A Review of “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie as a Love Song
For many people, Valentine’s Day is a day to declare their feelings for someone, to write letters to their friends, to go out with their family or to sit alone eating ice cream while casually watching a romantic movie. For me it’s all of these things together: it’s a day where we celebrate love.
We celebrate it with our actions, gifts, letters, but above all, with music. We usually dedicate romantic love songs to our loved ones, but there is a song that could be dedicated to all mankind.
“Under Pressure” by Queen & David Bowie is a 1980’s rock classic, which, although at first glance doesn’t it seem like it, tells a love story.
The song’s entrance, with its cymbals and iconic finger snaps, is broken within seconds with the conflicted, “Pressure.” The singers begin the story by portraying how the stress of everyday problems causes breakdowns and abandons the people on the street.
As the song progresses, the lyrics continue to describe this theme, repeating twice that it is because the people constantly fall into stress. The constant desperation of success and fear of the streets is all-consuming.
People despair, scream and pray that tomorrow will be kinder but they keep ending up on the street. It is then when the bridge of the song arrives and the finger snaps are isolated again that a solution appears.
It seems that love is considered a solution, or at least some form of escape, but how is it possible to find it in a world so consumed by evil? Why is there so much evil in the world that even love is consumed by it?
People are not only on the street because of economic or social problems, for the metaphor implies more than that. Abandonment on the street represents each of us abandoning another at their own mercy. There is no love here.
From the beginning,the composers have built an image in which the submission to fear and stress leads to an isolation from everything and everyone. The song is not just about the problems of the world, but why they exist.
Can love really be the solution to the evil in this world? Well, if such evil is born in the lack of it, its presence must disintegrate it.
By the end of the song, Bowie sings reasons to return to love. There will always be evil in the world that we cannot control; there will always be things that fill us with fear and want to drive us away, but we cannot let it consume us and harm us .
We must return to love and care for ourselves, to care for others. In the midst of despair, love is the force that moves everyone to grow, and return to where we belong: to others.
Love is the only thing that unites us, and we are reminded of that every Feb. 14. Although the plan to watch the movie alone is tempting, remember that humans are not meant to be abandoned on the streets.