Utopia, Dystopia

Genre: Reggae Released: 2024-12-03

I named Gabriel directly in the lyrics because I didn’t want to hide where this came from. Gabriel García Márquez wrote a short parable I’ve never been able to shake, an old woman’s bad feeling spreading through a town by rumor alone until the town burns its own houses down fleeing a disaster that never actually arrived, and I wanted to retell it plainly instead of dressing it up as an original idea of my own.

What I paid the most attention to writing it was the mechanics, not the moral. I didn’t want to jump straight to “don’t panic.” I wanted to trace how fear travels, first a private unease, then a rumor, then an omen, then “one by one, soul by soul,” because I think that’s the part we really need to see clearly if we ever want to catch it in time. The ending isn’t really about the town burning. It’s about how ordinary and reasonable every step toward it looked at the time.

The chorus, “utopia, dystopia, don’t instruct me to fear,” is the part that matters most to me, and I built it to refuse a false choice. I don’t think paradise and ruin are opposites so much as two equally imagined states, built on nothing but collective belief. Refusing the instruction to fear felt like the one point in the whole cycle where the old woman’s premonition could actually have been stopped before it started.

Reggae felt inevitable the moment I knew what I was retelling, that tradition of the cautionary fable giving a Colombian story a musical home built exactly for this kind of patient lesson.

So turn up the volume and sing “Utopia Dystopia”!