I suppose no song can really describe a person perfectly (not even the person who wrote it), and besides, this whole thing is an exercise in subjectivity anyway. It always struck me as egotistical or at the least delusional to insist that a song describes oneself. It conjures images of that guy at a party bogarting the dancefloor, insisting to anything he wants to fuck that “this song is about me!” But as I said before, I will play the game, so I chose a song that doesn’t exactly describe me, but is a fairly accurate depiction of where I am in my life right now, and how I feel about it.
Never mind that this is in itself a cracking tune, and that I’d love that sax riff to be my own personal theme music---the beauty of this song is in its lyrics. It’s a portrayal of alienation and disappointment, of a young man moving to the city of his dreams and finding that it can only tear him down and crush all his hopes, that “it’s got so many people but it’s got no soul.”
This isn’t exactly how I feel about my own relocation to a large city (not that Dublin is exactly on the scale of London, or indeed any other "large city", but it's where I am now, so deal with it), but I’m on my way. I had high hopes and big dreams when I moved here, none of which exactly came true, but somehow I haven’t given up all hope just yet. I haven’t become quite the empty nihilist the character in the song has. It’s true, though, that I thought the city held everything, and that I found out I was wrong.
“You used to think that it was so easy.” That’s teenage arrogance, isn’t it? The feeling that once you finally set out on your own life that you’re going to become master of everything, that you’re going to win at life. But you don’t. Fact is, very few people do. At least, not when they first fly the nest. It takes time and it takes effort to be who you want to be, and many of us are still trying.
The song ends in a quiet conversation between the two friends, talking about nothing, about their lives in the city, about moving away and dropping out and living quietly and peacefully in the country, if only they could “give up the booze and the one night stands.” It’s a far-off dream, though. They have some work to do first.
The narrator tells us that his friend is “never gonna stop moving,” and that’s why he finds it so difficult to make anything of himself. But there are people who can’t settle down, no matter how hard they try: some people are simply born a rolling stone. I’m not saying I’m exactly one of those people, but barely a year out of college and I’m starting to feel the itch.
Without the crutch of full-time education to fall back on, life can seem a little meaningless, especially if you’re not exactly sure what you want to do with it, and so you end up floating from entry-level career post to entry-level career post, from project to project, and from one corner of society to another.
There’s always that urge to move on, to see what’s over the next hill, that there’s something better maybe somewhere else, anywhere else other than here. But the problem is, once you get there, “somewhere else” becomes “here” and another “somewhere else” crops up over the horizon, and the whole cycle starts again.
If Baker Street tells me anything, it’s that I’m not alone in feeling unfulfilled. This has happened before, and it will undoubtedly happen again. There are others who don’t find what they’re looking for, maybe don’t have the motivation or networking skills to seek it out, and so end up stranded in a place that once seemed brimming with opportunity; stranded in a “here” that once was a “there”.
All we can do, I suppose, is to keep that dream of our dotage, that quiet little town where we can forget about everything, that fantasy of the ultimate “somewhere else”, a place where we don’t have to struggle and toil and deal with feeling scooped out of everything we thought we could be. It’s never the destination that causes trouble on a journey: it’s the getting there is the hard part.
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