Million Dead Album

Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats,
put on your thinking caps. now here’s a poser for you:

you know sexism, the social scourge of the sixties
seen as singularly responsible for a plethora of ills? well the reaction,
after starting well, has moved from the sublime to the ridiculous
through self-defensive actions of the string-vested interests.

so please let’s dispense with tired fixations with forms of address,
and with constant vilification of legitimate sexual attraction,
with weak accusations of inverted discrimination,
because it’s getting old.

come on girls, this is weak.
come on boys, gird up your loins.

and yes,
I’m no qualified social theorist, but I’ve got me a few ideas
I picked up while I was trying to be a human being.

...I’m amazed - no seriously, folks, I'm really fucking awestruck.
Leafing through so called lifestyle magazines...
The beauty industry is just the tip of the goddamn iceberg...
The prostitution of dignity for a sense of humour?...
The smallest blows against ignorance seen as too much?...

and you’re afraid.
you’re cowering behind a bravado built on pornography for cowards!

on leaving school immersed in philanthropic notions
(of a kind these days I find unthinkable)
I pulled my frail frame onto my charger and rode off into a sunset
with agenda predictable.

fresh faced - young dumb and tragically convinced that
blind faith could make an infantile, normative
playground theory on social interaction
positive enough to show them all, but alas!

working the tills put hair on my chest,
telesales made me a man! x2

and everything was going to be ok, but
the making of the man was the breaking of the back upon the rock
of everyday hostility.

and I don’t mean to seem at all ungrateful, but
the air-conditioned life has left me gasping for some real conversation.

and just because
turing couldn’t possibly conceive a machine with this little personality
I'm working shifts in veal-fattening pens,
and yet I'm puppy thin because to tell the truth I've been hanging on
for something more than distant dial tones
and a sense of ending.

the breaking of the back was the making of the man x4.

Well you can tell by the way I move my feet
that I'm a genuine insurrectionary
It's a kinda nervous shuffle that contrasts so well
with bolsavic bravado
and you can tell by the way i raise my hand
not in a fist but in question

take out your manifestos and then put them away
I implore you to ignore every word I say

if my status as a figure on a stage implies authority
I hope my caution and my age belies
my humility and will to take my rage
and try to turn myself into a
one man land slide!

Let's kick it off with a leafleting campaign
and follow up with some public meetings
pressing flesh and kissing babies as I smile and promise
things are getting better

I am the party!
the apperatchik and the grey bureaocracy
I am the secret police
manufacturing a consitiuency that doesn't answer back!

I found these words
in my bedroom
underneath, old magaznies

and I found this voice
in my record collection
distorting tapes kicked analysis awake

you found this song
but you didn't question
swallowed the sleeve but did not see my tongue inside my cheek!

I am the polit-bureau
I am the velvet revolution
it's a budapest kick on a fifty six and so!

lets all go hand in hand to the local polling station and vote for ourselves
vote for ourselves!

If every child chased dreams of
societal reorganisation
In place of sweet wrappers and escape
Then we would see Mr Cadbury's
enlightened industrialism
for what it really, fucking is
social morphene: we'd have ourselves a pre-school army!

Walt Disney, is pushing social and sexual hierachy
My bed time stories a GMTV gomulka

Slumbering, in my Jimmy Jammies!
My wonderous imagination, long since closed and put away

Willy Wonka was a capitalist, confidence, trickster
A poster boy for neo-liberalism
A full stop on revolt.
See the BFG a propagandist for an unnacountable regeme
Orwells vision, with a wrinkled face

hold out the arm and quiet the voice

My first McDonlads visit, a vacination
The time my parents took me to the school/clinic
Handed me over, to the teahcer/nurse/whatever

Hold out the arm and quiet the voice x3

I too
got sucked in by the myth machine
unatainable
but I just wish we weren't so fuckin mindless

little more suspision in our fairy tales please!

drowned in
recurring nightmare of casual influence

but I just wish weren't so fuckin mindless

Mum and Dad, Mum I'm sorry I won't do what Enid Blyton tells me

Our jealousy, at their opportunity
the once weak will one day rule this world

because the monsters underneath the bed,
are merely jaded feelings.

A lone voice crying in the wilderness
make the straight way for the coming of the...
A dry throat stutters on an empty vision of milk and honey
and desolate quiet

A dry mouth falters on the opening blast of,
a song to ruin what it left behind
A bare sole longing for the feel of concrete
and a lone voice crying in the wilderness

I have these dreams when I’m feeling sick of,
unfinished patterns that I can’t collate at all,
of an inward breath in a land bereft of uncrippled figures,
of an exhalation, of the Himavant, of a pulse.

it was the strangest thing today
i saw new footprints in abandoned pathways
beneath forgotten undergrowth something stirring again
you were a single red blood cell
but i lost you in this knot of capillaries
but you were bringing me oxygen when i needed it most in the smoke.

and you were always

Chorus
as far as mongolia, as close as my clothes
your presence pervading, but it still never shows
as close as the answer i never quite know, or can’t quite remember
your distance insidious, as soft as a blow
your shadow is with me wherever i go
it’s on the tip of my tongue but still i never quite know, or can’t quite remember
i don’t quite remember

the forced proximity of a million different mike leigh movies
makes me long for the fresh air of a familiar face
and not the violence of loneliness, nor the unease of surrounded seclusion
i keep nearly missing you around corners and in passing trains

and if i’d known that you weren’t so far away
that you were never that far away
i could’ve rode this train smiling.

It starts with a call, a call from his mother
Sophia says "come quick, MacGyver's been hurt!,
He was just on his way home, from saving the world again,
he got jumped by some kids, he went down, now he's dying!"
So I threw on my coat, and I ran out the door,
sped through the night to the old hospital,
where the doctor said "wait", so I camped in the ward
Watching the clock as it's haemorrhaging time

So slow, So slow, So slow,
And I've lingered here So long, So long, So long,
The air in here So cold, So cold, So cold,
The shallow breath So quiet, So quiet, So quiet,
The shibboleth of...

Macguyver laid bare, flat on the table,
blackened with bruises, he couldn't explain
And there was nothing he could build, to save himself,
Out of Biros, and Blue tac...

they opened up his cavities in the operating theatre,
But the doctors couldn't find a heart, his lymph glands running motor oil,
His calloused fingers lie innert, their intricate ability,
punctured by the God-shaped hole, in adolescent consciousness

He couldn't build a bomb to mend the splinters of his broken heart,
His home made radar couldn't find a way to make his weapons art...

Macgyver,
Bleeds out all of his rationalism,
Issac Newton,
Your lever is not long enough

The Scottish enlightenment a sinking ship...

...So I left the hospital, with the beep of life support machines,
A memory.

The footnote swallows the page
Today, New York kind of looks like Beirut,
But Beirut never looked like New York
Yet New York kind of cuts to the quick as it quickens
The dispossessed define the dying age

We were so wrapped up in the internecine strife of the last of the so-called 'European' centuries,
my compadres,
that we didn’t see it coming

So the footnote works its way up from the bottom of the page,
Filled with a certain understandable sense of rage,
At justice unforthcoming.

I have seen,
Two feet standing proud in the sand,
Cathedrals worn away by the rain,
New dawns bringing season’s change,
Relentless.

If I can’t feel (on a given day) the way I wanted to,
The temptation hits,
my grip it could slip,
I could give it up

But if I can’t feel (on a given day) the way I wanted to,
I won’t cheapen myself,
I won’t be patronized by lethargy

And it would be nice to answer questions with a capsule,
but I don’t deem myself that simple minded
And it would be nice to untie knots with single gestures,
But I keep on drawing blood
And it would be nice to think oblivion was a challenge instead of an excuse

You built yourself a socio-cultural trap,
Launched an attack on your subconscious Ruby Ridge.
If you get what you want,
You can’t play Hamlet to the balcony

The ultimate expression of consumerism - the wholesale commodification of sensation
The ultimate rejection of asceticism - the doors of perception kicked in
The ultimate acceptance of conservatism - a fierce passion subsumed and corrupted
The ultimate bisection of ethicalism - as you imbibe the denial of choice

If I can see straight I can’t lie.
Let’s put an end to this falsehood, to the conception that this is different.
Misunderstood and misconstrued, alternative only in vocabulary.
You leave the office on a Friday, swap one glazed expression for another
For 48 hours in elaborate gilded costumes at the masquerade warehouse.

They came from the East,
they brought horses to our cultivated lands,
they gave power to our have-nots

They took our culture,
they brought new customs to our burial grounds,
broadened the bases of our history

They came from the East,
replaced our despots with their Caliphates,
conquered but tolerated our gods.

They brought us wisdom,
they brought a zero to our tired calculations,
they guarded knowledge we’d forgotten.

They came from the East, They came from the East

Byzantium (a city of moths) crumbled into a dust,
that plunged Europe into the dark.

Constantinople (a metropolis of candles) brought light to our books,
as Europe forgot how to read.

Let’s make this stage our Rubicon, let’s cast a die, let’s let history decide.
And as I cross it, I chase Aeneas back to his ships,
I bring the rhythm back to the hips.
And as rome is consumed, as I fiddle this whisper tune on these strings, friends,
I have no need of your ears.

So let’s make this stage our Rubicon, our frozen Rhine, our Yippie picket line
and I Caesar Hoffman!
and as I cross it, I bring the Central Asian Steppe sweeping into the wilds of Europe.
I make my bedroom Rome, I make this city my home, I am Remus come from the dead,
come to tell you all to sack this city tonight, let’s sack this city tonight,
because I always heard better in the dark


Thus immersed in barbarous longing.