Let’s look at three songs: “Cabaret” (from the musical of the same title), “Is That All There Is?” and “More Than a Woman” by the Bee Gees.
In “Cabaret” the character Sally Bowles sings, “Start by admitting from cradle to tomb / It isn’t that long a stay / Life is a cabaret, old chum…” She asserts that life is so short that one shouldn’t take it seriously and should be treated as boisterous fun.
Earlier, she sang:
I used to have this girlfriend known as Elsie
With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea
She wasn’t what you’d call a blushing flower
As a matter of fact, she rented by the hourThe day she died the neighbors came to snicker:
“Well, that’s what comes from too much pills and liquor”
But when I saw her laid out like a queen
She was the happiest corpse I’d ever seen
Does the idea of a happy corpse ring true? As a corollary of this, is it plausible that a smile survives hours after death?
While “Cabaret” compares life to the titular cabaret, there are many other songs with simplified comparisons of life, none of which cover the full breadth of human experience. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that the world is inexhaustible, and to extend this, so too is life.
In “Is That All There Is?” each question has several levels. When confronted with the fire that claims her childhood home, the disappointment of the circus and finally the loss of her love, the song echoes “Cabaret” with the chorus:
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
Much like the way “Cabaret” repeats “Life is a cabaret, old chum / Come to the cabaret”.
In “More Than a Woman” by the Bee Gees, they sing, “We can take forever, just a minute at a time”. Can we visualize this in the concrete terms of the song? In Western tradition, we often associate the search for forever with young love. What does it mean to fuse the momentary and the forever?
The Bee Gees song gives us an entry to the changing sense of time experienced by a living person, as contrasted to the objective time of a fossil carbon-dated by a paleontologist.