Clark The Band - "Tonight I Belong in This Cell"

The obvious didn't dawn on me until the third listen - this song is not sung from the perspective of a number well placed in an Excel spreadsheet. Then I thought of Frege, who asked how or whether we can know that the number 3 is not Julius Caesar, a question that had never resonated with me until that moment, for I always thought it must be easy to distinguish between the emperor and the number, one being a man, the other being ... what? But then I thought, What if I've been duped?! So I listened as if Caesar was singing and I liked that until I deemed it implausible. But then what else could belong in a cell? A nucleus?

There are at least two mutually inclusive reasons why a person might belong in a cell: he has done something wrong and deserves to be punished, or he has done something wrong and is likely to do something wrong again. And yet for a song that arises out of either the singer's guilt or fear of self or both, it is incongruously uplifting. When you belong in a cell, it seems, prison can be liberating.

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