I dunno.. your choice of keys didn't seem as random as you think. You went with 'backspace' an 'spacebar' for some reason, rather than 'tab' or 'scroll lock', which might have been more of a challenge.
Subconsciously, you already had a lot of meaning attached to them, which you later gathered as a decent translation. Still, I think there's a lot more meaning to UC's techno-lyrics than just what the reader imparts.
UC 'too-clever' lyrics, at least the techno-speak ones, are actually few and far between, and I always wondered why people singled them out so much. They're definitely a new way of talking about the world, and I can see them being a little jarring to folks who haven't yet become overly-familiar with the slang. I can also see some of us who are immersed in that world kinda shaking our heads at Bono's attempt to fuse formerly non-musical imagery with U2's music.
But hey, there was Kraftwerk, all those years ago, setting the stage for this type of fusion of music and machinery:
Pocket Calculator
If you accept the premise of the song as being the story of a lost soul wandering around in a suicidal haze, and suddenly his phone - in this case an iPhone I suppose - starts sending him motivational messages (and I admit, this is a stretch), then the computer-speak makes perfect sense.
Force quit and move to trash
Restart and re-boot yourself
Password, you, enter here, right now
You know your name so punch it in
There you go , only four lines.
And interestingly enough, when you clip them out to form their own verse, they're surprisingly coherent.
Force quit, move to trash: Abandonment and surrender, the theme of the album. Your life's project, your current path, the document you have open, maybe the suicide not that you've already half-penned - you can throw it all away if it's not working for you, if it's brought you to this point in your life. Don't even exit gracefully, just get out and junk the program that has you stuck.
Or, from the Mac Tips site:
Force Quit is used when you cannot quit a program using the
regular quit. You can Force Quit by pressing Command-Option
-Q-Esc.
Note: This isn't very good for the program that you force quit
on, but it is the best choice if you can't quit any other way
This gives us the answer posed by SIAMYCGOO: Well, how do I get un-stuck?
Restart and re-boot yourself: Now that you've discarded the buggy program(ming) that had you mired down, stuck in a moment, you're free to start fresh. Not only can you refresh your mind and try again, you can reboot yourself.
'Booting' a system has always been a reference to 'bootstrapping', which is a metaphor for a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help.
'Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps."
In computer terms, bootstrapping is the process by which a very simple program, embedded into the hardware of the computer, becomes active and initiates a chain of other program calls that eventually lead to the entire operating system being active and turned over to user control.
The idea here is that we, as humans, have a hard-wired core that pushes us to survive. You can throw away everything, turn off the power, and even then, you know at your core that you can still keep going and build yourself back up to the person you know you are, or can become. Maybe you just got off track the first time around because of some bad programming.
Password, you, enter here, right now: So when the system is purged of its malware, of whatever malicious programming that had it stuck, it is rebooted and turned over to it's rightful owner.
You.
But you're greeted with a login screen. It's not just anyone's life, it's yours and only you can log in.
I like the idea other posters have expressed, where they hear this line as: Password: you.
This goes back to the bootstrapping idea, where you're the only one responsible for getting your life back on track, and for getting yourself back into that life once you're presented with the opportunity. You're not just entering the password, you *are* the code that activates your life.
There was nothing wrong with you, it was just the crap that you quit and trashed and are now ready to proceed without. It's a clean slate, something that we think can only happen once, when we are born, but this song is saying that you can get a second crack at life.
Password: you.
You enter here, right now.
You know your name so punch it in:
In a complete tangent, I'm reminded here of an old episode of Family Ties, where Alex (played by Michael J. Fox) is going through a horrible personal crisis after the death of his friend, Greg. He's so distraught, he ends up in a psychiatrist's office, trying to find the meaning in his life that seems to have vanished along with his friend's life. He breaks down, questioning and revisiting his whole history, grasping for meaning and finding nothing.
Until finally, the doctor gets him to the point where he asks if Alex believes in any power greater than himself. Surprisingly, for a guy who only believes in money and facts and concrete things, Alex discovered he does have some faith, deep down at his core.
The episode ends like so:
ALEX: Uh, Greg's dead, and I'm alive. And I can't change
that. But I can keep his memory alive. I can take
his sense of humor, and his energy, and his warmth,
and I can make them my own. I can be the best Alex
Keaton I can be, and I can use the gifts that I've
been given. And I can take time to appreciate the
beauty in this life. And I can, I can be gentle. And
I can be forgiving and thoughtful. And I can make a
lot of money. Because, well I'm sure God wants me to,
because if He didn't, He wouldn't have made me so
smart. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna talk a little bit
more, ah, do we still have time?
PSYCHIATRIST: Yeah, sure, sit down.
ALEX: Alright. I got so much in my head now, I don't know where to start.
PSYCHIATRIST: Start from the beginning.
ALEX: ...My name is Alex Keaton.
..from "My Name is Alex"
You know your name, you know who you are, you *are* who you are, and that's the perfect place to start. The only place to start again.
I look at Unknown Caller as the sequel to Stuck in a Moment. I see it as Bono not only imagining talking Michael Hutchence down, but also putting himself in Michael's place, and wondering what it would take to bring himself back from the brink. Because Bono's now the main character, he's looking for a solution, not just saying , "You are such a fool".
Because this is Bono, a die-hard Mac-user, he uses his iPhone, or whatever device he's using, as a metaphor for a link to something greater than himself. It was lost, that link, but in his most desperate moment, it becomes active again.
The use of the phone, or computer, is smart because not everyone has the same connection to God that Bono does. For some, it's a general faith in something greater than themselves. For some it's faith in others, their family and friends, which our portable electronics now allow us to keep close nomatter where we are. For some it's using the 'net to connect to the world. For others, that phone is just a link to a support line, manned by faceless but compassionate strangers.
When we lose that connection, we can be lost, left on our own, unless we know we have that kernel of self to keep us going.
Nomatter the metaphor, that piece of technology doesn't solve your problems, it just directs you how to solve them yourself. God helps those who help themselves. We've got to stand up straight, carry our own weight. And so on.
That's why the metaphor works, and will probably work even better in a few years, when we're so familiar with this jargon that it sounds natural in a song.
Wow, Montrose! That is DEEP.
