The1980s were a very creative and successful time for Jon Anderson. Yes’ 90125 was a blockbuster hit, Jon & Vangelis were garnering commercial and critical acclaim, and Jon’s solo career was in full swing with popular albums like Animation, 3 Ships and In the City of Angels.
In 1984, Jon found time to contribute the song Cage of Freedom to the soundtrack for Georgio Morodor’s Metropololis Redux. The film is a restoration version of the 1926 silent sci-fi classic directed by the legendary Fritz Lang, but with music provided by popular performers from the 1980s, including Freddy Mercury, Adam Ant, and Bonnie Tyler.
Metropolis remains one of the most visually impressive, influential, and thought provoking films in cinematic history. Its central theme, egregious social and economic inequality, is as pertinent today as ever. As the philosopher Plato noted, there is nothing more tragic than a city divided against itself, where one half of the population live in luxury, but where the other half are plunged into grief.
Metropolis tells the story of carefree elite which populate the skyscrapers of a futuristic city. These fortunate sons and daughters fritter their time and energy away on idle pursuits and trivial pleasures, much as we moderns anesthetize ourselves with “reality TV,” computer games, and the like. However, beneath the great city a vast underclass toils incessantly to provide the energy that powers the great Metropolis. The lives of these underground dwellers are so bleak that they plan a revolt, which ultimately threatens to destroy the all of Metropolis. In the end, disaster is averted, but only because masses that built Metropolis and the elites that planned it are forced to work together.
Today, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened to alarming proportions. The lessons of Metropolis (and history) suggest that such economic imbalances are inherently unstable. Put simply, economic injustice inevitably entails forms of oppression. Jon Anderson’s song, Cage of Freedom, zeroes in on a subtle form of oppression, namely the totalitarian potential of technology.
In Metropolis, the elites use video surveillance to track and subvert to workers. Director Fritz Lang was a visionary, but not even he could have imagined all the computer gizmos and gadgets that can be used today to track our every move. The lyrics of Cage of Freedom hone in how we are so often complicit in Orwellian forms and structures that govern our lives. Anderson sings, for example:
To make it safer we double the guard
Cage of freedom
There’s no escaping
We fabricated this world on our own.
There's no exit, there's no entrance
Remember how we swallowed the key?
Cage of freedom, that's our prison
We fabricated this world on our own.
Smart phones, I-Pads, and computers supposedly liberate us, but they can also be used to track our every move and devour our privacy. We love our personal data assistants and it can be hard to imagine life without them, but it also true that they ensnare us in many ways too. In fact, we hardly notice the subtle ways these devices can contribute to an Orwellian environment.
The final lines in Cage of Freedom highlight how constant and pervasive surveillance, designed to keep us safe, has the potential to turn the public square into a prison:
Big brother
Is there a bigger one watching you
Or is there one smaller
Who I should be watching too
Infinite circles of
Snakes eating their own tails
For every one chasing
Another is on the trail
Is that a friend
Can you tell, is he on your side?
'Cause I spy with my little eye
Yet another spy...
Metropolis and Jon Anderson’s Cage of Freedom examine the potentially sinister and dystopian aspects of technology. Cage of Freedom does not appear on any of Jon’s solo albums, so it is often overlooked, but I believe fans of Jon’s work will want to check it out. Both the song and the film are as pertinent as ever. For those who are interested, I explore this theme in greater length in my book “Yes and Philosophy” available in Amazon’s Kindle store.
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