Analyzation of "Save The Children"

Save the Children is very somber and chilling. That is because the world the Gaye describes is bare, not cultivated, and rendered this way through  fault of our own. The most pressing thing that he says is Who really cares, Who’s willing to try to save a world, That’s destined to die”. Automatically it is understood that the world that is destined to die in the near future is not due to some planet imbalance, but due to the legacy of our violence, and our hate. If our world is any indication, this violence and hate will be learned and ingrained into our next generation just like we “inherited” it from the previous generations. Gaye does not sugarcoat the situation he calls the world “in despair”. This reaction to the Earth and the lives in which we live is very strong and dramatic and were probably strongly influenced by the senseless violence that was portraying itself in this song’s time. War has for a long time been a part of humankind’s history. Before when they were no atomic bombs and no threats to wipe out life, war was a way of life. But not in the day Marvin Gaye sings of. If war continues, then the trend we are on shows the only end is sight is through more volatile weapons and more destruction. It nuclear fallout is in our future, then there is little anyone can do to prepare. Not only it is what we were doing, but how we are living. How we live as a society shows the polar inequalities of being in rich and poor and racism between people that has created boundaries and torn people apart. The way how Gaye first normally asks each question shows how serious he is about what he is saying it. Then him singing echoes his earlier sentiment showing how prevalent and how inevitable it is for us to act this way. Like it is our human nature to continue living this destructive way. Gaye describes it here “All who is to blame, we can't stop livin'”. It is a sentiment on how we live the only ways we know how, from what is taught us and what we adopt us our own ways. Unfortunately war with other peoples from different background, languages, and religion has been a consistent blimp on our history. It is how we have learnt to deal with each other, and is almost a practiced nature of humans. We accept it as a way of life, and wars crazy enough make a human life worthless just because it is on the enemy’s side. Also very notable in our world is how a president can inherit a war, when they receiving president left is not fully resolved. Just like that we as people are inheriting this acceptance and desensitization of violence. Because it is all we know, we continue living life like this until given a dramatic reason to stop. Gaye will soon offer a reason to stop the violence. One aspect that compelled me about the line “We can’t stop living”, was that it seems out of our control. For instance, people in war take apart of violence that doesn’t always make sense, but as the Vietnam War showed, it was out of many young boys’ choice whether they would risk their life for war. Although they were made to kill, and to bomb, the choice to order these commands was made from somebody higher up. What was left for Vietnam draftees to do after finding they were going off to war, to either escape or go with it. Just when Gaye’s lyrics have traveled to the abyss of miserable and disheartening. He offers advise to “Live for Life”. So this is living in a way where we don’t have to impress anyone. Or we don’t have because a man in a uniform tells us t. This life that Gaye talks about is quite literally life, posterity, growth. Who else better to encompass that hope, that future than the kids. To reflect this sudden hope, there is a change is the gloomy overcast of the effect of the spoken word, and than the sung word. Just like the lyrics are getting brighter, so is the mood of the tune. The background vocals really work to open up this track and create a different sound at the end. Then the beat changes again, to less jazzy and more up-tempo, usually this would indicate an increase in light-heartedness, but it begins to sound like a carnival tune, where we are back to the present, and therefore are stuck in our bad habits and practices. While the hopeful music represents the future, this return to busy drums, and instruments represents the return to our violent, world full of despair. This return reflects the last lines to be sung, and they are the most gloomy. They are “But who really cares, Who's willing to try, Yes, to save a world, Yea, save our sweet world, Save a world that is destined to die”. The purpose of this I feel was to bring us back to the world in which we are in. The world in which people are set in their ways and change are unsure. Just like that it leaves the hanging question, ‘Will the world be saved for the children”’, unanswered. Gaye has given us our reprieve to “save the children”. It is up to us to decide what kind of world we want to leave for our descendants because what we leave for them, ultimately they can leave for their children, and so on.