My Most Favoritest Song Ever: Driving the Last Spike by Genesis

I have so many things I want to talk about in this journal — writing in here is much like exercising for me. I never want to do it, but afterward I feel much better about myself and the universe around me. I guess one difference is that here once I start writing I never want to stop. It’s only the motivation to get started that’s an issue.
But okay, let’s do the favorite song thing. I don’t know why but I just feel the need to write, like the universe just needs me to write these two entries about these two songs before I move on to more intense topics so today I’ll do Driving the Last Spike by Genesis.
I couldn’t find a pic of the album insert that said something about how many railroad workers died building Britain’s railroad in the 1800’s. This song is about a guy who leaves his family to go work on that railroad. It’s a 10 minute epic about this guy who works and works and suffers and gets exploited by the company. On the surface this is a song about worker exploitation and a story about a man who loves God and has left his family on an epic quest, but a quest that is ultimately for the benefit of his family.
So this song is on the album We Can’t Dance by Genesis. When I was 16 I read a book that changed my life called The Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg about 20 men and 20 women who go on this epic quest to climb a mountain and find the gods that live at the top. My whole sense of reality changed after reading this book (some call the book atheist propaganda, which I must admit is fair) and it almost instantly made me want to write stories because I wanted to share that kind of profound vision with others.
So I had three albums on random in my 3 disc CD changer while I read that book back in the mid nineties. We Can’t Dance by Genesis, Vitalogy by Pearl Jam, and Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails. Here’s my Spotify playlist of these albums: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6gHuIoAUXngT6cojeMixOV?si=a158d3f23df44c86 — so these three albums are all fantastic and have all stood the test of time, but they’re very different from each other, from three very different genres and present three very different moods. But somehow, all three of these albums fit amazingly well in my head to The Kingdoms of the Wall. Any song from any of these albums brings me back to that book.
Especially Driving the Last Spike. There are so many parallels. They’re on this epic quest that they likely won’t return from, facing great danger and hardship, their love of God at the center of their ambition.
Funny how our minds make these associations. Like probably no one else has this same association between these two pieces of art and yet it’s so strong and meaningful for me.
So I’ve been listening to this song for many years and back in the day I just thought of the story as this sad example of evil corporations exploiting and deceiving good hard working people, but over the years I started to perceive something I’d kind of been blind to: the masculinity. This is a song about what it means to be a man. It’s an answer to toxic masculinity.
And The Kingdoms of the Wall also had a lot of rather masculine feel to it, which annoyed me when I first read it, like when I was younger I just didn’t agree with the concept of gender and just kind of rejected this idea that people need to behave in certain ways based on their gender. And granted, i still feel that way but now, I’m not sure what’s different.
Hmm, not sure I like how this entry has gone so far. Like it just doesn’t seem as interesting as I’d hoped. I wasn’t planning on getting into the whole thing about gender though I don’t know where I expected my mind and fingers to go when I start talking about how this song represents what it means to be a man. My whole life everyone around me has been obsessed with gender–no that’s not true–from about 1994 when I changed shool districts and started high school all the way up to about 2007 when I moved to seattle and got involved with the kink community, but even then it was only certain people who were hyper focused on gender.
Gosh, I got real off topic. I just turned the song on. Maybe that’ll bring my mind back to what I actually wanted to say, except I think I already covered everything I wanted to say. It all just sounded so much more profound and meaningful in my head.
Oh wait, no the last thing is that being a man, at least in my head, a quote-unquote “real man” is about building things. I guess in Kingdoms of the Wall they weren’t building anything, so maybe going on an epic quest to fetch a piece of knowledge or data, can be equated to building something, as it is often just as necessary as the actual building. But anyway, manhood to me is defined by building something that matters to your community, that makes the lives of the people around you better. That’s why men are supposed to be strong, is not for war and destruction. It’s for lifting and connecting and building.
Blasting, and cutting through god’s country like a knife.
Showing no fear of what lies up ahead.
But it’s like, everything these days is being done by machines. It’s like the very concept of manhood has been taken away from us by machines.
I mean, we still have some traditional construction and maintenance jobs but they are all overshadowed and dwarfed by the power and success of machines.
Hmm, now this is a new thought that hadn’t come to me before this moment. If being a man is about building things, which I feel it is for some reason or another, so I have to assume that some others feel the same, then it stands to reason that many men aren’t able to feel like real men anymore.
I guess I have the advantage of being a programmer. I build things. I just do it virtually. And also I have the advantage of being raised without much gender, at least at home–I still got a lot of gender nonsense at school (You’d better not cross your legs, go grocery shopping or enjoy gardening by god because those are girl things! You should like sports more.)
Anyway, I’m sure someone else has presented this idea that machines are stealing our manhood by doing the work that men traditionally did. I wonder if that’s why men often lash out at immigrants too, like deep in our subconscious we believe there’s only a little bit of manhood left and we want it all to ourselves.

Related posts