Mediate (song)

"Mediate" is a song by INXS from their 1987 album, Kick. The song is a segue from their big hit single, "Need You Tonight." The song has the distinction of having almost every line rhyme with the word "ate" (as in "Mediate").

Lyrical content

According to the liner notes of the remastered Kick, Andrew Farriss received help from Michael Hutchence with the lyrics. In return, Farriss helped Hutchence with the lyrics to "Guns in the Sky", and a compromise was reached: Farriss received sole credit on "Mediate", and Hutchence received sole credit on "Guns in the Sky".

Music video

Main article: Need You Tonight

The song was never released as a single, but there was a video for it, which followed "Need You Tonight". Both the video and the song pay homage to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues", as the members flip cue cards with words from the song on them, followed by Kirk Pengilly with a saxophone solo.

Beneath the lyric "a special date" in the "Mediate" portion of the video, the cue card shown reads "9-8-1945". This refers to the date 9 August 1945 which was the date the atomic bomb, codenamed Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. As the date is in the little endian format, with the day first and month second (as per convention in Australia), American observers sometimes confuse the date for 8 September 1945.