Myths & Music: Exploration and journey

By Sophie Kolax

Why do we yearn for the unknown? What sends us out of our homes? What makes us take the long way home? What are we aiming to accomplish when we go out of our comfort zones into the distance? 

For a long time, people were exploring for practical reasons: to broaden trade routes, to expand connections for imports and exports, and to gain access to materials not found at home. 

Our modern world is infinitely connected. Now, we can experience a taste of anywhere in the world in a 30-minute scroll session: watch someone run the Great Wall of China, develop the perfect chai recipe, watch six of your friends meet elephants in Thailand, and so on. We don’t need to travel anymore or to explore, yet we still do. It is still valued as one of the most life-enriching activities we can do. 

This ancient sentiment of yearning for the unknown has not stopped. Artists continue to use music to explore our motivations for taking the road less travelled. Motifs featured in Homer’s Odyssey or Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica are repeated era after era and again in modern music. 

Jason’s Dream Team Tours The Sea of Monsters

The story of Jason and the Argonauts all begins with a prophesied future king assembling a team of heroes to take on the most difficult task his people could think of: travel to the end of the known world and retrieve the Golden Fleece. 

Jason brings together some of the most famed heroes of ancient Greece for his treacherous journey to Colchis. He brings together the likes of Orpheus, a musical legend; Atalanta, a female warrior extraordinaire; and Heracles. Here on the famed ship of the Argo, the dream-team concept is born. Maybe it is a little on the nose, but the song ‘Come Together’ by the Beatles fits ever so perfectly as a modern musical example of team-building. 

Now, the journey of the Argonauts aims to bring the golden fleece back to Jason’s home so he can claim the throne as rightful heir of Iolcus, but the majority of the epic talks about just how many times a group of strong and intelligent individuals can get lost on their travels. Maybe they should have listened to the Indigo Girls and their song ‘Get Out the Map.' 

The sentiment of “I'm gonna clear my head / I'm gonna drink that sun” perhaps rang a little too true on the Argo, but if they kept listening, maybe they would have heard the Indigo Girls sing some good advice to ‘Get out the map,’ even if they asked for help and agreed to “leave the figuring to those we pass on our way out of town.”

While the Argonauts always appeared to be lost, the team did manage to obtain the Golden Fleece, thanks to the king’s daughter Medea, who happened to be a powerful sorceress, and her bewitching love for Jason. The team narrowly escaped Medea's family to return to Iolcus victorious.

Medea falls head over heels for Jason, leaving her entire life behind her when she promises to escape with Jason. The couple reminds me of Lord Huron’s ‘Ends of the Earth’. The chorus, “To the ends of the earth, would you follow me? / There's a world that was meant for our eyes to see” feels like an ode Jason would sing to get Medea to join him on his journey back from the Ends of the Earth.

The Argonauts paraded the Golden Fleece around Jason, and Medea took the throne, a successful hero's journey. You may even say that the ‘Dog Days Are Over’–or at least Florence + The Machine probably would have. 

I couldn’t tell this story without bringing up XTC’s ‘Jason and the Argonauts,’ which not only shares a name with the myth, but also reflects on the craze that can follow such a journey; the song itself builds on a repetitive melody, making the song feel almost endless, while lyrically exploring the aftermath of facing monsters, literal or mythical.

He wanted to prove himself as the rightful heir of his kingdom. He wanted to establish himself as a worthy hero and king, so obviously he had to achieve the impossible and make it back home.

What came first: the Journey or the Journier?

After Christopher Nolan’s IMAX sensation, it felt like the entire world and their mothers were talking about the Odyssey, so I am going to do so too.

In case you are unfamiliar with Homer’s epic, it begins after the Trojan War ends with victory for the Greeks, thanks to Odysseus’ infamous Trojan horse. After ten long years of battle, Odysseus and his crew head off into the sunset, hoping to see a little bit of the world as a reward for their hard work.

As The Chicks put it so eloquently, “(S)he needs wide open spaces / Room to make her big mistakes,” and big mistakes he makes. Odysseus faces Scylla and Charybdis, the sirens, and Circe. He then lands on the island of Polyphemus, a Cyclops, escaping by blinding him and cleverly calling himself ‘nobody.’  

Even after this, Odysseus is sent to the brink of the underworld to get directions. Jason could’ve taught him the same sentiment he learned from the Indigo Girls.

After losing his entire crew along the way, he eventually washes ashore on Ogygia, and Calypso, a magical nymph, falls madly in love with him. John Denver’s song, appropriately named Calypso, also encapsulated her and the island’s message of learning from discovery.

Christopher Nolan used the stay on Ogygia to explore Odysseus’s remorse for all the damage he had caused after the burning of Troy, in the war, and after losing the crew he cared so deeply about. This sentiment is beautifully encapsulated in The Killers' song ‘All These Things I’ve Done’–and honestly, what things hadn’t Odysseus done?

To bring The Chicks back into conversation, the Odyssey is framed in the lines “But now (s)he won't be coming back with the rest / If these are life's lessons, (s)he'll take this test,” from ‘Wide Open Spaces’.

After ten long years at sea, Odysseus makes his triumphant return, strings his iconic bow, and kills all the suitors fighting for Penelope’s hand in marriage and looking to take Odysseus’ throne as King of Ithaca.

For Penelope, Hozier’s song ‘Run’ comes to mind. I can imagine Penelope speaking out into the ether to her missing husband, “I need you to run to me, run to me, lover / Run until you feel your lungs bleeding.”

So this concludes the journey story to end all journey stories.

To wrap up, I will return to ‘Wide Open Spaces’ once more to conclude, as they say, “Who's never left home, who's never struck out / To find a dream and a life of their own / A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone.” As is evident across ancient epics and modern music, we will always look and explore to expand not only our physical boundaries, but also our perception of the world.