One Track Sunday: The Summer Olympics Find Their Muse

With less than three weeks before the 2012 opening ceremony, the London Olympics are fast approaching. To commemorate the big event (and likely to supplement commercials), Muse’s “Survival” was given the go ahead by the Olympic committee to become the official track of the 2012 Games. It’s only fitting that a British band would get greenlight to produce a song for the Olympics; however, it was not necessarily in the cards that the band would use the Olympics as the platform for their newest video.

Muse’s “Survival” video plays out as well as the most eye catching of commercials. It begins with an airy track highlighting the summer Olympics during the present day and then hurtles us back in time, hitting key moments on the sporting event’s timeline stretching back into the 1800s. For the first 27 seconds, the video is riveting, and then it takes us into a rock anthem rife with tribulation and victory, sweat and human bodies stretching into nearly unimaginable positions. It’s a pretty cool video for something that was thrown together to support the most celebrated sporting event of all time.

Despite “Survival” appearing as the lead track off of Muse’s newest album, set for release in September, Matthew Bellamy has come out to say the song was written with the Olympic athletes in mind, and the video just goes to prove how seriously the band took the challenge. “Survival” may not burn as brightly as former tracks like "Starlight," but it does spectacularly suit the gut wrenching emotions residing within all of us.