We’ve come to Groove all night
This was a psychedelic groove I made well before finding lyrics and a melody for it. I wanted it to be a Psychedelic Creedence Clearwater Revival, a song you could boogie to. The lyrics originally came from a dream I had — one that didn’t really make sense — and I patched it together from notes taken in the middle of the night.
The lyrics emerged by themselves through many improvised takes, following the usual syntactic and semantic paths of high-speed improvised language; I was driving at top speed through empty midnight freeways, gripping the wheel between my teeth. I like that process of songwriting. I’m a sucker for the moment; the lucid edge of control that hills and slides into the unknown sine wave. That’s why I do music — it’s a drug.
Like many of my songs, this one found its final form through the political subject.
We’ve come to radicalise
I wished to address all the contrived grievances that neoliberal boomers tend to have towards younger generations and their supposed ineptitude. I want this song to be an anthem for the youth who have inherited a traumatised world, but I also wanted to warn the upper classes. An entire generation of radicalised revolutionaries are emerging from the economic, cultural, ecological and psychological trauma, coming together through subversive anti-traditionalism and growing new cultures in opposition to Capitalism’s withering corpse.
This song is really inspired by the 17th Century baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. Raped at 17 by her painting tutor and put through a long, humiliating trial to prove it, Gentileschi’s paintings often depict women torturing men; driving nails into their heads and slitting throats.
Inspired by this revenge etched into canvas, I wanted to summon the spirit and guts of Gentileschi in song form. A psychedelic diatribe, metaphorically driving nails into the heads of exploiters and mindless profiteers; the mostly old, white, rich men leaving and even further traumatised reality in their wake.
Lyrics:
Well we’re shaving our heads
Sending ours souls to the coroner
You let that dog out and it never came back
and now we collect bits in our box
the static of trauma
Like a bird with no feather
At the end of it’s tether
With a couple of loose screws
-
We ate all the acid
transmission fluid leaks from our head
We got them botulist eyes
no more a neutralist stare
What’s in our box?
And when are we gonna radicalise ?
Your sons and baby daughters
we’ll steal that apple from your eyes
-
Well we’re alone on the moon
Or a planet out in space
we’re trapped inside novels
From the science fiction age
And we can’t read the symbols
we’re collecting locks of hair
We cycle through the music
And we’re kicking out the squares
2
We hear the sounds of guns
They’re Coming for us now
The hounds are out
And I highly doubt
We won’t get the electric chair
2
Our mind born with that
electric kool aid stare
we’re barking in the streets
I can hear your stomach churning
Your heart rate’s through the roof
we’re reading Freud and Marx
We got the tears of Mark Fisher
And the guts of Gentileschi
we’re sicker than vomit
And tougher than a cunt
And we know where repression goes
We know the deal with guilt
-
misery has his eyes on us
to sew the seems that wilt
Will we fall into the sea,
Never being loved?
Will we call you from your dream,
Collecting bits of stuff?
Will you hold in you hands,
What you held in your sleep ?
-
Well now
we’re taking our last sunset boulevards
we’re digging holes outback
And folding them in white sheets
And tucking them in gently
And we’re sending letters To the lettermen,
To the dogs in the dog house,
the mutts and the goons
All the little fucks that
tell you what to do
-
Well the letters are tick-tock-ticking
Our jowls are drip-drop-dripping
We howl at the nuclear moon
-
And we are
Militarised, radicalised,
intelligent Sons of bitches
Coming to get you.