Polarize me, sensitize me,
Criticize me, civilize me,
Compensate me, animate me,
Complicate me, elevate me.

I have such complicated feelings about “Animate.”

On the one hand, this song f’ing rocks. The guitar is crushing, the drums are understated but phenomenal, and it’s some of Geddy’s most memorable bass work of the entire discography, IMO.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, Ged recorded the bass line using a dying amplifier he’d found lying in the studio’s garbage pile. We should all be so poetic on our last legs. Good job, little Garbage!Amp. You sounded amazing.

But on the other hand, there are those lyrics. On the surface, “Animate” sounds like it’s a man begging a woman to “sensitize me,” “complicate me,” “civilize me,” etc. as if said woman’s sole purpose in his life is to orbit him like a planet. In exchange, the man will “rule his tender part” and will “learn to gently dominate” the woman.

Gosh. How romantic.

If this was intended as a love song, I’d rather Neil stick to writing about the French Revolution.

But “Animate” wasn’t intended as a love song, per se. Neil had wanted to write a study of Carl Jung’s concept of the anima/animus, a theory which states man and woman have a “shadow self” made of the qualities of their non-identifying gender. In other words, a man identifies as a man by allowing his masculine qualities to dominate his feminine ones; and a woman identifies as a woman by letting her feminine qualities dominate the masculine ones.

Setting aside the fact that these days we generally understand gender more as a spectrum than a binary, the lyrics of '“Animate” do make a lot more sense in the context of a male narrator singing about and to his inner feminine side.

Problem is, “Animate” exists in a vast ocean of love songs, and the listener doesn’t necessarily know this song is meant to be about analytical psychology instead. You hear it, and you assume it’s just another love song. And a particularly macho one, at that.

“Animate” is a killer opening track to a killer album, but it’s also a prime example of Death of the Author in the wild. In my opinion, Neil swung for the fences writing this one—as he always does!—but instead fouled hard and ended up conking out the ump.

But damn if those lyrics aren’t also really freakin’ earworm-y, too.