(SONG : Kevin – Macklemore and Ryan Lewis)
Dear Readers,
Watching this video made me think. Really think.
The questions posed by Macklemore, his rap verse speak a clear message. Unlike his previous globally recognized hits, this song tells a story, it has opinion and a whole lot of heart that I just couldn’t ignore.
Kevin, the depressed young adult with a troubled background, using and abusing to survive. To distract from his reality. He get’s picked up by the state – they tell him he has problems, he can’t concentrate, he’s depressed – but instead of supporting him to be able to live in his now, to fight against the negative. They sedate, feeding him pills to calm him down, to numb the world around him. Till he looses himself, and ultimately takes his own life.
Now, I’m not Kevin. That doesn’t necessarily mean I haven’t met a Kevin or can’t become him either. I hope you can keep up with my start analogy but the truth of the matter is, this worries me. I have fallen in love with more than one man similar to Kevin – a guy who has a troubled past, who seeks rest-bite in substance. I am in love with another Kevin, who has been prescribed medicine to medicate his human symptoms.
Lumping my loved ones into this box still doesn’t settle my soil. It still makes me question...
"isn’t there a little bit of Kevin in everyone?"
I look around on a day to day basis at the people around me, I talk to my friends and they till me how they are struggling. How they are juggling education and work with little to no success. I talk to adults and it’s pretty much one in the same, they are fighting against the bills, struggling to keep a household or stay in their jobs.
Out of all of the people I talk to there are at least half who have had problems with depression, mental disorders and/or coping with a terrible past. Just because those people are still fighting their battle today due to strong support networks or heavy medication – doesn’t mean they don’t all have a chance to meet the same fate as Kevin. Why should it be a constant battle to keep afloat? If having ‘problems’ and feeling ‘incomplete’ is a disposition, when most of us consume ‘drugs’ on a daily basis like, caffeine, nicotine and alcohol that alter our state of reality – then aren’t the majority of us walking around with a ‘Hi my name is Kevin’ sticker stuck on our backs?
I can’t count how many times someone has told me, ‘These pills just don’t work, I don’t feel like myself – this isn’t my reality ‘ i’d be a blood-money millionaire.
The people who aren’t medicated aren’t doing much better. So, all I can assume is that our world is littered with ticking time-bomb Kevin’s, with the elites, the people who take much more than they should from the rest of the world, just pushing down on us, to repress the problem that just doesn’t seem to disappear.
It just simply isn’t fair. I myself am not medicated, but I have had times where my emotions have got the better of me, where I haven’t felt like my life is going smoothly and where i’ve wanted to just give it all up for sweet ignorance.
Does that make me a Kevin?
"If so, then we are all Kevin. It’s a human circumstance."
Macklemore is shouting for us to recognize we are collectively hitting a wall. Over and over again. We aren’t finding solutions, we are just paying off the problems, and dampening the pain so we can continue the way we are without change. To change, you have to admit that something needs to be lost or something isn’t right. A need for things to be different. Looking through the comments on this video, I know I am not the only person that could relate to this message.
Now that in itself is depressing.
I feel it’s up to us to demand more from our state – to listen to what the story each of our Kevin’s leave behind when they say they’ve had enough with this world. ‘Your killing me’, the harrowing lines speak so much truth. It hurts to admit but we are killing ourselves in this direction. It’s not the majorities wish, but most are too sedated to recognize our situation and fight against it. Until we can all say we are happy in our day to day lives, we are happy as who we are or if we aren’t we know the steps we need to take to change it, this isn’t over.
As the pills may work for some, for the rest of us it isn’t always going to be perfect – there needs to be balance when you ride the ‘human wave’ but right now, we could all go down like the titanic. For this not to happen I believe that we need to open our eyes to the fact that Kevin is not the only person suffering in this world. We all are.
This song gives me hope that more people are starting to realize we need to be active, we need to speak up and love each other more. I respect Macklemore for using his platform to speak such home truths, his sincerity is visible – it inspires me. All I can hope is that it reaches it’s audience, like it’s reached me, to speak up about what’s really going on in an effort to change it for the better.
Love, Your Fellow Kevin
x