The meaning behind “Badlands”

From his best era we extract his best visual production, “Badlands”. This is a video that handles two senses. On the one hand we have the personal narration of the interpreter who tells the anguish of surviving in the desert, facing the natural limitations that this implies and in the background emerges the struggle for survival and death itself. Lyrically the song reflects that, a challenge to live in conditions of total adversity. However, the visual content gives us more elements to reinterpret the message or rather enrich it.

I ride alone, the wasteland that I cross
Will take another life, we'll take another loss
I feel a dry wind, dust is in my eyes
The artic cold at night, the earth, it tells me lies
God in heaven, my only friend
Will I live to see my journey's end?
As the world awakens me so hard, my values have been changed
I make a promise to myself: Never again
A dusty godforsaken path, endless to my dismay
I know these are the badlands, somehow I'll find my way
No more paradise, no more soothing rain
All the sacrifice, the pain is all the same
Still I'm pushing onward, alone I can't deny
My presence fills the desert, my spirit never dies
Will these lonely nights ever end?
Will I live to see my journey's end?
As the world awakens me so hard, my values have been changed
I make a promise to myself: Never again
A dusty godforsaken path, endless to my dismay
I know these are the badlands, somehow I'll find my way
The vultures that circle, cloud the empty sky,
Patiently waiting, they wait for me to die
Tortured and beaten, blistered by the sun
Forceful and heartless, have the badlands won?
Still I'm pushing onward, alone I can't deny
My presence fills the desert, my spirit never dies
As the world awakens me so hard, my values have been changed
I make a promise to myself: Never again
A dusty godforsaken path, endless to my dismay
I know these are the badlands, somehow I'll find my way

Visually, a story of these realities is constructed. First we see open shots of the desert in which dry, yellowish, bare land with an open sky predominates. Vultures can be seen circling the sky looking for corpses. These are the cursed lands where few survive. The novelty occurs when shots of human constructions made in these cursed lands that have been abandoned and destroyed by the inclemency of time begin to be interspersed. This tells us that humanity has succumbed, is not made to survive the cursed lands and therefore has to face extinction. There is no life that can withstand these conditions.

We also see how human technology has invaded natural spaces and turned them into desert zones for life. Instead of trees, plants or animals, cities are filled with concrete structures, metal, electrical grids, fuels that fatally pollute the air. Sometimes graffiti shots are captured in which deadly images predominate, indicating the state of war that humans live tribally.

There is a sequence of shots in the video featuring a skull, a puma roaming freely in the desert, the remains of an animal holding a cross, and a snake moving in the middle of the dry desert floor. All these images allude to the danger of facing the defiant nature of the cursed lands, but they also allude to the imminence of death. In that sense the fate of cities and desert environments is the same: the end, the collapse. Life cannot be sustained in these places and only the remains are left to bear witness to the end. Not for nothing does the end of the videoclip culminate with a shot of a declining cross in the cursed lands as the sun goes down. This is a very suggestive image because it indicates the end of life, of modern civilization built on the basis of death.