Are we human or are we dancer? Beats me.

I had to drive my daughter to theatre tonight, and as is usual, she took command of the radio when we got in the car. First we heard the Red Hot Chili Peppers singing about California - yes, I know they sing about California a lot, and they're good at it.

Next KROQ played another song...a song that mystified me so much that I had to tweet after my daughter left the car (no, I broke no California laws - have the Red Hot Chili Peppers sang about that?). Anyway, I tweeted:

my daughter had control of radio. now i wonder "are we human or are we dancer." ?

I was mobile at the time, so I was performing fftogo (FriendFeed) and mobile Google (Google) searches to figure out what the heck was going on. And it turns out that back on November 30, Helen Sventitsky (check out her music) was wondering the same thing:

“Are we human, or are we dancer...yeah, I can't figure that one out, either”

I finally figured out that the song was "Human" by the Killers. No, not the Jam/Lewis one. The lyrics for this one are here. And the imponderable chorus is as follows:

Are we human, or are we dancer
My sign is vital, my hands are cold
And I'm on my knees looking for the answer
Are we human, or are we dancer

I figured that it was some type of deterministic stuff like Martin Gore was thinking about at the time of Ultra. But, in searching for the song meaning, I discovered a site I hadn't heard of before - songmeanings.net. Ooh, and it makes rbreeze wonder:

vital signs and hands are cold are obviously references to death or being near death, and asking yourself a question about your being. in this case a little strange, are we humon or are we dancer? im not sure what they mean by dancer, perhaps like above, being a puppet... or maybe dancer, like a dancer, just being free to move your body?

personally i think the killers are asking us to look at our attitudes to life and how we live it.

the line "There is no message we're receiving" is a reference to pink floyd - comfortably numb? maybe thats a clue to the lyrical message in the song?

But if you're non-trendy like me and haven't heard of the song until now AJ Batac linked to the video. But, in that famous YouTube phrase, "embedding disabled by request." But the video is open captioned.

And the track is on last.fm too.