I can't quite pin down my thoughts on the song 'Mercy'. The second single from the 2015 album Drones, it's been a surprise highlight of my two Muse concerts. I'm tempted to write it off with something ambitiously smarmy - 'Mercy' is my fourth-favorite track from my fourth-favorite album by my fourth-favorite band - but it wouldn't feel right to dismiss a song where we fans clap along as if it's part two of 'Starlight', or we're part, too, of the rhythm secction. My lasting memory of 'Mercy' is the feeling of joining into a group celebration - we're all Muse fans! But shouldn't a song with such a lofty distinction sound more... like Muse? Maybe in the mold of 'Time Is Running Out'?
Regardless, I've been trying to figure out why this song seems to have such a great effect on the concert crowd. The first lyrics in the song might be a hint - help me, I've fallen on the inside. I think as the average Muse crowd gets a little older, the song makes more sense to us. At some point, we've all felt something fall away from us, within us, like it's gone forever to the inside. It's an intensely personal sensation, but the song drowns out the darkness, and for a few minutes we forget our decision to suffer alone.
Those first words always remind me of the Japanese phrase ochikomu, meaning 'be depressed'. It's really two words working together, 'to fall' (ochiru) and 'be crowded' (komu), and I think it does much more to capture the feeling than any equivalent English expression. It's one thing to feel completely defeated by a powerful opponent or a uniquely tragic situation, but when the darkness is borne out of an everyday setback we sometimes can't help but become our own harshest critic. And what is a better word than crowded for feeling unable to get away from our own critics? And of course, there is nowhere to stand up in a crowd that won't allow it.
Lyrically, Muse has steadily drifted from introspective beginnings to broader commentaries on the larger forces shaping daily life. Drones is often described as a concept album, using the idea of an autonomous machine as a starting point for many of its songs. Matt Bellamy himself has said Drones charts a journey that ends in a human drone rebelling against an oppressor. But in 'Mercy', I've always felt that subtle reference to individual complicity, mind over what matters, eroding our individuality with every little self-flagellation. The song is the awakening before forgiveness, before we ask those around us, because we must forgive ourselves first, and allow ourselves to stand up on the inside. If we have no mercy for ourselves, who will show it to us? Given how I've seen others around me respond to the song, maybe some, maybe many, of my fellow Muse fans wonder the same thing, just briefly, before they make room so their seatmate can stand up.
