Moreover, the playful song title conjures up an interesting reflection. After all, does today’s culture see anything as fabulously absolute, or more like depressingly relative?
First and foremost, if you assume it's all relative, then you've made that into an absolute. No escape.
So can we at least consider some of the universals that are relatively Absolute? There seems to be many features of culture, language, and behavior that are found in common to all people known: we all seem to believe murder and stealing is wrong; we all hold something as sacrosanct; we all have bias towards kinship, privilege in-group loyalty, and believe in fairness and duty; we all practice reciprocal exchanges of labor, goods, or services; and we all look for patterns and relations in things. Just to name a few.
There are also some fundamental constants to the physical universe: Planck's constant, the speed of light, and Newton's gravitational constant. There are biological universals and constants, such as gender disposition and physiology.
In the modern civilized world, we see universals around the dignity of the human being, respect for personal property, limits of the state, and the rule of law. As individuals, we also tend to find our deepest and most enduring happiness through the universals of family, vocation, friendship/community, and faith.
We also find the draw we all have towards a transcendent Absolute through our groping for goodness, truth, beauty, and love in a multitude of ways. Maybe we know implicitly that only through eternal forms, can changeable and impermanent things have significance. And therefore maybe things are not so depressingly relative after all.
Why don’t we want to believe in absolutes? Because they impose demands on us; demands to say with conviction that some truths are better than others, and demands for us to live by them. It feels safer to search or play with truth, then claim any Truth.
But who said God was safe? He's just fabulously Absolute.
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Most consider Joe Jackson's best work to be his most popular albums, Look Sharp and Night and Day. I tend to prefer his more obscure work, and consider Night and Day II (a beautiful piece of work), Big World (wonderfully poignant and intense), and Blaze of Glory (epic) to be my favorites.