday :]

and fair warning everyone, its another long one, that once again is mostly uneditted aside from spelling and grammar lol and a few additions and removals :3 but this aint a school essay so i think im okay

Before I analyze the lyrics of Breathe, Desperately by From Indian Lakes, I want to quickly address how it creates tone through pacing and its instrumentals and how this applies itself to my interpretation in regards to Gordon, Barney, and their relationship during Half Life 2.

The song uses reverb heavily in this song, you can hear it far more easily on what I think might be the guitar, bass guitar, and the likely synthetic vocalizations. This reverb in music for me tends to lend itself to more nostalgic and dreamy tone which on a bass level is two tones that play a role in how I conceptualize Barney and Gordons relationships. Nostalgia is the far more important of the two concepts given the very obvious elephant in the room that is the 20-year time gap between 1 and 2. Nostalgia on Barney’s end plays two roles; first in between the the 1st and 2nd games and second during Half Life 2. Nostalgia for Gordon is simpler with only one main role.

In between the two games, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, barney develops a heavily modified view of Gordon based on the best memories he has of Gordon and the negative ones are warped into positive ones and therefore softened. So, Gordon ends up being one of his main feel-good thoughts he goes to for peace during the occupation, something he’s nostalgic for. Then during the second game once Gordon comes back, barney is forced to reconcile the heavily nostalgic and rosy memory of Gordon with the real Gordon, who outwardly, for the most part, has come to embody the worst of his attributes combined with an entirely new attitude borne of all the trauma he’s endured. This is a painful wakeup call for barney because for him, he has this figure representing most of what he misses about pre-combine earth come to life and its nothing like what he remembers for obvious reasons. So now he cant really look to this memory he has of Gordon because the real thing is in front of him and it feels wrong to fantasize over a fictional (not that he really realized it) version of his best friend now that he’s alive again, so not only is his main coping memory metaphorically taken away, he’s having to deal with the highly traumatized real life counterpart, which brings its own bag of sorrows.

For Gordon, nostalgia for a time before isn’t something he allows himself to think about often or really has the chance to, its more of a moment of weakness when everything has come crashing down around him and there’s nothing else to occupy himself with. But when he’s forced to unpack everything around the time gap, he too is faced with his memory of barney (and everyone else he knew) vs how they are now. Gordon’s memory of barney is far more accurate than barney’s memory of Gordon, but the real-life barney differs about as much as Gordon does to barney’s memory. Barney has outward changed far more than Gordon has, he’s lived 20 more years than Gordon has all while under constantly traumatic circumstances. He inwardly has 20 years of experience as well as 20 years of trauma. So even if he outwardly can almost act the same as he did before the Resonance Cascade, there’s still something always off about his actions that set off a bell in Gordon’s head, making Gordon’s nostalgia vs reality more subtle than barney’s but harder to root out because of it.

The dreaminess of the song also plays a role. Its far more general but, overall, it feels like it can represent both the fading of memories due to the passage of time, the haziness of memories due to trauma, and the haziness of the present moment during traumatic events.

Now to address the lyrics of the song, Ill be breaking down the song into parts, with a section about the lyrics that represent barney, the lyrics that represent Gordon, the lyrics that represent both of them, and the lyrics that represent their relationship.

Barney embodies the first two verses of the song:

I was once a quiet boy

Cleaning out my wounds but I

Never could keep my mouth shut

When I needed to

I could try to pry it loose

But the stone won’t move

And I wanna try to rip it out

But I’ve grown to love this thing too much

These lyrics tell us a little about barney’s learned inability to express his genuine thoughts and feelings unless under extreme duress. This is a characterization of him that I developed as an in-universe way to explain his overly casual and humorous persona in such a dystopian world (according to the developer commentary in episode 1, barney is written this way as a call back to the dark humor of the first game and isn’t given much more character other than that). I feel that this issue for him developed by early middle school at the latest from bullying by other boys and his brothers for being soft and expressing his thoughts and emotions (an idea that developed later than other parts of my characterization of him because of my class about American Masculinity im taking this semester).

This is a concept reinforced by the first verse, where it is the speaker reflecting on their younger self being quiet (an adjective normally associated with boys when they are more gentle and easy going compared to other more “masculine” boys) and having to clean their wounds (in this interpretation, earned from being bullied) and never being able to shut up when they needed to (interpreted here as him being earnest in his thoughts and feelings, a typically “un-masculine” thing to do). The phrasing of the verse also implies that this inability to “keep his mouth shut” is something he only experienced in the past, furthering the narrative I am proposing.

Now in the present during the second verse, the speaker discusses wanting to try to be able to talk about how they feel and what they think but they cant. They’ve stopped up that well very effectively to the point that they can no longer open it again. And even though they want to open it again they are also in conflict with themselves because they grown so attached to the rock that they’ve used to stop their emotions well. For Barney the rock is his casual humorous persona, which he uses to shield and obscure any form of vulnerability by the time he’s finished with middle school. And obscuring his emotions and thoughts is an incredibly useful tool in is repertoire during the combine’s occupation, especially when he’s working as a spy in the CP. So even though this coping mechanism obviously damages his ability to make and maintain close relationships with other people, it’s something he’s grown fond of because it firstly protects him from harm from the average relationship but its also a tool of survival under the combine. But it gets even more complicated when Gordon’s back, one of the only people he’s ever felt truly close to come back and now that he’s lost the true closeness over the past 20 years he finds himself unable to even begin to breach the gap between them due both to his own hardened emotional shield and Gordon’s own guarded emotions.

Gordon embodies the third verse:

Have I become the man I hated once

Or have my thoughts become clouded

By things I used to fear the most?

And is my heart full of the ashes I heard about?

Have I become the missing person

I’ve been trying to get you all to forget?

The first line in the speaker self-reflecting about how they’ve changed, and realizing they might’ve changed for the worse, into something that they hated once upon a time, and don’t seem to now but might still. And the second and third lines are them wondering if they’ve not changed but the world around them (particularly those that are frightening). This corresponds to how I view Gordon; I feel that before the Resonance Cascade, he was really rather non-violent, he didn’t enjoy violence (outside of fiction anyways). But after, violence has become his go to solution for most things, and his preferred solution because it’s simple and tends not to leave loose ends. It’s how he’s survived so long. But I feel like he also hates that it’s what he’s become, a creature of violence and little else. But the second and third lines are almost more meta than anything else, discussing whether or not Gordon as a person has truly changed in face of everything or if he’s only acting in self-defense.

The fourth line is about Gordon and his ability to feel and love others again. With the heart obviously representing said ability to love and the ashes being the fallout and trauma of everything he’s been through making it difficult to feel safe enough to trust anyone around him. This line is particularly strong for me because it immediately brought to mind gman telling Gordon to “wake up and smell the ashes.”

The final two lines are probably the furthest from literal and hardest to parse because the implications of the speaker being the one to try to get people to forget them, which doesn’t match up with how Gordon is able to act once he comes back in Half life 2. But if interpret them as internal thoughts on Gordon’s part as opposed to how he acts outwardly, it makes more sense. So, obviously Gordon being a missing person lines up incredibly well given his disappearance in between half-life 1 and 2 and the mythos that ends up building around him turning into the missing person as opposed to Gordon himself. And this “missing person” applies to both the general public and barney, as both end up turning Gordon into an icon in their own ways with the rebels viewing him as this messiah and barney viewing him as a perfect person, and both of these expectations weigh heavily on Gordon when he starts picking up on them and he desperately wishes they would stop treating him like he is more than he really is.

Barney and Gordon’s relationship, or at least how they are able to interact given the many, many circumstances, during Half-life 2 is represented by the chorus (this is ignoring the lead up which is grouped with the fourth verse):

We breathe so desperately

As if it’s the only thing we need

And we don’t care if it’s not

Breathing honestly

We’re burning out lungs with it

And we don’t care

We don’t care at all

The chorus is the speaker speaking of his relationship with another person where breathing is a metaphor for speaking. They (the speaker and unnamed other person) interact with each other on a surface level and not being able to get closer on a deeper level but both act as if it’s all they don’t need that deeper connection. The speaker also acknowledges in the 3rd and 4th lines that neither they nor the other person that (at the very least) they both don’t care if anything they breathe is a false pretense or lie even if it hurts to know that evidenced by the 5th line. The 6th and 7th line both reiterate that neither party cares.

In the context of barney and Gordon, this chorus tells us that during half life 2, they both are never able to feel the deep connection that they had before everything happened no matter how hard either of them wish they did. The only way they are able to interact is almost exclusively in situations that ensure that they never get the time to connect and break down the heavy mental and emotional guards they both have. But they both hold onto those surface level) interactions (often under duress as the only level of connection they’ll ever have so they are desperate for it but neither can say they want more so they act as if its all they need. Neither acts like they care that everything they say is a front and never what they really want to say. They both act like the loss of closeness doesn’t hurt and that feeling like strangers again doesn’t hurt them, even though its almost on purpose that they don’t try to get closer. So therefore, the last two lines end up feeling like for barney and Gordon, they’re not the truth but instead affirmations to try to convince themselves that that’s what they really feel. It makes almost the whole chorus a lie, saying that they don’t care about each other, just another lie to burn their lungs with. But they do care incredibly much, but at the same time, they don’t care. They don’t care that they can’t get closer because they don’t have the time to care, they don’t have time to think about how much they miss each other, there’s a war going on. They don’t care that not having the time to reconnect hurts because they cant. They care but at the same time they cant afford to care, so they don’t care.

The chorus lead up and fourth verse are lyrics that apply to both Gordon and barney as individuals:

Chorus lead up (note, this is an approximation as there are different people saying different things about what the actual lyrics are):

Buried alive now, buried alive now,

Buried alive now, cover your eyes now

This part of the song doesn’t give us much in terms of how it fits into the song’s narrative separate from my interpretation of how it fits barney and Gordon, so instead I will jump directly into my application to them. To put it simply, this part of the song is about how both barney and Gordon have had to bury their person hood and emotions deep down into themselves in order to protect themselves and survive.

For barney this starts as early as childhood to protect himself from bullying for being soft and goes even further as he has to act the part of the machine as a CP, where he also has to push down his individuality and humanity lest he be discovered as a mole. For Gordon its more recent during the Resonance cascade where he has to push down anything not strictly survival related in order to make it out alive, which continues on during half life 2, having to mantle this heroic persona that has developed in his 20-year absence. And the lyric “cover your eyes now” is explaining how burying their person hood and taking on these far more resilient personas is like covering their eyes in the face of danger, something that is an action of self-protection seen in childhood but ultimately if something is really a danger, it doesn’t do much to protect you, telling us that the personas that both Gordon and barney put on don’t do much in the long run to protect themselves from emotional hurt.

Fourth verse:

When you breathe the air

It tastes like medicine

And overwhelming days

Are nothing that I can’t hide

When you walk alone you think such foolish things

And so disappointed we are

With no one around to love

This verse is the speaker talking about the isolation that they and the unnamed other person feel without being able to connect to one another, the most obvious evidence of this is the last two lines, blatantly stating that they are disappointed by not being able to love someone else. Its further evidenced by the first two lines where even the air is sour and nasty. The isolation this verse exudes is made worse when looking at the 3rd and 4th lines where the speaker talks about hiding their own negative feelings, likely because they have no one to talk to about them.

In regard to Barney and Gordon during Half-life 2, the initial assessment of the meaning of this verse holds true, they both have to walk alone in their paths, isolated from others and each other, having to push past their pain to move forward. This verse is also far more depressing for barney and Gordon, I feel, as they aren’t just not able to communicate with each other, often times they literally are physically alone, especially Gordon, throughout the games. Barney, while physically surrounded by people, is still alone as he likely spends most of the time still undercover in a dangerous environment where one misstep could lead to his discovery.

The one line I neglected to address in my initial analysis of this verse is the line where the speaker mentions how when you’re alone you think foolish things. This line could mean a multitude of things, it could be about a generalized “foolish thing” or it could be directed to either the previous or following lines, either calling thinking that you can always hide your feelings foolish or that being disappointed when you have no one to love foolish. Or it could be saying both are foolish. I choose to interpret it as addressing both the previous and following lines. However, I also believe that the two lyrics the line could be addressing apply separately to Gordon and barney, with the previous line being more barney centric and the following line being more Gordon centric (however they do still apply to both, don’t get me wrong).

I think that the 3rd and 4th lines apply to barney more directly because a significant personality trait I’ve discussed for him is his consistent hiding and obscuring of his thoughts and feelings, particularly his stronger ones. And Barney for this most part recognizes that he does this (though there are times I believe that he does it unconsciously out of habit for even the simplest of things,) and he recognizes that its unhealthy, he sees how lonely it makes him, but he’s still stuck alone in his head.

With Gordon, one of his main conflicts that I write about is his inability to connect with people and then feeling lonely in the disconnect, even before the resonance cascade, though it was far less pronounced then. But after, he’s so alone all the time, fighting alone, travelling alone, with none to help him for most of his journey and he’s lonely and scared and when someone is there for even the shortest amount of time and then dies or leaves him alone again he’s disappointed, but he constantly admonishing himself over feeling the need to connect, its dangerous to get attached its foolish to want someone there because they’ll die like they have every other time, and it makes connection near impossible.

Further, the first two lines can take on a more literally meaning where instead of the air only seeming to taste bad, it likely literally tastes bad from pollution mainly because I highly doubt the combine cares much for air quality, as long as they get the resources they want from earth, this feeds into the line in the chorus about burning their lungs when they breathe, the air is literally harming them when they try to communicate to each other and its hurts even as they simply exist.

To sum up, this song is about the disconnect that barney and Gordon feel from each other and the people around them for a multitude of universal and personal reasons, and how much they both rely on the disconnect to protect themselves from harm and despise it for how much it hurts.

#ponderingradioactivedecay #i just like tinking about them #honestly analysis of music is prob my fav form of esay to write #even though i didnt get to do it muchin school and a lot of the time i didnt enjoy it #i still enjoyed getting to ake stories about music i listended to i think most of hte reason i didnt enjoy it was cuz i never got to #analyze what i wanted but thats a given with how school makes you think you hate something becuz it doesnt let you do it #in a way u want to lead it #but ye enjoy me reading into music and applying it to my blorbos #iwillspeakincessantly