To Be (Condemned) Human

The song “Ser Humano” from the now disbanded Mexican band Natalia y la Forquetina seems to have a deeper meaning than the simple lazy rock song it sounds like. The song’s title can translate to either “Human Being” or “To Be Human” and its lyrics carry a rather significant message about humanity, but when paired with its music video it could be interpreted in a rather depressing way that can show the rather pathetic state humanity is currently in. Even though the video can seem very simple at first sight, a deeper analysis of the images combined with the lyrics of the song, suggests that the song might carry a much more deep meaning than one might think.

Let’s start off with what’s not so obvious in the obvious. The video basically consists of the band performing in front of a huge crowd in a darkly lit space and the crowd consists only of inflated dolls that look like the members of the band. We’ll deal with the dolls later, for now let’s focus on the band itself. It’s quite normal for this band to do actions that seem abnormal and artificial, but in this case doing that portrays them as something that goes beyond just a band. In this video the band does nothing more than what a band does: play music. Not only that, but they seem to be devoid of much emotion while they do it and they just play on without showing much emotion in their faces, and most of the shots are too fast for the audience to be able to tell precisely what their facial expression actually is, since the lighting makes it hard to see anything. This automatically causes a detachment from the members of the band and shows them as something close to a bunch of robots just playing music and shaking their heads on an enlightened stage. This image is strengthened right at the beginning where the singer trots into the stage with a rather null expression on her face; and later on her hair covers her eyes most of the time, so it is too difficult to see what her expressions are.

The audience in the video is the point where anybody watching the video can see that it is indeed an unusual video. The crowd which would be a regular concert crowd where any contemporary music-enthusiast would feel identified if it were not for the fact that they are all just a huge mass of plastic, inflatable dolls with a ridiculed look and performing actions that are stereotypical ofrock-band fans, such as fainting when they see their idols. The chorus of the song says “I can’t complain, I’m a human being. I can’t complain, I’m condemned.” These lyrics, as well as the general themes that are mentioned throughout the whole song seem to express that humanity is a species that is fated to behave in the way that the plastic dolls in the video behave.

Moreover, in the video the inflated dolls admire the band, which could symbolize something bigger than what it is, such as perhaps the entire world of media and entertainment, which so many of us are attached to nowadays, or even so, anybody that we admire. In this sense it’s logical for the band to portray themselves as machines that simply carry out their work. This way they might be trying to portray how even the idols that we admire so much are also just “condemned humans” that, as the lyrics go, “dream the daily routine.” This conveys not only the “insignificant masses” as the condemned humans, but even the big and successful characters of our time as part of this condemnation.

The lyrics also seem to strongly support this idea. The lyrics talk about a “small place where there is only green, blue, coffee, pain” which can quite easily be a reference to the Earth, since green and blue are indeed the colors that are normally used to represent the planet. The part that makes it problematic is where it says coffee and pain. Coffee is a drink that is used to “keep people going,” to prevent them from falling asleep during their boring and tiring jobs that don’t entertain them enough to keep them awake throughout the whole day. So in a sense, coffee in this song is referring to the artificial products that have been made to make our lives progress as if nothing bad is happening. Then the “pain” breaks reality in and shows how we are simply suffering from our lives. Combined with the images of the video, where we are shown just how pathetic we look when we are “having fun at a concert,” the music video manages to convey a rather depressing view on the current state of humanity.

The band is probably trying to portray this in order to try to try to get their view on the world out and perhaps see some improvement in the “condemned humanity.”