West End Girls (not Jones Beach)

I like rock music but I’d never consider myself knowledgeable. On the way home yesterday while listening to the radio in my car I heard a song I’d never heard before.  I did a bit of research and found that it was actually produced in the 1980’s, attained much critical acclaim and had a very brief revival in 2012 when it was sung at the closing ceremonies of the London 2012 Olympics. It goes under the title “West End Girls.”  As I listened without the benefit of actually knowing what the lyrics were but picking up on the refrain “East End Boys, West End Girls”, my mind began to formulate the setting and refrain in a way I could relate to, imagine or understand them to be; but clearly not, upon closer inspection, as they were written or their context.

I imagined a skiing resort in a town in Colorado. I imagined a group of college guys from a high end “eastern” university (think Harvard, Yale, and Brown etc.) on a ski trip during break intermingling with the local (“western”) women of a similar age.  Per Wikipedia the song’s lyrics and setting (London) focus on class, inner city pressure and existential anxiety.  So, aside from the banal is there a takeaway from my “vision” and the facts; an extrapolation if you will?

After some reflection and a night’s sleep I came to the conclusion that my personal takeaway from this experience was to remind me that unless you make the effort to actually determine the facts, you live in your own personal silo, hearing what you want to hear, seeing what you want to see and believing what you want to believe.  As a somewhat privileged American baby boomer I let my own experiences color my interpretation, never once thinking it could be about something outside my personal line of sight. Moreover and only because I wanted to know more about the “Western town” which I imagined was being referenced did I learn about what the lyrics are really about and their context.  Going one step further, perhaps a larger takeaway is that if attitudes about things like race, class, privilege, sexual orientation and the like are going to change we all need to step outside of our personal silos.