Rage Against The Machine blew their load far too damn early. Imploding just before Bush the Second arrived, their core value point – modernizing the incendiary potential of the protest song – halted before 9/11 took the band’s plight from an urgent slap across a comatose face to a potential smartbomb of desperate demand for truth and justice. What we have in their place are smaller fires of discontent and informed dissent, such as the cerebrally ferocious lyricism of UK spitfire queen Kate Tempest – and her new single just set fire to every unspoken rug-swept bit of dirty laundry pop culture has conveniently shielded itself from in the daily news cycle.
With the Dan-Carey-produced “Europe Is Lost,” Tempest reminds us that protest songs can – and should – be more than kumbayas about peace and ending war. The track is a disgusted diagnosis of Fuckall Culture through an urgent and laser-focused but weary delivery, spun between the matter-of-fact butter cadence of Brother Ali and Scroobius Pip. Initially praising the apparent state of prosperity, she’s soon lamenting the “roots dug up from the ground” and feeling, like many of us do, that we’ve gotta do something to change the formula. To shake the complacency.
But she sees the odds, and she knows the game is rigged. “Feeling the onset of riot, but riots are tiny though, Systems are huge / The traffic keeps moving, proving there’s nothing to do.” And where do we go from there? While we incarcerate millions for a harmless plant with voluminous evidence of medical benefits, a federally enabled pharmaceutical obsession has raped our culture with dicks of Xanax and Oxy poppers, wreaking absolute havoc among communities suckered into a haze of cognitive dissonance with casualties in the millions.
Tempest knows. “Your kids are doped up on medical sedatives, but don’t worry bout that. Worry bout terrorists.”
Because ISIS is what’s going to destroy us, not our obsession with indulgence, numb and convenience,our addiction to eliminating natural order for bigger, better, right fucking now.
“The water levels rising! The water levels rising! The animals, the polarbears, the elephants are dying! Stop crying. Start buying. But what about the oil spill? Shh. No one likes a party pooping spoil sport.”
While we’ve all spent our share of time in the “Hotline Bling” meme rabbitholes or laughing at Reddit’s spin on the increasingly bizarre reality in which we live, how many of us truly understand the irrevocably shattered structural morality of the corporate ecosystem that runs our economy and national dialogue? How many truly understand the fact that what’s in our wallets is the purest and truest vote we’ll ever have, or that pop culture is not an actual culture but a glittery parasite with no form or foundation?
This dilemma, this modern fire sale on luxury vapidity spans white English culture, whether in America or the UK. We’re suckered into the same rat race, bemoaned by the Fight Clubs of old and older still, bound to be the future and again, while nothing ever changes. “Work all your life for a pittance, maybe you’ll make it to manager / Pray for a raise, cross the beige days off on your beach babe calendar.”
Through incredible wordplay, jarringly stark imagery and a lyrical progression deserving of generational preservation, Kate Tempest bullseyes the multitude of modern crises with a power that makes us remember to think.
Some songs matter far more than the daily news cycle. Listen and read along with the lyrics to one such track, the best in a long while. And watch the two-second pause at 1:18 – it’s a Wile E. Coyote oh-shit-where’d-the-road-go moment if there ever was one.
Europe is lost, America lost, London is lost,
Still we are clamouring victory.
All that is meaningless rules,
And we have learned nothing from history.
People are dead in their lifetimes,
Dazed in the shine of the streets.
But look how the traffic keeps moving.
The system’s too slick to stop working.
Business is good. And there’s bands every night in the pubs,
And there’s two for one drinks in the clubs.
We scrubbed up well
We washed off the work and the stress
Now all we want’s some excess
Better yet; A night to remember that we’ll soon forget.
All of the blood that was shed for these cities to grow,
All of the bodies that fell.
The roots that were dug from the ground
So these games could be played
I see it tonight in the stains on my hands.
The buildings are screaming
I cant ask for help though, nobody knows me,
Hostile and worried and lonely.
We move in our packs and these are the rights we were born to
Working and working so we can be all that want
Then dancing the drudgery off
But even the drugs have got boring.
Well, sex is still good when you get it.
To sleep, to dream, to keep the dream in reach
To each a dream,
Don’t weep, don’t scream,
Just keep it in,
Keep sleeping in
What am I gonna do to wake up?
I feel the cost of it pushing my body
Like I push my hands into pockets
And softly I walk and I see it, it’s all we deserve
The wrongs of our past have resurfaced
Despite all we did to vanquish the traces
My very language is tainted
With all that we stole to replace it with this,
I am quiet,
Feeling the onset of riot.
But riots are tiny though,
Systems are huge,
The traffic keeps moving, proving there’s nothing to do.
It’s big business baby and its smile is hideous.
Top down violence, structural viciousness.
Your kids are doped up on medical sedatives.
But don’t worry bout that. Worry bout terrorists.
The water levels rising! The water levels rising!
The animals, the elephants, the polar bears are dying!
Stop crying. Start buying.
But what about the oil spill?
Shh. No one likes a party pooping spoil sport.
Massacres massacres massacres/new shoes
Ghettoised children murdered in broad daylight by those employed to protect them.
Live porn streamed to your pre-teens bedrooms.
Glass ceiling, no headroom. Half a generation live beneath the breadline.
Oh but it’s happy hour on the high street,
Friday night at last lads, my treat!
All went fine till that kid got glassed in the last bar,
Place went nuts, you can ask our Lou,
It was madness, the road ran red, pure claret.
And about them immigrants? I cant stand them.
Mostly, I mind my own business.
But they’re only coming over here to get rich.
It’s a sickness.
England! England!
Patriotism!
And you wonder why kids want to die for religion?
Work all your life for a pittance,
Maybe you’ll make it to manager,
Pray for a raise
Cross the beige days off on your beach babe calendar.
Anarchists desperate for something to smash
Scandalous pictures of glamorous rappers in fashionable magazines
Who’s dating who?
Politico cash in an envelope
Caught sniffing lines off a prostitutes prosthetic tits,
And it’s back to the house of lords with slapped wrists
They abduct kids and fuck the heads of dead pigs
But him in a hoodie with a couple of spliffs –
Jail him, he’s the criminal
It’s the BoredOfItAll generation
The product of product placement and manipulation,
Shoot em up, brutal, duty of care,
Come on, new shoes.
Beautiful hair.
Bullshit saccharine ballads
And selfies
And selfies
And selfies
And here’s me outside the palace of ME!
Construct a self and psyhcosis
And meanwhile the people are dead in their droves
But nobody noticed,
Well actually, some of them noticed,
You could tell by the emoji they posted.
Sleep like a gloved hand covers our eyes
The lights are so nice and bright and lets dream
But some of us are stuck like stones in a slipstream
What am I gonna do wake up?
We are lost
We are lost
We are lost
And still nothing
Will stop
Nothing pauses
We have ambitions and friends and our courtships to think of
Divorces to drink off the thought of
The money
The money
The oil
The planet is shaking and spoiled
Life is a plaything
A garment to soil
The toil the toil.
I cant see an ending at all.
Only the end.
How is this something to cherish?
When the tribesmen are dead in their deserts
To make room for alien structures,
Develop
Develop
Kill what you find if it threatens you.
No trace of love in the hunt for the bigger buck,
Here in the land where nobody gives a fuck.
Dig into another gem from Kate here. Then keep going.
