Five songs inspired by Franz Kafka
Frank Kafka was one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th Century. His works are defined by a combination of realism, in which his protagonists live seemingly ordinary lives, albeit mixed with the unbelievable. For instance, the main character in the short story The Metamorphosis is transformed into a bug-like creature when he wakes up on a seemingly ordinary day.
Kafka’s works usually feature characters facing strange situations that seemingly arise out of the mundanity and ennui of modern social existence. They frequently experience the undesirable emotions of alienation and anxiety and struggle to gain any rational sense of the world in which they live.
In fact, Kafka’s works are so prominent in the realm of social understanding that they helped to coin the phrase ‘Kafkaesque’. It is usually used to describe the absurd situations that we find ourselves in, particularly those that occur as a result of bureaucracy – Kafka’s frequent main target in terms of his vitriol.
The influence of Kafka on the world of art and literature is undeniably far-reaching, but how about his impact on the world of music? To answer that question, we’ve put together five songs that have been inspired by the Prague-born writer’s best works. Here we go.
Five songs inspired by Franz Kafka:
‘Colony’ – Joy Division
Joy Division’s final record, Closer, released in 1980, had a track entitled ‘Colony’, which is a direct reference to Kafka’s 1914 short story In The Penal Colony. The song’s lyrics see Ian Curtis draw on the darker parts of his consciousness, which Kafka was also able to produce effortlessly.
Curtis’ lyrics are difficult to interpret (as had Kafka’s words been). His widow, Deborah Curtis, once noted that the words meant a lot to Ian: “If he put a record on, we’d have to listen to absolutely everything. He used to talk about what the lyrics meant and the story behind them. He didn’t like songs that didn’t mean anything.”
‘At Night’ – The Cure
Robert Smith is an admitted huge fan of Kafka, and he wrote a song having been directly influenced by Kafka’s short story At Night. The Cure’s 1980 album Seventeen Seconds features a track with the same title and focuses on a watchman character from the story.
Smith said of the track: “That song is inspired by Kafka, to the fact that there is a guardian – that is God’s concept after all – that sees us. Coming back to the night, it recurs frequently in what I write because I prefer it to daylight by far. I usually work at night and sleep during the day. I don’t know why, but it is so.”
‘A Letter to Elise’ – The Cure
Yet ‘At Night’ is not the only song by The Cure in which Smith expressed his love for Kafka. One of the best songs on the band’s Wish album is ‘Letter to Elise’, which, of course, takes its title from Kafka’s collection of letters to his fiancée Felice Bauer, Letters to Felice.
“For the first time, the narrator’s voice was mine,” Smith said of beginning to understand Kafka’s works. “I was the narrator. I was blending myself in his words. I read and re-read all of his books: The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Castle. His influence on my writing is huge, as on ‘A Letter To Elise,’ directly inspired by his Letters to Felice.”
‘Bloom’ – Radiohead
Brad Pitt once said of Radiohead: “What is so important about Radiohead is that they are the Kafka and the [Samuel] Beckett of our generation. What comes out in them, I don’t think is anything they could actually articulate, but I would certainly say that it’s that which we all know is true somewhere when we’re in our deepest sleep.”
In this light, Radiohead are indeed akin to Kafka in the sense that often what is most important is difficult to actually articulate (as Kafka underlying expressed throughout his works). One track that creates a trapped feeling (as in the likes of The Trial) is ‘Bloom’ from The King of Limbs – the whispers coming from beyond the realms of our understanding are at once beautiful yet simultaneously harrowing.
‘ASLSP (As Slow aS Possible’ – John Cage
Kafka’s prose is defined by two things – firstly, its experimental nature and, secondly, the fact that much of it is open to interpretation. In light of that, we could argue that the experimental composer John Cage shares much in common with the literary icon.
Of particular similarity is Cage’s piece ‘ASLSP (As Slow aS Possible’, which is intended to be played as slowly as possible (as the title suggests). Interestingly, Cage gave no hint as to how slow the piece ought to be played, nor for how long, so he has undoubtedly left the work open to interpretation in the way that Kafka had done with much of his most significant writing.