Song Analyses #1

Song Analyses 1

            Dark music usually portrays dark messages in its songs. Whether it’s death, failure, or heartbreak, hardcore music is home to depressing lyrics. However, some bands send positive messages beneath the depths of the seemingly solemn surface. Fittingly, the band Dress the Part does just this in there song “The Surface”. Shifting from negative to positive, in “Surfacing” Dress the Part uses oceanic symbolism and intense hyperbole in order to convey to message that “together we can find the way” and “overcome the ocean”.

            The message Dress the part aims for is one of hope and conquering. The message is aided greatly by oceanic symbolism. The song takes form as a journey from, “the depths beneath a violent sea” to the last line of the song, “to break through the waves”. These depths are symbolic of a negative dark place that the narrator wants to escape, where as “to taste the light is all I desire” symbolizes their need for light and comfort. Oceanic scenes of “setting sail” are brought up later as the narrator seems to get closer to their goal. The final lines of the song sum up the oceanic symbolism, “from the deepest sea and the darkest days/we will return to golden rays/overcome the ocean/to break through the waves”. The ocean is used to represent the subjects’ journey from dark to light, which is translated as from depression to happiness.

Hyperbole is a prominent device used throughout the song. With intense imagery,  “To taste the light is all I desire/for my frozen insides to burn with fire”, Dress the Part creates an epic scene of struggle. The narrator expresses how they want “to burn away my weakness” and “burn away my past”.  The narrator doesn’t literately want to “burn” away these things as much as they want to leave them behind. In the beginning of the song lines such as “the world is cold, I reach for the sun/thousands of miles above me”, are exaggerated to express the impossibility of overcoming something so great. The narrators struggle is greatly illuminated by the exaggerations.

As humans, we will all face a dark situation, one that is seemingly impossible to defeat. Dress the Part argues that anyone can indeed conquer this situation by using the vast ocean as the obstacle in the way of the narrator. Nothing is greater than the ocean and along with intense hyperbole to create a dramatic mission for success, Dress the Part aims to lift sprits as they say “together we can find the way”.