Zarathustra vs Faith No More

Thus Spoke Zarathustra – First Part – Chapter 1: ‘On the Three Transformations’ I

vs “We Care A Lot” [Version 2], Faith No More (Introduce Yourself, 1987)

It is as if, in ‘On the Three Transformations’, Zarathustra is once again speaking to his own heart… yet this first chapter concludes with the phase 'Thus spoke Zarathustra,' is addressed - as if a speech to a crowd - to 'my brothers' and takes place in a town called the Motley Cow. Whatever the case, here we encounter the transformation from camel to lion, and from lion to a child: ‘Three transformations of the spirit I name for you’. Each deserves its own track. First, the camel.

The first transformation concerns becoming camel: ‘What is heaviest, you heroes? Thus asks the weight bearing spirit, and thus it kneels down, like the camel, and would be well laden’. Faith No More capture exactly this becoming-camel in their hit single "We Care A Lot" – and perhaps even reflect back to Nietzsche something of the self-mockery and sarcasm that can be surfaced in this passage of Zarathustra. 

“We care a lot about disasters, fires, floods and killer bees / …about the NASA shuttle falling in the sea / We care a lot about starvation and the food that Live Aid bought / We care a lot about disease…’. The song – pioneering rap-rock, powered by the fattest of metallic bass-lines and carried along by choral synth – is an inventory of things which Faith No More care about. This pretty much reflects the way Nietzsche constructs this first passage of the chapter: ‘What is heavy?’ ‘Is it not this…’; ‘Or is it not this’; and so on. Such things that are heavy would be ‘loving those who despise us’ – ‘we care a lot about the NY, SF and LA PD’. The lyrics delivered with thuggish brilliance by the superb original frontman Chuck Mosley: ‘we're out to save the world’. ‘It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it’. So true… ‘it's a dirty song but someone's gotta sing it’.

First Part: Chapter 1.II - Bob Marley and The Wailers