Analysis of ‘The Soft Machine’

I: Introduction

The Soft Machine is a 1961 novel by William S Burroughs. It originally came from manuscripts from The Word Hoard, a large body of text (roughly 1,000 typewritten pages) produced between about 1954 and 1958, and used as the basis also for Naked Lunch and the Interzone collection, as well as some of Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. TSM is the first part of The Nova Trilogy.

An experimental novel, TSM uses the cut-up technique, an aleatory narrative that involves taking a written or typewritten text, cutting it up into pieces, and rearranging them to create a new text. The concept started with Dadaists like Tristan Tzara in the 1920s, yet writers like Burroughs in the 1950s popularized it.

Two things from Burroughs’s novel were later applied to music: its title, which became the name of a late 1960s/1970s psychedelic/jazz-fusion band from the Canterbury scene (check out an analysis I did of their third album here); and the expression “heavy metal,” used by Burroughs originally to describe a heavy, “metallic” kind of drug addiction.

I am basing this analysis on the second edition of TSM, with which most readers are familiar. Here is a link to it, and here is a link to Burroughs reciting “Uranian Willy,” which is a different version from the text I’ll be using.

II: General Remarks

As I did with my analysis of the Naked Lunch novel, I’ll only be looking at select parts of TSM, since the cut-up technique has created a chaotic incoherence that would make an analysis of everything virtually impossible, at best turning a blog article into a book. I’ll be looking at those parts that do read as a linear narrative (or approximately so), such as ‘The Mayan Caper,” among others.

Because of the cut-up technique’s causing of the story to jump back and forth instead of being linear, it would perhaps be best to read TSM more like an extended prose poem than as a novel, appreciating each piece of imagery for what it is, instead of trying mentally to put all the pieces back in order, a frustrating process that would negate Burroughs’s purpose in cutting up the text anyway.

His reason for cutting up the text and rearranging it was not some kind of avant-garde self-indulgence for its own sake. He was trying to subvert the reader’s sense of perceiving the linearity of language as a manipulative or coercive power. As with so much of Burroughs’s writing (as I observed in my analysis of NL–link above), he was preoccupied with systems of power and control, as manifested in religion, the government, drug addiction, and sexual indulgence as an attempt to escape from such control.

Burroughs may have written about drug abuse a lot, but he by no means glorified it. He knew the pain of addiction and the need to be freed of it, so notions of drug abuse are a major theme in his writing as an aspect of power structures’ way of trying to control us, as we see in NL and TSM. For Burroughs, the human body is a “soft machine,” a weak, vulnerable thing under siege by parasites, drug addiction, and totalitarian control.

One of those forms of totalitarian control is the linear use of language, so the purpose of the cut-up technique is to liberate us from the linguistic aspect of that control. One aspect of TSM is a tendency to go back and forth in time, as if in a time machine (indeed, it’s been observed that Burroughs’s title for the novel is a variation on HG Wells‘s Time Machine), so the cut-up technique can be seen as representing that moving back and forth in time, instead of experiencing it in the normal, linear way.

The idea that the cut-up technique can be a metaphor for time travel is suggested in “The Mayan Caper,” in the third paragraph of that chapter, where the narrator speaks of taking yesterday’s and today’s newspapers and rearranging their pictures to make a montage: as he does this, he’s literally moving back in time to yesterday.

Though it’s the first novel of The Nova Trilogy, TSM is also widely regarded as a sequel to and extension of NL, since both novels are taken from The Word Hoard, as mentioned above, and so TSM continues NL‘s habit of explicitly describing drug abuse and homosexual sex, these being ways of trying to escape the miseries of totalitarian control through the government and religion, yet also paradoxically keeping us in its thrall, as slaves to our own desires.

The political aspect of that control, as depicted in NL, was in the form of political parties that all (except for the sympathetic Factualists, who represented Burroughs’s libertarian socialist individualism) in their own ways stifled the individualism that Burroughs valued. The religious aspect of that control in NL was represented by the Muslim faith (i.e., “Islam Incorporated”); in TSM, it’s represented by the Mayan religion, which leads me to a discussion of…

III: The Mayan Caper

This is not only the one genuinely linear narrative in all of the novel; it’s also central to understanding the meaning behind the cut-up technique as a means of undoing the manipulative and coercive power, as Burroughs saw it, of language, especially as it passes through linear time. One upsets the established order by literally upsetting the word order of syntax and temporal order (i.e., going back in time to the Mayan era).

I already mentioned above how the narrator ‘traveled time’ by rearranging the pictures of the day’s newspaper with those of the newspaper from the day before to make a montage–analogous to the cut-up technique’s rearranging of the order of cut-out sentences on strips of paper. He will also mention how the oppressive Mayan priests will use the Mayan calendar–a record and arrangement of the order of time–to control their slavish, toiling population, who work in the fields doing slash-and-burn agriculture.

After rearranging temporal order with the newspaper pictures, the narrator goes to a film studio and rearranges the order of time by learning “to talk and think backwards on all levels…by running film and sound track backward.” An example of such retrograde motion includes going from satiety to hunger. He will also run a film first at normal speed, then in slow motion…he applies the same method to such physical practices as achieving orgasm, which I assume means either delaying it (what fun!) or reversing it.

He next goes to Mexico City and learns all he can about the Mayan language (which he finds easy to learn) and their culture. The absolute power of the Mayan priests, about two percent of the population, depended on their control of their calendar. As I explained above, control over temporal order and the concepts of language–as expressed, for example, in their calendar–is essential to manipulating and having power over the people–this is why messing up that order is so crucial to liberating the people, as Burroughs saw it.

Slash-and-burn agriculture–what the priests use to keep the population obedient, ever-toiling slaves–is a matter of precise timing, according to the narrator. It must be done at specific times; “a few days’ miscalculation and a year’s crop is lost.” We see once again how temporal order is strictly maintained for the priests to retain power over their people.

Most of the hieroglyphs from the Mayan writings refer to dates on the calendar; the other, undeciphered symbols probably refer to the ceremonial calendar. Yet again, we see how language, mixed with temporal organization, is used to manipulate and control the Mayan people.

After learning of the Mayan language and culture, the narrator has to find a “vessel,” that is, the body of a Mayan boy in whom the narrator is to be transferred–his soul moved into it for the purposes of mixing in unnoticed among the Mayan population after traveling in time back to their era. The two are to do this procedure, an illegal one, with an American doctor who has lost his certificate due to having become addicted to heavy metal [!].

What’s ironic here is how the narrator’s mission–to liberate the Mayan people from their oppressive priests and systems of language and the temporal order of their calendars–is to be facilitated with the help of a doctor also in need of liberation (i.e., the “soft machine” of his body controlled by the hardening, heavy, metallic nature of his drug addiction). Furthermore, the doctor learns, from his examination of the Mayan boy’s naked body, that his body “is riddled with parasites,” which are another major form of control dealt with in TSM. Another paradox of liberation via the aid of the non-liberated.

The narrator “would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites” if the doctor used “the barbarous method used by…[his] colleagues”, so instead he’ll use a different technique for the transfer operation. He’ll operate with molds, keeping the narrator intact in deepfreeze.

Once the transfer operation is done, the narrator goes to find a “broker” who will help him achieve time travel to the Mayan era. The method of traveling time should be of no surprise to those familiar with Burroughs’s writing: it involves nothing other than drinking a drug, made from dried mushrooms and herbs that the broker cooks in a clay pot.

The narrator feels the motion sickness of time travel, he pays the broker his fee, and he finds himself in a jungle. When he comes to a clearing, he sees a number of workers in a field planting corn. He feels “the rushing weight of evil insect control forcing [his] thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing [his] spirit into a soft invisible vise”, and he is handed a planting stick from one of the workers. He’s gone from time machine to soft machine, the parasitic insects taking control of his body.

He comes across as “a half-witted young Indian”, which will be useful to him, since he’ll never be suspected by the priests as a threat to their power. He can thus possibly be transferred from field work to rock carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and the priests have total confidence he’ll show no resistance to their power. He stays, therefore, for months as a field worker and keeps a low profile.

He learns of two horrible punishments for anyone who tries to challenge, or even just thinks of challenging, the priests’ authority: “Death in the Ovens,” and “Death In Centipede“, this latter one involving being strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes–executions carried out secretly in rooms under the temple.

In order to mess with the system of controlling the people and thus liberate them, the narrator needs access to a machine the Mayans know how to use, but not how to repair were it to be broken, or how to build a new one were it to be destroyed. Since the machine uses recordings (i.e., on magnetic tape, something not invented until the 1920s), it’s clearly an anachronism that Burroughs, in his surreal imagination, has invented out of poetic licence–this anachronism is also reflective of TSM‘s theme of rearranging the temporal order of things.

To gain access to the machine, the narrator agrees, in all disgust and reluctance, to do a sexual favour for one of the priests–the latter transforming himself into a green crab from the waist up during the sex act. The narrator is able to endure all of this by reassuring himself that he’ll enjoy killing the man when the time comes. So after the narrator’s sexual ordeal, the priest transfers him to janitor work in the temple, where he witnesses executions: bodies torn into insect fragments by the ovens, and centipedes born in the ovens from those fragments. It’s time for him to act.

The narrator uses the drug he got from the doctor to take over the priest’s body, he gets into the room where the codices are kept, and he photographs the books. He dismantles the machine by mixing the order of recordings and images, a change that will be picked up by the machine and fed into it. Recorded agricultural operations–the slash and burn–are shuffled so they’ll occur at the wrong times, losing a year’s crop, and causing famine.

He sends out a new command, essentially: “Smash the control machine–Burn the books–Kill the priests–Kill! Kill! Kill!” And with this, to make a long story short, comes the toppling of the Mayan “regime,” to use the word in, of all sources with an obvious liberal agenda, the Wikipedia article. This leads to my next point.

Now, a bringing of an end to the Mayan tyranny is all fine and good…if such is an accurate representation of what their priestly authority was really like. Yet with an anachronism like their machine and its ‘recordings’ as central to the priests’ power, I’d say such accuracy is rather unlikely, to put it mildly.

Matters get more sinister when we consider how this whole “Mayan caper” (interesting choice of words in itself) has been conceived by, of all people, Americans, and for the purpose of toppling an aboriginal “regime” in what’s today Latin America. Yes, the tankie in me is coming out for commentary again.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently socialist about the Mayan “regime.” Remember also, though, that in the opinion of an anarchist–as Burroughs can reasonably be described to have been–neither were the USSR or the Soviet Bloc, nor have China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, or Laos ever been ‘genuinely socialist.’ Any state is oppressive, whether right-wing, left-wing, or centrist, in the eyes of your average anarchist or ‘left-wing’ communist, especially in the eyes of individualist libertarian socialists like Burroughs…so what difference did it make to him whether or not the Mayan priests were socialists?

The point is that it has been a standard practice of US and Western imperialism to do regime change on any country out there that goes against imperialist interests. The first step of such regime change is to justify it by claimning that those “regimes” are oppressive: exactly what we are meant to understand about the Mayan priests–it’s all propaganda, meant to manufacture consent for said regime change.

The ruling class has always found anarchists useful in agreeing that state socialism isn’t ‘real socialism,’ and is therefore tyrannical. The capitalists can say of the anarchists, “See, even fellow leftists agree that the socialist states are no better than capitalist ones, so we should oppose them!” In helping imprialism crush, for example, the Soviet resistance, through their own propaganda, anarchists give the working class “the unkindest cut.”

IV: Uranian Willy

“Heavy metal,” as Burroughs used the expression, had nothing to do with music, of course. I recall seeing him on TV (back when I was still living in Canada) talking about his use of “heavy metal”; I wish I could find the video of him talking about this on YouTube so I can share it here, but my foggy memory of it will have to serve. He was talking about a “metallic” drug experience.

So Uranian Willy, “the heavy metal kid,” personifies drug addiction at its worst: where it has gone from the organic (vegetable) to the mineral (metallic). Willy thus represents the final stage of addiction, a “heavy metal” addiction to junk, sex, and power.

He may be among the “Nova Mob,” a group of parasitic entities attempting to destroy the Earth by manipulating human thought and flesh through “word and image” machines (rather like that of the Mayans, just discussed above), but also being closely associated with Will Lee (who in turn represents Burroughs), Uranian Willy also wishes to break free of his drug addiction and thus free everyone else from addiction’s thought control. Hence, he is also known as “Willy the Rat,” or “Willy the Fink,” for having turned his back on and snitched on the Nova Mob. “He wised up the marks”–that is, he got them to understand how they’re being manipulated. Recall Burroughs’s dictum from Naked Lunch: “Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.” You can fool others, but you cannot fool yourself.

Willy’s efforts to liberate others (“the marks”) from heavy metal drug addiction is compared, on one level, to a pilot in a fighter plane attacking “the Reality Studio and retak[ing] the universe”–“target[ing] Orgasm Ray Installations.” On another level, Willy’s resistance can be compared–in terms of its somewhat similar language–to the narrator of “The Mayan Caper” and his changed commands in the Mayan machine to “Burn the books–kill the priests–Kill! Kill! Kill!”

“This is war to extermination,” Willy understands of his wish to end his dependency on heavy metal. He must “wise up the marks everywhere,” and get them to understand the dangers of drug addiction and how the powers-that-be use it to control the minds of the masses. To wise them up, he must “show them the rigged wheel,” how the marks are being played by those in power. He must save the “Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug” of heavy metal.

So in this context, we can see how passages like “Photo falling–Word falling–..Take Studio–Take Board Books…Towers, open fire” are similar to what happens when the narrator in “The Mayan Caper” messes with the Mayan machine and its words and images to overthrow the Mayan regime.

Now, members of the Nova Mob are alarmed at Willy’s having suddenly gone rogue and against them, so they try to get him to stop his attack: “Pilot K9, you are cut off–Back–Back–Back before the whole fucking shithouse goes up–Return to base immediately.”

It seems, however, that the Nova Mob have failed in their attempt to stop Uranian Willy, for “It was impossible to estimate the damage–Board Rooms destroyed–Enemy personnel decimated–…Shift linguals–Cut word lines…Photo failing–Word failing…”

Note how “Shift linguals–Cut word lines…” and “Word failing…” sounds a lot like the cut-up technique’s disruption of the natural flow of language as a way of liberating humanity from systems of control. The Nova Mob is being overthrown just as the Mayan priests were.

V: Gongs of Violence

The sexes are at war, dividing the planet right down the middle. It’s a perfect way for the ruling class, with their systems of power and control, to keep us all from resisting and fighting them: make us all fight each other instead, through idpol. [This battle of the sexes, incidentally, should not be confused with the legitimate and necessary struggle for the equality of the sexes, to allow equal opportunity for women, to end their domestic servitude, and to end their sexual degradation. Such an attainment of equality necessitates solidarity between men and women through the adoption of socialism, not the divisiveness of edgy liberal identity politics.]

The armies on both sides seem to have adopted homosexuality, for one army has “Lesbian colonels in tight green uniforms.” Those on either side are deemed “the Sex Enemy.”

Since there is no true love between the sexes in this world, there are no heterosexual marriages or families, and there’s no natural parenthood. Children, therefore, are just “property,” usually not owned by their biological parents.

Each of these “properties” has a “life script,” which sounds again like the use of a predetermined language for the purposes of control by the ruling class. Those with “a lousy grade B life script” may complain…to their mothers, whether adoptive or biological?…”Fuck my life script will you you cheap downgrade bitch!”

The idea that “time-nappers jerk the time position of a property” sounds like an example of how normal linear time is also used as an instrument of power and control by the ruling class, and so “time-nappers,” who “jerk the time position,” are engaging in acts of resistance against the powers-that-be. “The property can also be jerked forward in time and sold at any age,” which sounds as though those in power also manipulate temporal order to maintain power, through the selling of children.

With vivid descriptions of a cityscape we also have vivid descriptions of fighting and violence there, presumably manifestations or results of the battle of the sexes. “Rioters of all nations storm the city in a landslide of flame-throwers and Molotov cocktails.”

Amidst all of this fighting and surrealist description is the ongoing battle for the souls of the people: on one side, those trying to liberate us from the heavy metal addiction: “We are converting to vegetable state–Emergency measure to counter the heavy metal peril”; and on the other side, there are those trying to keep us all addicted to heavy metal: “we are converting all out to heavy metal. Cabonic plague of the Vegetable People threatens our Heavy Metal State…Do not believe the calumny that our metal fallout will turn the planet into a slag heap.”

“Gongs of violence” on the one hand sounds like explosions ringing out like the banging of gongs, and on the other hand like a pun on ‘gangs of violence,’ a male gang vs a female one in the sex war.

The world of this sex war seems to be a future dystopia, which fits in well with the sense of time travel going on throughout TSM. The destruction of cities is implied in the spelling of a number of them without the first letter of each: Ewyork, Onolulu, Aris, Ome, Oston.”

VI: Cross the Wounded Galaxies

In this final chapter, we seem to have traveled time yet again: this time, to the very beginning of human consciousness. The “muttering sickness” has come to “the ape forms,” or the first primitive man, who are able to speak. Since Burroughs regarded language, and the normal, ordered use of it, to be a form of power and control over humanity, he saw it as a “sickness.”

The sickness was brought to the narrator of this chapter “from white time caves frozen in [his] throat.” The “sick apes spitting blood laugh, sound bubbling in throats torn with the talk sickness.” The primates are learning to speak, which is a kind of forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so to speak, that is going to lead them all to their collective ruin.

And with language, they now have names. They’ve come out of the mud and are about to enter civilization, and all the irreparable harm it causes, as Burroughs saw it. “The sickness leaped into our body…cold screaming sickness from white time…spitting ape wounds…the talking sickness had names…we had names for each other.”

The “talking sickness” sounds like a rejection of the psychoanalytic “talking cure.” Just as Burroughs didn’t trust language, he didn’t trust the Freudians as people who used therapy as a tool of control. On the other hand, the “ape forms” problematically having names for each other sounds representative of ego formation, which a later Freudian–Jacques Lacan–saw as illusory.

“White time” and “the white worm-thing inside” (this latter being a parasite as yet another instrument of control) seem to represent white supremacy. The “fear-softness in other men” would be the soft machine, or the vulnerable human body in its susceptibility to all the forms of control: time, language, parasites, and heavy metal drug addiction.

“The thing inside [him, that is, “the white worm-sickness in all our bodies”] would always find animals to feed [his] mouth meat.” The parasites inside us that control us always make us kill for food, which includes eating other humans.

There seems to be a jump ahead in time later on in the chapter, for we read of “sewers of the city, crab parasites in [their] genitals.” What was parasitic in prehistory is still parasitic now.

As we have moved from prehistory to the modern world, in Burroughs’s time machine of the rearranged words of his cut-up technique, we encounter a proliferation of the evils begun in the era of the “ape forms”: more parasites and tapeworms, people with names (“Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin”), the authoritarianism of religion (“I am Allah. I made you.”), and shattered windows (“Glass blizzards”), the result of vandalism, or war? There are even Orwellian “Think Police”.

Time travel seems to go into the future again, with presumed astronauts who “cross the wounded galaxies”: Earth seems not to be the only planet infected with parasitical forms of power and control. After all, the “heavy metal boys” are from Uranus, hence “Uranian Willy, the heavy metal kid.”

VII: Conclusion

What TSM is trying to tell us is that the most significant and dangerous forms of manipulation and control that we have to be wary of are not so much those of the government, religion, or even the capitalist class. They are those that we have all internalized: what the parasites and the heavy metal addictions are metaphors for–whatever we allow inside ourselves to have power over and harden the soft machine of the human body.

The Tanah: Crests–Chapter One

[The following is the forty-fourth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, here is the forty-first, here is the forty-second, and here is the forty-third–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

The following is the first of a trilogy of writings of visions of periods of good fortune, this first one for the Luminosian tribe specifically, and the other two for the future of humanity in general, with whom the tribe would be intermarried.

The tribe’s plan for liberation–to make bracelets marked with images of the four Crims personified, and to wear them faithfully–worked gloriously for them, not only freeing them from slavery to the Zoyans, but also ushering in a long period of peace and prosperity for the tribe. The tribe is warned never to lose faith in the Crims as they continue wearing the bracelets, though, lest their fortunes should turn ill.

Such a loss of faith would come one day, though, many generations down the line, and the tribe, by now intermarried with other ethnic groups they’re living with, would then begin a descent into another trough, the “feudal” one described in “Troughs, Chapter Two.”

Chapter One

Glory be to the mighty Crims, who in response to our faithful wearing of their bracelets, will not lose faith in us, and who will soon liberate us from the oppressive Zoyans!

The drugs we extracted from the plants and herbs of Drofurb’s earthly body have given us visions of a certain future of liberation from slavery to the Zoyans. We will be free; we will prosper!

In our visions, we saw a pestilence overwhelm our Zoyan oppressors, wiping them out quickly, one by one, until none of them are left…yet the pestilence will not affect even one of us Luminosians! We will all walk out of Zoyan land unhindered and unscathed, free to find a new land to settle in.

When we find that new land, as our visions have shown, we will have the wisdom not to take the land from those who live there, as we had the Zagans, but instead to live with them peacefully and in mutual respect. We will engage in commerce with them, and we will thrive with them, growing from our poverty as wandering former slaves into a wealthy, happy people!

For many generations since that time, we will continue to live well, because we will keep faith in the Crims as we pass the bracelets from the old to the young. We will remember those four of the air–Weleb, the earth–Drofurb, the fire–Nevil, and the water–Priff, who all saved us from servitude, and we will teach the younger generations to have the same respect.

Thus will the land we live in grow in fertility and bounty, giving us plentiful food, good weather for growing crops, and a peaceful coexistence with the other peoples we mix with. We will even marry with them, adopt many of their cultural values and beliefs, and become much more than just Luminosians.

There should be nothing wrong in any of these changes, as long as we continue to keep faith with the Crims as the bracelets are passed down; but over time, as the newer and newer generations are diluted of our Luminosian values and beliefs, they will forget, if not be utterly ignorant of, the importance of believing in the Crims as they wear the bracelets.

O, the new generations will love the beauty of the bracelets! They will not, however, understand, much less appreciate, their meaning. This ignorance will be the people’s downfall, for the good luck given from the bracelets comes only from faith in the Crims. Wearing the bracelets without that faith leads only to ill fortune.

The faithless wearers of the bracelets will see that ill fortune in the beginning of a new trough.

Balls

To kill a president, it takes real balls.
Or, was the attempt
on his life a bunch of
balls, a lie to fortify
a room for balls?
Well–nuts!

Analysis of ‘Paranoid’

I: Introduction

Paranoid is the second album by Black Sabbath, released in September 1970 in the UK, and in the US in January of 1971. Several of the band’s signature songs come from this album: its title track, “War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” and “Fairies Wear Boots.” “Paranoid” is Black Sabbath’s only top 20 hit, reaching #4 in the UK, and #1 on the US Billboard Hot Hard Rock Songs in July 2025, for the first time in 55 years since its original release.

Paranoid was completed quickly, recorded in only a few days, as was the band’s debut album (recorded in a single 12-hour session). It’s regarded as one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time, defining the genre. Rolling Stone ranked it #1 on their list of the “100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time” in 2017, and #139 on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2020.

Here‘s a link to the full album, and here is a link to all the lyrics.

II: War Pigs

The song was originally to be called “Walpurgis,” with different lyrics, about Walpurgis Night, or as bassist/lyricist Terry “Geezer” Butler put it, “the Satanic version of Christmas.” For him, the real Satanists of the world are the warmongering politicians and bankers who make the poor fight their wars for them, so the original lyric’s talk of Devil-worshippers is just a metaphor for the rich and powerful.

Still, the nervous record company executives wanted nothing to do with a song lyric about Satanism, so it had to be changed into something more directly anti-war–hence, “Walpurgis” became “War Pigs.”

The song is in E (actually, all of the songs on Side One of the album, as well as “Electric Funeral,” opening Side Two, are in E), with a frequent power chord alternation back and forth between D and E (also happening often in the other songs just mentioned). Indeed, the intro of “War Pigs” is guitarist Tony Iommi playing E and D chords back and forth while a civil defence siren is heard in the background. Sometimes, Iommi plays E suspension 4th and E major chords.

Then we come to the iconic guitar riff of D-E, with drummer Bill Ward‘s hi-hat hit closed, then one time open, then three times closed again, before the next D-E riff. This whole cycle is heard twice, then singer Ozzy Osbourne comes in.

Vestiges of the old “Walpurgis” lyric can be heard in the comparison between “Generals…in their masses” with “witches at black masses” and “Evil minds that plot destruction/Sorcerer of death’s construction.”

Since the song was written while the Vietnam War was still going on, “the bodies burning” can be heard as a clear allusion to the effects of napalm, something also referred to in “Hand of Doom.” As we hear this song today, though, “the bodies burning” can make us think of Palestinian children caught in burning buildings and tents as a result of the IDF bombing in Gaza. These latter may not have been in fields, but the flattening of their cities may make them in a metaphorical sense like fields.

The last two lines of the first verse, about “hatred” and “brainwashed minds,” gives us an idea of the “poisoning” effect of propaganda in the corporate, bourgeois mainstream media, which is always inculcating the idea of who our ‘enemies’ are: back at the time of the writing of the song, it was those ‘dirty commie Reds,’ the Viet Cong ‘gooks’; in the 2000s, it was ‘radical Islam’; in the 2010s, it was Gaddafi, Assad, and Putin; in the 2020s, it’s been all Russians, Chinese, and the Iranian ‘regime’ (as Michael Parenti once observed, we in the West have governments; elsewhere, they have ‘regimes’ that must be overthrown and replaced with ‘freedom and democracy.’

Next comes another famous Iommi riff: first, a repeat of the power chords of D-E, then power chords in G, F♯, F♮, and E. A spooky high G-to-G♯ lead, as a blue note–follows, then all those chords again, followed by a high trill of D and E.

The scary, evil sound of riffs like these–of a sort also heard in “Electric Funeral” and “Hand of Doom”–were consciously made as such, for Sabbath were trying to make the rock-and-roll equivalent of horror movie music: this is the basic formula for what would be called ‘heavy metal.’

Originally, the band had called themselves ‘The Polka Tulk Blues Band’ and ‘Earth,’ and they were playing a kind of blues/pop music. Then one day, Geezer had noticed a lineup of people waiting to see a horror movie, and he noted that people are willing to pay a lot to see scary movies. The movie in question was a re-release of 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by Mario Bava; so the band changed their name to that, and started focusing on writing ‘scary’ songs, such as the eponymous first track of their debut album, with the main riff featuring the evil-sounding tritone interval, known as the ‘diabolus in musica.’

To get back to ‘War Pigs,’ we come to a very important and political verse that is so memorable and even more relevant today than ever. Politicians (and the capitalists they serve, of course) may have started the wars, but it’s the poor who always have to do all the fighting and dying. In the next verse, we hear that people are treated “just like pawns in chess.”

This is all true not just of the Vietnam vets who felt screwed by the American government back in the 1970s, but also those of the Iraq war, many of whom regretted their service in killing people based on government and media lies about “WMDs.” Many Americans join the military out of sheer desperation to find work in a country that threw the working class overboard as soon as there was no longer a danger to the capitalist class of socialist revolution (i.e., the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the end of 1991).

Not only have American troops been treated “just like pawns in chess,” but so also have the troops of people in other countries. Consider young Ukrainian men being forced to fight a war that, contrary to popular belief (as a result of mainstream Western media lies), was not merely Russian aggression, but has always been a proxy war from the US and NATO that had provoked Russia for eight years, from the 2014 coup d’état that removed democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych from power and replaced his government with one that included Neo-Nazis who attacked ethnic Russians in the Donbass until Putin, realizing that attempts to bring about a diplomatic solution weren’t working, felt he had no choice but to intervene. The US/NATO proxy war is all part of a geopolitical chess game meant to weaken Russia to ensure the continuation of US/NATO global hegemony. Hence, Ukrainian boys, the pawns in that chess game, die to satisfy the anti-Russian ambitions of the US/NATO.

…but I digress. Back to the song.

After the end of the verse with “Wait ’til their judgement day comes” (whose significance I’ll get to in a minute), we hear a repeat of the D-E, G, F♯, F♮, E chords (interrupted, of course, with Ward banging on the drums). Then Iommi goes into a solo, starting and ending it with notes highlighting the suspension 4th and major 3rd, the middle of the solo being blues licks. Next is the going back and forth heard in the intro of E to D chords, and back to the D-E and hi-hat.

In the final verse, Ozzy sings abut the war pigs finally getting their comeuppance. The thing is, though, that it comes in the form of divine retribution, rather than, say, that of the ICC, or the Nuremberg Trials. It’s assumed that justice will be achieved through the spirit, rather than through realistic, human action, as if we people are too weak to do anything about injustice.

Using religion as the final arbiter of justice is a form of philosophical idealism, which says that thoughts, ideas, the spirit, etc., come first, and that physical reality proceeds from them. Philosophical materialism, on the other hand, reverses the order, placing physical reality first, and having thoughts, ideas, etc., proceed from the physical (i.e., our thoughts and ideas proceed from a physical, biological apparatus called the brain).

Many of us today feel that this latter philosophy is far more realistic and useful for solving the problems of our world. Lamenting the wars and injustices of the world, while waiting for “God” to repair all the wrongs will probably involve a rather long wait, to put it mildly.

The idea of God judging the sinning war pigs, throwing them all in the Lake of Fire, and with “Satan laughing, spreads his wings,” sounds more like a form of ghoulish entertainment than a wish for real justice. Such a trivializing of the ethical problem of warmongering can lead to the kind of backsliding into liberalism that Ozzy did by the 2000s (under the influence of his wife, Sharon, no doubt) when he was defending Zionism, even when the IDF war pigs began murdering the people of Gaza in a particularly shocking way in recent years (as of the publication of this article).

After a refrain of the D-E, G, F♯, F♮, E chords, we come to an instrumental outro called “Luke’s Wall,” named in honour of two men in the band’s road crew, Geoff “Luke” Lucas, and Spock Wall. Sabbath also added the title to inflate the song count for the US release of Paranoid, to get higher publishing royalties.

The outro opens with Iommi playing, still in E, high notes of E-B, E-D (minor 7th above), E-B, E-D, B-D, then power chords in E, B, and D. He repeats those high notes (otherwise described as root–fifth, root-7th [2x], fifth, 7th), then power chords of E, G, and E. He plays those high notes again in E, then brings them down, with parallel intervals, to D, then to C, and he plays chords of B, C-C, B.

Then he plays a mournful lead in E, which goes into a brief solo, and he returns to those high notes of the beginning of “Luke’s Wall.” The outro ends with a speeding up of the tape.

III: Paranoid

This song was an afterthought. In fact, the album was originally supposed to be called War Pigs (The album’s cover, with a picture of a man rushing at us with a sword and shield, is supposed to be a “war pig,” not a man with delusions of persecution; but with the change of the name of the album, they never bothered to change the picture accordingly).

It was felt that the album didn’t have enough material, so this short song was thrown together very quickly to fill in about three minutes. A cursory reading of the lyric already reveals that the song is not about a man who thinks everyone is out to get him, but rather, about (Geezer’s) depression.

The song begins with an Iommi riff in E, him quickly hammering on from D to E chords (by ‘chords,’ I mean power chords, the standard rock/heavy metal practice of playing the root and fifth simultaneously, rather than full triads–i.e., no thirds, hence, I don’t bother saying if they’re major or minor chords), then he plays single notes of A-B, D-E (2x).

Most of the rest of the song musically is made up of chords in E, D (G-D), and E. On two occasions, you’ll hear E, C, D, E (2x). Iommi’s guitar solo is a dry signal on the left channel, which is patched through a ring modulator and routed to the right channel.

There really isn’t much point in going into the lyric in much detail; it’s pretty straightforward–as I said above, it’s just about Geezer being disconsolately unhappy, to the point of feeling as if he’s going crazy. This ‘feeling of going crazy’ is the closest the lyric ever gets to him being “paranoid.”

The notion of being depressed as a form of mental illness, does, however, tie in with the album’s general themes of war, drug abuse, anger, hatred, and vengefulness. Paranoid is an album about, essentially, everything that’s wrong with the world, and a sense of paranoia is surely a big part of such problems.

IV: Planet Caravan

And now, we have a mellow, psychedelic song to contrast with all of the heavy metal coming before and after it. Now, instead of power chords in E and D, we have gentle, lyrically played chords in E minor and D major. Ward plays congas, and Iommi adds some flute, overdubbed to the reversed multitrack master which was then re-forwarded and treated with stereo delay.

Tom Allom, the engineer for the album, added some piano chords towards the end of the song. Ozzy’s voice was put through a Leslie speaker to achieve the treble and vibration effects.

The lyric is about floating through the universe with one’s lover, according to Geezer. I can’t help thinking, though, that given the psychedelic nature of the song, that it’s also about enjoying a nice, mellow high after smoking some grass. Such an interpretation would tie in well with the general themes of the album, which as I mentioned above, include drug use.

As far as Geezer’s lyrics go, this is one of his particularly beautiful, poetic achievements, rich in imagery, simile, metaphor, and personification (take, for example, the line “Stars shine like eyes, the black night sighs.”). The words flow musically and gently–they’re a true delight.

After Ozzy’s singing, we hear a fittingly lyrical, even jazzy, solo by Iommi. Though his solo has been compared to those of Django Reinhardt, I don’t really hear the comparison. It is worthy to point out, all the same, that Iommi suffered an injury to two of the fingers of his fretting hand, reminding us of how Reinhardt had damaged two fingers of his fretting hand in a fire. Both guitarists managed to get around their handicaps quite admirably: in Iommi’s case (inspired by Django’s example of not giving up on the guitar), he coped by drop-tuning his guitar and playing more power chords, partly to make playing easier, but also resulting in his signature ‘heavy’ and ‘dark’ sound, so loved of metal fans.

V: Iron Man

Ward begins the song with the thumping of his bass drum, then Iommi plays a dissonant bending of a low E note against another bent E note. Ozzy, in a distorted-sounding voice that apparently was achieved by speaking behind a metal fan, says, “I am Iron Man.” Then comes in the iconic guitar riff: power chords of B, D, D-E-E, G-F♯ (3x), D, D-E-E.

As Ozzy sings the verses, in the same melody as the riff, Iommi is playing it in single tones rather than with power chords. “Iron Man,” of course, is not the Marvel Comics superhero: his actual body was turned into metal as a result of time travel “in the great magnetic field,” for the purpose of warning humanity of an apocalyptic future.

His return to the present time in his iron form has only caused people to gawk at him and wonder how he changed into such a monstrous creature. They regard him with disgust and contempt: “Why should [they] even care?” This is humanity: judging people solely by their physical appearance.

Geezer has said that he meant “Iron Man” as an allegory for Christ, who also tried to save mankind, but was treated with similar contempt and killed. Instead of saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), though, Iron Man wants revenge against those who rejected him, making himself the very dreaded future he meant to warn us all against.

After the first two verses, in which Ozzy has sung of the people’s contemptuous reaction to Iron Man, Iommi plays an ominous riff of single tones of B-B, D, B, B♭, A-A-A, E, A♭-A-A-B♭(3x, but without the last five notes the third time). Then we go back to the main riff with the power chords.

Ozzy sings the third verse, of how Iron Man’s body “turned to steel…when he traveled time.” After that, during the verse where Ozzy sings of nobody wanting the Iron Man, Iommi plays power chords in E, then D, then single notes of B, B, B-D-E, E-F-F♯, A-A♯-B (2x). This music is all heard twice, then back to the main riff.

The next verse is about Iron Man beginning his act of revenge. The verse after that is musically the same as, and lyrically parallel to, the one discussed in the middle and end of the previous paragraph.

Next comes an instrumental break, at double the tempo, in C♯, with Iommi playing single notes of C♯-B, G♯, G♮, G♭, E, B-B (hammered-on) C♯-C♯ (we hear this all twice). Then, Iommi plays a solo, then a repeat of the riff just described.

Then we hear a return to the single-note riff of B, B, B-D-E, E-F-F♯, A-A♯-B (4x), and a return to the main riff. In the final verse, Ozzy sings of Iron Man’s terrifying revenge, the people “running as fast as they can.”

If Iron Man is allegorical of Christ, then “Iron Man lives again” could be heard as a fusion of the Resurrection and the Second Coming, bringing on the Day of Judgement. Then we hear a return to B-B, D, B, B♭, A-A-A,…etc. Another way to see Iron Man’s revenge as relevant to today’s world is to think of how many times leftists have warned people about the consequences of embracing unbridled capitalism, or the “free market,” which has resulted not in economic prosperity, as the market fundamentalists fantasize it would, but rather the very neoliberal, totalitarian society that those right-wingers fear of communism. Ordinary people now are taking their revenge in the forms of burning down warehouses, throwing Molotov cocktails at Sam Altman‘s home, shooting insurance company billioaires, etc.

Next comes the coda: fast E notes on Geezer’s bass while Ward is thumping with him on the bass drum and playing the hi-hat, then hitting the tom-toms. Iommi repeats that dissonant bending of the low E note, then he plays a doom-laden single-note theme of E-D-E, (hammered-on) D-E-D (pulled-off), E-D-E, F♯ G F♯ G F♯ (grace note>>>) G-F♯ D (2x). He does overdubbed solos briefly, then returns to the theme (which always has Geezer backing him up with bass notes of mostly Es, Ds, C♯s, and Cs. The song ends with an emphatic E-D-E.

VI: Electric Funeral

This song is yet again in E minor, as were the previous three (“War Pigs” was an ambiguous, blue-note E major/minor). Iommi is playing the opening riff with a wah-wah pedal: E, E, B-C-B, E, F♯-G-F♯. The tempo is plodding and mournful.

When Ozzy comes in singing, he sings the same menacing melody as the backing guitar and bass riff: E, E, B…B♭…A-G… The song is about a nuclear holocaust. The first verse, with ominous imagery of the dangers coming from the sky (the dropping of an atomic bomb, of course), is comparable to the narrative I created around Krzysztof Penderecki‘s music when I wrote my analysis of his terrifying avant-garde composition, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

The first two lines of the second verse, about how people who blindly follow orders like robots, who obey without thinking, will lead us all to our deaths in a nuclear war. These lines are particularly relevant today, when people mindlessly believe Western media propaganda that insists, “Russia bad! China bad!”, yet never consider that the purpose of such agitprop is to manufacture consent for war with those two nuclear-armed countries, as against the one nuclear-armed country that has actually used nukes to kill people.

This isn’t about believing that the Russian and Chinese governments are flawless or utterly blameless. To be sure, there’s plenty of room for criticism of both where applicable and appropriate. The point is that we should not be demonizing them to the point of antagonizing them and playing dangerous games of nuclear brinksmanship. Such dangers are what “Electric Funeral” is all about. We don’t want to be “victims of man’s frustration” over the reality that the US isn’t going to be the strongest country in the world anymore, and that the BRICS nations are on the rise. In fact, if handled well, this emerging multipolarity, with its new balance of power, could lead to world peace.

After the second verse, we come to an instrumental break. With an open low E-string, Iommi plays descending pairings of notes in E-G♯, E♭-G♮, D-G♭(5x). Next, he plays a riff, at double speed, of power chords of E-D-E, then a high chord of E minor up on the twelfth fret. Geezer backs him up on the bass with E-D-E, G, G-G, G.

Ozzy sings, doubling a melody of leads Iommi plays, of the violent effects of an atomic bomb destroying a city. The horrors turn surreal with imagery like “rivers turn to wood; ice melts into blood.” When I first heard this line as a teen, I thought it absurdly sensationalistic, but a possible interpretation of the first half of it is an allusion to Revelation 8:10-11, in which a star, named Wormwood, falls on a third of the rivers, turning them bitter and killing many people. Similarly, in Revelation 8:8, “the third part of the sea became blood.”

This fast section of the song ends with Ozzy chanting “Electric funeral” in E, while Iommi bends a high D-note up to E for Ozzy’s every syllable. Then Iommi plays a lower lead of Ds and E, leading back to the original, plodding riff with the wah-wah pedal.

The final verse is, as with the ending of “War Pigs” a reference to the Final Judgement. God is “the electric eye/Supernatural king.” The evils ones of the world will go to hell, as will the war pigs.

After a repeat of the original wah-wah riff, the song ends with more of that menacing theme on the guitar and bass: E, E, B…B♭…A-G. The song fades out ominously with that, ending not with a bang, but a whimper.

VII: Hand of Doom

The song begins with an eerie bass line in D: C-C-D-D-D, D, D-D-G, G♯, A. Then Ward and Iommi join Geezer, and Ozzy begins singing.

The song is about drug addiction, specifically intravenous drug abuse, such as IV heroin, as used by traumatized veterans of the Vietnam War, in a vain attempt to escape their pain.

Once the addictive habit has been established, “time’s caught up with you,” and “you know there’s no return.” What up to now has been a soft, ominous guitar doubling of that bass line described above is now loud and terrifying. “You join the other fools [who have become addicts]”, “Now [the addiction is] killing you.”

With the second verse is a return to the soft, ominous playing of the guitar/bass theme. Ozzy sings of the traumatic source of the need for the escape through drugs: “the bomb,” and “Vietnam napalm.” It’s all so “disillusioning” that “you [need to] push the needle in.”

A return to the loud and terrifying version of the riff comes with Ozzy singing of how, with the addict, “from life, you escape/Reality’s black drape.” After this verse, Geezer plays the eerie riff alone a few times, then all is spookily silent for a second.

Then we come to a whole new riff, in C, from Iommi. He plays roots, fifths, and octaves in triplets of C-G-C (4x), then chords of B♭, B♭-suspension 4th, and B♭-major.

Ozzy sings of what a fool the addict is to be overindulging in such a dangerous habit. In the second of these two new verses, he sings of the addict “drop[ping] the acid pill.” He won’t “stop to think now.”

It seems odd (if not outright hypocritical) for Ozzy to have sung, and Geezer to have written, a lyric that judges drug users, when we all know these four guys were far from innocent of the habit. As early as “Fairies Wear Boots,” Ozzy is freely admitting to “smoking and tripping.” Then there’s “Sweet Leaf” glorifying the smoking of marijuana, with Iommi opening the song by coughing after inhaling a joint. Then there’s Ozzy chanting “cocaine!” in “Snowblind,” and saying “Smokers…get high!” in “Killing Yourself to Live.” Finally, there’s Ozzy’s claim that he and Ward did acid every day (or almost every day, or sometimes once or twice a week) for two years back in the early 1970s, leading to Ozzy having a chat with a horse.

After the first of these verses is a return to the triplets of C-G-C, etc. During the verses, Iommi is playing power chords of C, E♭, D-B♭, F, C, B♭, C. After the second of these verses, Iommi plays power chords of C, E♭, F, G (3x).

Then, for the next verse, Iommi is playing a heavy riff with power chords of Cs and C♯-C♮, over and over again. Ozzy sings more of the addict’s delight in self-destruction.

After this verse and a repeat of that riff with the triplets, etc., Iommi does a solo in the Dorian mode. Then he plays a riff of three descending power chords of C, B♭, and G (2x), then there’s a return to the original, eerie bass riff in D.

In the next verse, Ozzy sings of the addict’s “skin…turning green,” symbolic of the physical and mental sickness growing in him, as the rest of the verse is just about the addict ignoring the damage he’s doing to himself and the painful reality around him he’s trying in vain to escape.

In the final verse, we sense how the extensive damage to the addict’s health is finally taking its toll on him. He falls, his body heaves, and he’s surely going to die.

After this, we just hear the bass playing the eerie theme all alone, just as alone as the dying addict is. The bass fades out quickly, as does the addict’s life.

VIII: Rat Salad

This track is an instrumental in G. One can hear it as Black Sabbath’s equivalent to Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick”: an instrumental, the second last track on Side Two of the band’s second album, and most importantly, it has a drum solo. The riffs are essentially made up of blues licks, as “Moby Dick” is essentially a blues instrumental, though here Iommi plays a solo in the Dorian mode again.

The main riff is, as I said above, made up of blues licks: G, A♯, C, C♯, C-C♯ grace note)-C, A♯, G (2x), etc.

IX: Fairies Wear Boots

This song, with a lyric by Ozzy, for a change, was inspired by an altercation the band had with a group of skinheads: not the white supremacist kind, but ones nasty enough to call the band “fairies” because of their “girlish” long hair.

Ozzy decided to get back at them with this song lyric by using the homophobic slur on them instead. The song opens with an instrumental intro called “Jack the Stripper,” named after the Hammersmith nude murders of 1964 and 1965. Iommi plays an opening riff in G minor with an echo effect, then it goes up to A minor.

After that, it goes up again to B minor, with Iommi playing octaves. Then he plays power chords of E, D, (and Ward bangs solo drum licks), B, and A (more solo drumming). This trading of power chords and solo drumming is repeated, then they go up to C♯, and Iommi does a solo with blues licks. Then there’s a repeat, twice again, of the E, D, B, and A power chords trading with the solo drum licks.

Finally, we come to the song’s main riff in a bluesy G minor. First, the riff is loud and aggressive, then it softens to leave space for Ozzy’s vocals. He begins his story about the skinheads, though the setting and circumstances seem quite different from the original source of the story. Instead of what was, depending on how the story’s told, an encounter with skinheads at either a Sabbath gig or a soccer game, Ozzy presents it as if it were a drug-induced hallucination. He’s walking home late at night and sees the “fairies” in boots dancing through a window inside a house. The boots are the strong ones a skinhead would wear.

Between the repeated chorus, in which Ozzy seems hysterical that no one would believe his bizarre vision, there’s a riff by Iommi with single notes of (more or less) F-G (hammered-on, 2x), C-D (hammered-on), F, D, and F bent up to G and back down (these an octave lower). Then he solos briefly, does the riff again, and plays the “Jack the Stripper” theme again before returning to the main riff of the song.

After Ozzy’s repeat of the chorus, he sings of going to the doctor for help, only to be told that his problem is doing too many drugs. Oddly, instead of producing a fourth line to rhyme with “far,” he just sings a long “Yeah!” (Easy rhymes for “far” could have been “are,” “bar,” “car,” “jar,” “star,” etc. Off the top of my head, I could rhyme it with a fourth line of “A crazy dope fiend is all you are.”)

Iommi repeats the riff described two paragraphs above, then ends the song with a repeated, higher-pitched riff of A, A♯, G, A♮, F, G…fading out.

X: Conclusion

Paranoid is an album fusing the themes of war, mental illness, escape through drugs, alienation, revenge, nuclear war, and self-destruction through drug abuse. The song “Paranoid” may be more about depression than actual paranoia, but the title for the album seems nonetheless apt, since all the aforementioned themes have a way of fuelling paranoia in people, in one way or another.

My Short Story, ‘Soil,’ is Published in the Anthology, ‘Life, Death, and Transmutation’

I have a short story, ‘Soil,’ that has been published today, fittingly, on Earth Day, in the anthology Life. Death, and Transmutation: A Charity Anthology of Dark Nature Poetry and Fiction, edited by Alison Armstrong and presented by Dark Moon Rising Publications. It’s a charity anthology of dark fiction and poetry exploring the life, death, and regenerative forces of Nature, with all proceeds donated to Defenders of Wildlife.

My story is about a businessman who has just died, and while he’s in his grave, his soul must reckon with the divinity of the earth for his sinful pollution of the land to maximize profit. He’ll undergo a painful ego death, which will ultimately be a kind of purgatory for him, leading to his ultimate redemption and blissful existence, being interconnected with everything else in the universe.

Other great writers in the anthology are Alison Armstrong, Pixie Bruner, J. Rocky Colavito, Christina Guldi, Elad Haber, Kyle Heger, Kristi Hendricks, Juleigh Howard-Hobson, J.L. Lane, Basile Lebret, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, Shane David Morin, Irena Barbara Nagler, Margo Pecha, Sacha Rosel, Stacy Schonhardt, Tamara Kaye Sellman, Shawn Scott Smith, David L Tamarin, and Tracy Thompson.

So go get yourself a copy of this great book. You can find it here on Amazon.

Arson

A fire is nothing, in an empty building,
compared to that violence of having so
little pay that you cannot afford to live.
David Byrne and his band in the white
suits had the right idea in their old song
and 1980s video. We’re ordinary guys, and nasty weather is coming.

It’s just adventurism, but it’s something.
The fire-starters will just be arrested, so
it won’t in itself be revolution, but it has
started something that has been far too overdue. Build a movement.

We must not just burn buildings; we must
burn the entire system to the very ground.
No longer must the parasites be allowed to steal off workers’ sweat.

With a virgin earth, we can start to build something new, and better.

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter Two

[The following is the forty-second of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, here is the fortieth, and here is the forty-first–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This and the next chapter deal with “visions” of the future brought on by the use of drugs made from plants, local ones of the tribe’s area, presumably. Which plants in particular were used, we can’t be sure of, since they are never explicitly named in the text.

This chapter includes visions of a future many hundreds of years past the time of writing. The uncanny thing about this chapter is how, at least in the opinion of a few of the researchers in our team, it seems to be describing a feudal society, long before any of the tribe could have known what such a society would be like! It uses the language of someone trying to depict such a society, while of course not being able to describe it properly and accurately, all the while describing it in a way that the people of his or her own world could understand.

The chapter begins with a vision of how the tribe got liberated from the previous trough of slavery to the Zoyans as dealt with in Chapter One. Apparently, the tribe made a set of bracelets, one for each member, each decorated with personifications of the four Crims of the elements. So, Weleb has the face of a man blowing to represent air, Nevil has a face of fire, Drofurb a face of earth and rock, and Priff a watery face. These are mere suppositions of ours: we cannot describe how such bracelets looked for sure, having not yet found even one among the texts and relics.

In any case, it is the magic power of such bracelets that it is believed helped liberate the tribe, with the understanding that they would wear them with bedrock faith in the Crims. A lack of such faith in the future would result in a reversal of fortune. The liberated tribe passed on the bracelets to the next generation, warning the wearers to keep their faith in the Crims strong. The admonition worked, it seems, for many generations. At some point, though, the new wearers of the bracelets must have thought of them as little more than pretty jewelry, for the people soon enough found themselves in a new kind of servitude.

Chapter Two

Glory be to Drofurb, Crim of the earth, from whose plants we may extract drugs that give us signs of the future! From these visions, we Luminosians now know how we can liberate ourselves from the oppressive rule of the Zoyans!

We must make a bracelet for each member of the tribe; of what material each is to be made, we do not know, but we will try many kinds until we know which is correct. The bracelets are to be decorated each with an image of the four Crims, presented as if men. Weleb’s face will huff and puff and blow air; Nevil will have a fiery face; Drofurb, a face of earth and rock, with plants for hair; and Priff will have a wavy, watery face.

The most important thing of all, upon making and wearing the bracelets, is that every member of the tribe have an unshakable faith in the Crims and their ability to sustain a happy life for us all. If ever the wearer’s faith should falter, ill fortune will come back to us.

Our visions have shown that when we finish making the bracelets with the correct material, all of the tribe, fully motivated in their hatred of slavery to the Zoyans, will wear the bracelets with perfect faith. The visions show that we will be liberated; furthermore, many generations in the future will wear the bracelets faithfully, and so will continue to live well in a long, great crest. Bur our visions also show that one day, when the tribe is self-satisfied, they will grow proud, lose their faith, and treat the bracelets as if mere adornments. Then will come the next terrible trough.

Our vision of the trough to be endured was as follows. We saw wide, flat, grassy fields with men and women living off the land. Their crops yielded much food, yet the people were often hungry, for they had to give most of this food to the men who owned the land, those far richer than they.

These poor, wretched workers descended from us Luminosians, who after our liberation from the Zoyans would marry and mix with other peoples. None of these people could read or write; they were all filthy and often suffering or dying of disease at young ages. Many had few teeth, with little to eat or to grin about.

We saw no hope for any of them to rise out of their poverty and squalor. They could only raise crops and give most of the yield to their wealthy lords, who gave hollow promises of protection in exchange for food so desperately needed to fill their bellies with.

No kindness did the lords show their drudges: only an insistence that they know their place, and never try to rise from it, for pain of violence from the lords’ standing armies. We also saw the bracelets on the people’s wrists, never to be removed until passed onto the next generation, for until such a time, the bracelets were stuck to their skin; attempts to tear them off would be intolerably painful, until the Crims forced them to give them to their sons and daughters.

In time, though, one generation would rise up, conquer the evil lords, kings, and queens through bloody violence, which included the severing of heads with devices that had dropping blades. The people would then be free…if only for a short time, for the next trough would be soon to come.

Swollen Finger

If you point
with an index finger that is O, so
swollen and bloated, then the road
that you’d have us take will all be
unclear, hard to see.
You will lead us
astray…lost.

Analysis of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’

I: Introduction

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is the sixth studio album by Genesis, released in 1974. It’s also the last Genesis album with original lead singer Peter Gabriel, who then quit after the tour promoting this album to pursue a solo career. So this is the last Genesis album with the classic prog quintet–Gabriel (vocals/flute), Tony Banks (keyboards), Mike Rutherford (bass/12-string guitar), Phil Collins (drums/vocals), and Steve Hackett (guitars)–which gave us Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, their first live album, and Selling England by the Pound.

A rock opera, TLLDOB tells the story of Rael (played by Gabriel), a troubled youth from New York City who goes through a journey of self-discovery in a surreal Manhattan. The story is richly allegorical and metaphorical, drawing ideas from religion, mythology, literature, and psychology. It is by turns brilliant and yet of a frustrating “obscurantism,” to borrow a word from a critic in the Rolling Stone Album Guide (fourth edition, page 328).

Here is a link to all the song lyrics, here is a link to the entire album, illustrated and with the lyrics, and here is a link to Peter Gabriel’s liner notes from the inner gatefold of the album cover.

Since this album is so frustratingly obscurantist, there are probably as many different ways to interpret what it all means as there are people to interpret it. What follows below, therefore, is my own personal interpretation, for what that’s worth.

Gabriel’s narration in the liner notes mostly do more to make the story obscurantist, as do the black-and-white photos on the cover, than do his lyrics. Perhaps obscurantist is the whole idea, though, since as I see it, the story is about Rael going from his angry, rebellious, self-centered youth to reaching a high state of spiritual enlightenment, a mystical experience that cannot be adequately expressed in words, music, or images.

II: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

The song begins with Banks on the piano, playing wavelike phrases with his alternating right and left hands hitting intervals of fifths and fourths on every strong beat (the first, fifth, ninth, and thirteenth of the sixteenth notes in every bar of 4/4 time, the other groups of three sixteenth notes being intervals of thirds). We can hear in his playing the clear influence of classical music, a defining feature of prog.

Then the whole band comes in, with Gabriel singing the album and song title (Collins doing backup vocals and hitting cymbals), to a chord progression of B-flat, B suspended 4th, and resolving to E.

Now, what does “the lamb lies down on Broadway” mean? Note what Gabriel says in the liner notes: “This lamb has nothing whatsoever to do with Rael, or any other lamb–it just lies down on Broadway.”

Are we supposed to take Gabriel at his word here, or is he deliberately trying to keep us from the correct interpretation? I think it’s the latter. Why should we believe it’s just a lamb lying down on Broadway, meaning nothing else? What would be the significance of that, if that’s all there is to it?

Denial is a common defence mechanism used to keep us from confronting a painful truth. Here, at the beginning of the story, Rael hasn’t yet begun his spiritual journey. He’s full of anger, rebelliousness, and hatred of everyone around him. He has yet to understand that the hostility he sees in the world around him is just a projection of his own hate.

The lamb is another lamb: the Lamb of God as symbolic of someone going through a painful journey of self-discovery and enlightenment, who must learn to sacrifice himself for others. Therefore the lamb is Rael. Gabriel would deflect us, for the moment, from that conclusion so that we won’t figure out the meaning of the story too quickly or easily…or to make it obvious that his denials are b.s. I generally regard the liner notes narration as unreliable, so I won’t reference it again.

The lamb lies down-that is, dies, like the light that dies down towards the end of the story–like Christ on the Cross. This happens on Broadway, where theatrical and musical productions are done, for “all the world’s a stage.” Rael will make a sacrifice–saving his brother, John, from drowning–in the middle of the theatre of life.

Rael isn’t at that stage of his spiritual progress yet, of course (a progress somewhat like John Bunyan‘s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of Gabriel’s inspirations for Rael’s story, by the way). At this point, he is just angry at the world, part of his reason surely being its phoniness, like the theatre of a Broadway show.

He would have his identity and individuality known to the world, hence his can of spray paint and wish to put graffiti on the walls (“Rael, imperial aerosol kid. Exits into daylight, spray-gun hid.”). He’d have the world know he’s not one of their kind: “I’m Rael!” he shouts.

“Rael” is a pun on real. He’d have the world know he isn’t phony as they are, “all the men and women [who] are merely players,” as Jacques calls us in As You Like It. As I said above, though, everything Rael sees that’s wrong in the world is just a projection of what’s wrong in himself, and his spiritual journey will help him to understand that over time: no, Rael isn’t all that real, either. His journey will make him real.

So if the lamb is Rael, and is a symbol of crucified Christ, the Light that will die down on Broadway, then it makes sense that “the lamb seems right out of place,” for Rael is far from ready to be that salvific symbol, a selfless rescuer of his fellow man (personified in his brother, John).

Rael is trying to establish his identity and individuality, that is, his ego. The problem with doing this, though, is that–as the Buddhists and Lacan independently concluded–ego is an illusion. Our identity is interwoven with every other identity and with everything else around us. By the song, “It,” Rael will come to this understanding.

“Somehow [the lamb is] lying there/Brings a stillness to the air.” Two aspects of the lamb sit in contrast to those of the city: the lamb’s passivity and its representation of nature, as opposed to the aggressive hustle and bustle of New York City, and “the man-made light…the neons dim to the coat of white” (i.e., the white fur of the lamb). The light of the neon is nothing compared to the light of the white lamb.

The passivity of the lamb, its “lying there” and its “stillness,” means it not only has Christian symbolism, but also that of Taoism, which favors the passive, feminine yin over the aggressive, male yang. While ultimately, Taoist philosophy is about having a balance of yin and yang, in Rael’s case, he has too much of the yang in his anger, aggression and vandalism, so he must learn to emphasize the yin as symbolized in the lamb in order to restore a sense of balance in himself. Since the lamb also represents nature as contrasted against the urban reality of New York City, this love of nature is also how the lamb is Taoist in symbolism.

“Something inside [Rael] has just begun,” that is, his spiritual journey is beginning. He doesn’t know what he has done because, contrary to his loud declaration of his identity (“I’m Rael!”), he doesn’t know himself. As he goes on his journey, though, he will come to know himself.

The song ends with an ironic quote from the old Drifters song, “On Broadway” (also covered by George Benson, whose version was used in the All That Jazz soundtrack). The irony in the quote in the Genesis song is how the bright lights and the “magic in the air” are illusory, the fake theatricality of life.

III: Fly on a Windshield

Here is the inciting incident of the story, Rael’s call to adventure. A dark cloud is descending into Times Square. No one else notices it or seems to care.

There is soft guitar strumming as Gabriel softly sings. Banks’s organ is hovering in the background, too.

The cloud is like a “wall of death.” The wind blows dust into Rael’s eyes; where he thought he saw clearly before, now he realizes he cannot see. That same dust, settling on him and making a crust on his skin, has immobilized him. He is terrified and wanting to run to safety, like the hero rejecting the call to adventure, but of course he can’t, so he feels like a fly, about to die by smashing into a windshield.

There’s an instrumental outro in E minor in which the whole band joins in, with Collins bashing away on the drums and Hackett playing leads. It goes up to F-flat, then to B, segueing into the next track.

IV: Broadway Melody of 1974

Here’s where the surrealism of the story really takes off. Gabriel’s lyric is of a stream-of-consciousness style (some might call in self-indulgent writing).

We’re hit with a barrage of images from a variety of sources in popular culture, religion, myth, and politics: Lenny Bruce, Marshall McLuhan, Groucho Marx, “mythical Madonnas,” the Sirens, the Ku Klux Klan, Howard Hughes, the song “In the Mood,” and criminal Caryl Chessman. So we have people involved in performance, as is Broadway, though many have in some sense failed (Bruce got busted for obscenity, Groucho’s “punchline failing,” and media man McLuhan has his “head buried in the sand”), since Rael sees through the fakery of the theatre of life.

There’s a sense of a mix of good and evil throughout, for “Ku Klux Klan serve hot food,” “the cheerleader waves her cyanide wand” (we may find cheerleaders charming, but cyanide is usually extremely toxic), and a robber, kidnapper, and serial rapist “leads the parade.” Chessman “knows, in a scent”…a pun on innocent, from a man who was most certainly guilty. This mix of good and evil, a blurring of opposites making everything to seem a chaotic mess, implies that Rael has entered the realm of the Real, Lacan’s notion of an undifferentiated, traumatic world that cannot be described verbally…hence, Gabriel’s obscurantist lyric.

The song ends with some soft guitar strumming and Banks on the Mellotron (strings tapes).

V: Cuckoo Cocoon

Rael finds himself in some kind of cocoon-like cave. Like Jonah, who also refused his call (from God) and thus was caught in the belly of a great fish, so is Rael caught in this dark, enclosed space wherein he’ll undergo a spiritual transformation.

He is perhaps too early to be going through this transformation, though: “Cuckoo cocoon, have I come to, too soon for you?” He’ll need to experience a lot more before he’ll be ready to shed his ego and live for humanity, his brother (literally John, and metaphorically everyone).

Gabriel sings over soft 12-string guitars from Hackett and Rutherford. Gabriel also does flute solos in the middle of and at the end of the song.

VI: In the Cage

Where at first he felt “secure” and “good” in the “cuckoo cocoon,” now Rael is “drowning in a liquid fear,” and he wants to get “out of this cave.”

He’s felt like an embryo slumbering in the womb, but now he wants out. Rael is experiencing something comparable to Jesus’ harrowing of hell, or Jonah’s terror in the belly of the great fish. Rael’s “sleep in the deep” will feel like a nightmare.

We hear Tony Banks’s organ with a heartbeat pulse in 6/4, in B-flat minor. When Gabriel sings of keeping self-control and being safe in his soul, the key changes to E-flat major; but when Rael’s “cynic soon returns, and the lifeboat burns,” the key goes down to C-sharp minor, with an A-flat major for a dominant chord.

Stalactites and stalagmites shut Rael in and lock him tight. On the one hand, they could be seen as teeth about to bite and chew him up; on the other, they are like the bars of a cage. Now he wants to get “out of the cage.” He’s “dressed up in a white uniform,” like a straitjacket, since he’s obviously troubled and difficult for society to control: has he been put in an insane asylum, and the cave/cage is just a hallucination from his unstable mind?

He sees others trapped in cages like his, with the stalactite/stalagmite ‘bars’: “cages joined to form a star, each person can’t go very far.” This sight has the potential to give him the understanding that we’re all in the same predicament, caught in a trap of some kind. Rael also sees his brother, John, for the first time in the story. He calls out to John, hoping for help, but John leaves him there.

Gabriel then makes references to two old songs: “Runaway,” by Del Shannon, and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head,” sung by BJ Thomas, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and heard in the soundtrack for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. John is Rael’s “little runaway,” leaving him in the lurch as the raindrops keep falling on his head, the raindrops of pain he wants to get out of. If he could be a liquid like those raindrops, he “could fill the cracks up in the rocks” and escape, but he is solid, his own bad luck.

Interestingly, though, when John disappears outside, Rael’s cage dissolves. This moment is a hint as to what he must do to be spiritually edified and enlightened. John is the key to Rael’s salvation. If he cares about John, he’ll be free of the cage of his own egoism. In this sense, his sojourn in the cave, or cocoon, like Jonah in the belly of the great fish (a moment in Joseph Campbell‘s Hero’s Journey, as are the call to adventure and the refusal of the call, as mentioned above), has been spiritually transformative for him.

VII: The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging

The song begins in A major, with Banks at a keyboard and Gabriel singing. The verses generally are in A major, with some shifts to C major in later verses; the refrain, in which Gabriel sings the title of the song, is in E major, and the song is more dissonant at the end. Collins’s drumming is rather like a marching beat, suggesting the regimented life of the scene Rael is about to see.

Rael is now in a factory, being given a tour by a women there. He sees people being processed like packages of dolls. Here we can see the source of Rael’s suffering, as well as that of everyone else in those cages: capitalism. People are being commodified, hence, “the grand parade of lifeless packaging.” This is the society that has produced Rael’s rage.

He recognizes some of the people in the production line, members of his New York City gang, it seems, with the same rage as he because of everybody’s commodification, “in labour bondage.” Indeed, the imagery of capitalism runs throughout the lyric: “Everyone’s a sales representative/wearing slogans…”, “I guess I’ll have to pay.”

Unlike the “free market” delusions of the market fundamentalists, a true understanding of capitalism recognizes that there’s “no sign of free will.” We live, work, buy, and sell under capitalism because we have no other options…and this lack of choice is among us leftists, too. Such is the hegemony of neoliberalism, which had only gotten worse after the 1974 release of TLLDOB.

We get a sense of worker alienation and the commodification of humanity in lines like “The hall runs like clockwork/Their hands mark out the time/Empty in their fullness/Like a frozen pantomime.” People feel like machines, operating with mechanical precision, yet they’re empty, frozen, and lifeless, bereft of humanity, even in the “fullness” of everything they’ve shopped for and bought.

It seems that the commodified people have all been fittingly given each a number, since John, among them, “is number nine.” Is this a reference to Lennon, with “Revolution 9”? This also seems fitting. If I’m right in that interpretation, and so much of the source of the suffering of Rael and everyone else–including John–is capitalism, then revolution is the solution. Lennon spoke of “Revolution 9” as an attempt to paint a picture of a revolution using sound. If John is the key to fixing what’s broken in Rael, then he’s his brother’s inspiration, like the nine Muses, to a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

We just need to understand how such an overthrow is to be done successfully. First, we’ll examine how not to do it.

VIII: Back in NYC

The song begins in D major, and it’s mostly in seven. Banks’s synthesizer playing is prominent throughout the song.

Gabriel sings of Rael’s rough life as a kid in New York City, being in gangs, getting into fights, and being incarcerated in Pontiac Correctional Facility as a juvenile delinquent when he was 17 years old, and released then, too. He also sings of Rael’s use of Molotov cocktails, damaging property with them.

These are examples of young punks using violence to rebel against establishment systems like capitalism and the bourgeois state. They can be seen as forms of adventurism (a typical tactic of anarchists), which while being romantic and exciting, are ultimately bad for the working class because they provoke stronger waves of violence by the bourgeois state against the rebellious punk agitators (e.g., Rael being put in Pontiac). Such actions, thus, are how not to do revolution, as opposed to building a disciplined working-class movement and party, rooted in Marxist-Leninist theory, and engaging in revolution only when the time is ripe for it.

Rael, therefore, must learn to tame the wild man inside him. This is what shaving the hair off of his heart symbolizes. The hairy heart, in turn, is represented by a porcupine that Rael cuddles. He has no time for romantic escape (i.e., adventurism) when his fluffy heart is ready for rape (i.e., wishing to commit crimes in the name of revolution, when as Che Guevara observed, the heart of a revolutionary should be filled with love–that is, selflessness). The hairs, like a porcupine’s sharp spines, cut when you touch them; they hurt, like a raping phallus.

So Rael must learn to do revolution out of love for others, to help others, not just do violence for the sake of violence. He will eventually learn this virtue when he has to sacrifice his return to NYC by saving his brother from drowning. If he just goes back to New York City, as in the title of this song, he’ll just go back to his old violent, rebellious ways, and he’ll have learned nothing.

During the verses about cuddling the porcupine and “No time for romantic escape,” the key is D minor, and we hear groupings of four bars in 7/8, each followed by one bar in 6/8. During the “Off we go” part, there’s a grouping of two bars in 7/8, then a bar in 3/8, another two bars in 7/8, then a bar in 4/8, and the whole pattern repeats one time. This section is in A major.

The hair on the heart to be shaven off, like the spines on the porcupine, are phallic symbols, so shaving the heart, a taming of the wild man in Rael, is thematically connected with his and John’s emasculation later. It’s all about extinguishing desire–being “ready for rape”–to end Rael’s egoism.

IX: Hairless Heart

This is an instrumental, in D minor. There’s some soft guitar strumming with Banks’s organ arpeggios in the background. Hackett plays a lead using a volume pedal. Collins comes in later, playing the drums gently. The sedateness of this music suggests the beginning of the taming of Rael that the shaving of the heart represents.

This music segues into the next track.

X: Counting Out Time

This song, the one following it (“The Carpet Crawlers”), and the title track were the ones we heard on the radio, released as singles.

In this song, Rael has “found a girl [he] wanted to date,” and he wants to “get it straight” when he gets it on with her, so he has a book to teach him how exactly to stimulate her erogenous zones. This is all perfectly well-intended, of course, but ultimately wrong-headed, for to get his girl off properly, he has to listen to her, to know exactly how this girl in particular likes it.

Now, this is the surface meaning of the song. There’s also a deeper meaning that makes the surface, sexual meaning most ironic. Note how as Gabriel sings early on, he asks the Lord for guidance, noting how “the Day of Judgement’s come.”

The book he bought, which has all the advice that “the experts” give him, should be seen as symbolic of the Bible, “the experts” being the prophets. The girl he wants to date is actually God, whom Rael wants to please, the sexual ecstasy being symbolic of spiritual ecstasy.

Such an interpretation fits in the wider context of Rael’s ‘pilgrim’s progress,’ his spiritual journey. The body here is symbolic of the soul; his ‘knowing‘ her (in the Biblical sense [!]) representative of growing in spiritual knowledge and enlightenment, of knowing God deeply.

Consider The Song of Songs, a book of sensuous love poetry in which the groom professes his love of the bride. The book is traditionally allegorized by Jews as an expression of God’s love for the Israelites, and by Christians as an expression of God’s love for His Church. We can thus allegorize Rael’s sexual encounter with the girl as Rael’s attempt to love God; here, with the roles of bride (man) and groom (God), the sexes are reversed, with a female God.

So how does Rael try to reach God with his Bible, the Good Book of Great Sex? He’s “found the hotspots, figures one to nine,” which sound like nine of the Ten Commandments, or of the Mosaic Laws in general (he later mentions a “number eleven”). In other words, Rael has the superficial idea of reaching a state of spiritual enlightenment by merely following religious laws. Accordingly, he is doomed to fail, “for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6)

The song is in A major, the verses following a descending major scale progression of tonic (A), leading tone (G-sharp), submediant (F-sharp), dominant (E), subdominant (D), mediant (C-sharp), supertonic (B), and dominant again. The tune has a light, almost trivial quality, to the point of being comical, since Rael is being clumsy and overconfident in bed (allegorically, too trustful of the efficacy of following religious laws). Hackett’s guitar solo is fittingly spastic.

In the refrain where Gabriel sings of how Rael loves erogenous zones, we hear a progression of G major (subtonic), D major (subdominant), and tonic A major; then, when Rael wonders what a poor boy would do without the book’s guidance, we hear chords in C major (a natural mediant in the context of the key of A major), B, and a bar in 5/8 (subdominant resolving to tonic). Bars in 5/8 (representative of the Pentateuch) will alternate with bars in 4/4 in the verses.

The last time we hear the chorus about erogenous zones, there is significantly no use of the bars in 5/8, for at this point, Rael has grown disillusioned with the book, since its erotic tips have been of no use in helping him satisfy the girl sexually. As far as my allegory is concerned, this means that adherence to religious laws (i.e., the Pentateuch) isn’t working for Rael, so he has abandoned them–hence, no bars in 5/8 time.

During our hearing of “Back in NYC,” Hairless Heart,” and “Counting Out Time,” Rael experienced a flashback from which he has now come back, getting us ready for the next song. In other words, aspects of his spiritual journey had begun before this story even began…and perhaps he hadn’t even realized he was already on that journey.

XI: The Carpet Crawlers

This song is also about an attempt to attain spiritual enlightenment and salvation that ultimately fails, that in fact leaves one trapped in hell. Here, instead of there being false hope in following religious laws, as I saw as an allegory in “Counting Out Time,” there is false hope in following spiritual leaders (“callers”). One might think of people watching televangelists on their TVs, foolishly giving them money.

Rael feels lambswool under his feet, which is “soft and warm, giv[ing] off some kind of heat.” Since the lamb represents Christ, this lambswool carpet that feels so good is actually representative of that false Christian path that promises, but fails, to deliver salvation.

Rael sees examples of carpet crawlers going to their deaths, such as a salamander going “into flame to be destroyed,” “imaginary creatures…trapped in birth on celluloid,” and “the fleas cling to the Golden Fleece hoping they’ll find peace.” Note how the lambswool is, apart from representing the Lamb of God, also the Golden Fleece, religious fraudsters’ promise of heaven while enriching themselves with others’ money.

Later, Rael sees his “second sight of people,” the first having been those in “the grand parade of lifeless packaging,” while these new ones have “more lifeblood than before.” Nevertheless, they’re being no less exploited than the previous bunch, for they’re crawling like the insects “to a heavy wooden door/Where the needle eye is winking, closing on the poor.”

It’s the rich who aren’t supposed to be able to pass through the eye of a needle, not the poor. But in this Golden Fleece version of the Lamb of God, religion–the opium of the people–is being used to serve the rich.

Still, the masses mindlessly follow the voices of their corrupt religious leaders, crawling on the carpet like the self-destructing salamander and the fleas, all the little ones…the poor. The carpet crawlers are yet another grand parade of lifeless packaging; religion is used to serve the interests of capitalists.

While it is true that one can only get out of one’s problems by going through them, not avoiding them (“We’ve gotta get in to get out.”), in this case, the “callers” are drawing the carpet crawlers into a trap by chanting a mantra that, though true in itself, is being misused and applied in a way to lead the crawlers astray. The callers thus are false prophets, who twist true ideas out of context to deceive their followers by taking them in what only seems to be the right direction.

They’re being taken “to the ceiling where the chamber’s said to be.” Upwards to heaven, up into the light, which the trees crave. “Believing they are free,” the carpet crawlers mindlessly follow the voices of “their callers.”

Even the strongest of these people are lured to their destruction, for the meek here will not inherit the Earth (“Mild-mannered Supermen are held in Kryptonite.”). Gabriel’s lyric doesn’t seem to make a distinction between “the wise and foolish virgins,” the former of whom, according to the parable (Matthew 25:1-13), had enough light for their lamps when waiting to meet the bridegroom (God), while the latter didn’t prepare enough oil, and so they were excluded from the wedding banquet. Here, all carpet crawlers, strong and weak, wise and foolish, are led to ruin by their callers, not to heaven.

The chord progression of the chorus is, essentially, F-sharp minor, A major and G major twice, then D major, and C major leading out to the next verse.

XII: The Chamber of 32 Doors

Rael has gotten past the carpet crawlers, gone up a spiral staircase, and reached a chamber with 32 doors, There are people everywhere around him, “running around to all the doors.” They all want people to acknowledge them.

After all the religious chicanery of the callers tricking the carpet crawlers, as well as Rael’s failures with gang violence bringing about social change and with the book’s advice not pleasing the girl, Rael “need[s] someone to believe in, someone to trust.”

People in the country are more trustworthy than those in the city, for the former people’s eyes and smiles are more sincere. Someone who works with his hands, the proletariat, is more trustworthy. But Rael is down here, alone with his fear, alienated from everybody; every door he’s gone through brings him back to the beginning. He’s making no spiritual progress trying to follow the ways of others, so he must find his own way.

Everyone’s pointing where to go, even Rael’s mom and dad, “but nowhere feels quite right.” He still needs someone to believe in, someone to trust.

A man who doesn’t shout what he’s found is trustworthy. Such a man doesn’t need to sell his path to salvation, “he won’t take [Rael] for a ride.” The “chamber of so many doors” is thus just like the cage: Rael wants to get out–“take [him] away.”

XIII: Lilywhite Lilith

Just as he wants to get out of the chamber and away from all the people, so does a blind woman, “Lilywhite Lilith,” want help to get out. He guides her out of the crowd of people, and now that she can “feel the way the breezes blow,” she can show him where to go.

Rael is gaining an early insight as to how to find spiritual enlightenment and salvation. He will get the help he needs if he helps others and gives up his egoism.

She takes him “into a big, round cave,” and tells him not to be afraid. Just as she is blind, so is he in the darkness of the cave, sitting on a jade seat. Being in the darkness, in his fear, is like confronting his Jungian Shadow, in order to attain enlightenment.

The darkness is gone when two bright, golden globes float into the cave and hover above the ground.

XIV: The Waiting Room

This track is an instrumental. Tony Banks called it “the best jam [they] had in the rehearsal room,” and it was originally called “The Evil Jam.” The band apparently played in the dark, just making noises on their instruments, and this track resulted from their experimentation. It was quite frightening.

You really get a sense–from all of the spooky, eerie sounds the band is making that Rael is waiting in a dark, scary place, in the belly of the whale again, so to speak, confronting the Shadow.

XV: Anyway

The song begins with a sad piano motif in G minor. Banks develops the wave-like, arpeggiated motif by replacing its perfect fifth with ascending and descending minor sixths, major sixths, and minor sevenths. Gabriel comes in singing of Rael’s experience of impending death, trapped under a cave-in of rocks.

Gabriel’s lyric uses a number of metaphors to refer indirectly to death. It’s “time to meet the chef,” who I assume is supposed to be God. “It’s back to ash,” as in ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ Rael has had his “flash,” the brief light of life. He’s heard that Death “comes on a pale horse” (Revelation 6:8), yet he’s sure he hears a train, which can be associated with death in dreams and poetry. He feels “the pull on the rope,” which is a hangman’s noose. He’ll “stretch for God’s elastic Acre,” which comes from the German Gottesacker, an ancient designation for a burial ground.

Rael imagines he’ll keep his deadline [!] with his Maker, that is, meet God in heaven. Anyway, he’s not really dying; he’s just going through that maddening confrontation with his Shadow, and so it feels like dying. Accordingly, the musical tension is heightened, with Banks playing those mournful piano arpeggios much faster, backed up by the band. Hackett adds some harmonized, overdubbed guitar leads.

XVI: Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist

We hear some 12-string guitar strumming in A major, then Gabriel comes in (with Collins’s backing vocals) singing about personified Death as “the Supernatural Anaesthetist.” He just puffs a toxic powder into your face, you breathe it in, and die. As “a fine dancer,” he’d be doing the danse macabre, I assume.

What comes after this one, four-line verse is an instrumental passage, also in A major, that is rather upbeat for something that’s supposed to be about Rael’s death. Indeed, Hackett plays a sweet lead of C-sharp, D, C-sharp, B, and C-sharp. the fact is that Rael is not really dying; the whole thing was just a hallucination, like a really bad drug trip.

XVII: The Lamia

Since there’s a dialectical relationship between Eros and Thanatos, or the life (sex) and death drives, then it seems fitting to juxtapose Rael’s near-death experience with a sexual encounter.

Out of the cave, Rael finds himself in a pool with three Lamia, the tops of whom are beautiful women, but instead of having legs, each has a snake’s tail. Rael makes love with them, after which they would consume him, but it is the three who die after drinking some of his blood. He eats their corpses and leaves.

The point behind his sexual encounter with and mutual eating of the Lamia is that these acts represent Rael’s giving into the animal side of himself, his bestial, sexual nature. This is the symbolism behind Gabriel’s choice of Lamia, half-woman, half-snake, for his story. Rael must learn from the mistake of giving in to sensual pleasure…and he will learn this the hard way.

XVIII: Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats

This track is another instrumental. Mostly keyboards, Hackett’s leads are put through a volume pedal, and Collins plays a little percussion. Very dreamy, melancholy music. The party of sensual pleasure is over for Rael, so like a drug addict who is coming down from the peak of his high, Rael is feeling the depression that inevitably comes when he realizes the pleasure he’s so attached to is impermanent.

XIX: The Colony of Slippermen

The instrumental intro of this track sounds like an imitation of Chinese or Japanese music–plucked guitar strings sound like those of a koto or zheng. Collins hits wood blocks, which again give an Asian effect. It’s a unique moment in the history of the musical style of Genesis. Why the band chose to play the intro like this I don’t know: are we meant to think that Rael has wandered into the Chinatown section of New York City?

After this intro, the music suddenly changes to a light, upbeat sound, with Banks playing the organ over a shuffle rhythm. I find it intriguing that Genesis chose such a happy theme given what we’re soon to learn what’s happened to Rael as a result of his sexual union with the Lamia. The upbeat theme seems to represent his blissful ignorance of something that will soon shock him.

Gabriel begins singing with a quote of the first line of the famous William Wordsworth poem about daffodils. Again, the association with the poem reinforces this odd sense of everything being positive…when all that Rael has to do to know he has nothing to be happy about is look in a mirror.

Indeed, instead of “all at once, [seeing] a crowd/A host of golden daffodils,” as in Wordsworth’s poem, Rael had “never seen a stranger crowd” of Slippermen, with skin “all covered in slimy lumps,” and “twisted limbs like rubber stumps.” Rael is told that they all made love with the Lamia, too, who made them look as grotesque as they do, and therefore, he now looks the same as they do.

Naturally, Rael is horrified to realize this, and the music changes, with some synthesizer playing, to reflect this shocking realization.

All of this section of the song has been Part I: the Arrival. Rael must join his brother John with Doktor Dyper in Part II: A Visit to the Doktor. What has happened to Rael and the Slippermen is essentially the catching of a sexually transmitted disease, for which the only cure, apparently, is…emasculation.

So, Doktor Dyper emasculates both Rael and John, and Rael looks normal again…except that both he and John have their penises in tubes that they wear as pendants around their necks. The point is that Rael’s desire and indulgence in pleasure (his union with the Lamia) have made him ugly (like the Slippermen). Emasculation represents a renunciation of physical pleasure so Rael can progress spiritually.

Part III: The Raven He still feels some attachment, naturally, if not physically, to his penis. This is when a raven appears and snatches his tube. Rael asks John for help, and not getting it, runs after the raven as it flies away, but he’s never able to retrieve the tube, for the raven–far off ahead–drops the tube in some water at the bottom of a ravine, and all Rael can do is helplessly watch the tube float away.

John’s indifference to Rael’s need for help is just like his indifference when Rael was in the cage. This cool reaction hurts Rael, but what he must learn is that it’s not about people caring about him: he has to learn how to care about others.

He also has to learn how to let go of his attachments and desires, as represented by what’s in the tube.

XX: Ravine

This track is another instrumental. It’s essentially Banks playing melancholy music on a synthesizer. One imagines Rael standing at the top of a ravine, looking down where his lost penis was dropped in the water. He’s staring down at the abyss. One may ask if he’ll ever be a man again, and one hears the raven’s answer: “Nevermore.”

XXI: The Light Dies Down on Broadway

Fittingly, much of the music for this track is thematically similar to that of the title track, for at this point in the story, Rael has come full circle. He sees a window in the rock of part of the ravine wall, and in this window he can see New York City: his home!

Once again, this is a temptation of his selfish instincts, for he’ll be left with a difficult choice: escape this hellish world and be free, or sacrifice the fleeting opportunity and help his brother in need. In this dilemma of his, we can see a link in meaning between “the lamb lies down” and “the light dies down”: Jesus as the Lamb of God and as the Light of the world gave His life for His friends (John 15:13). Rael as a Christ-figure must do the same for his brother, John, representative of all our brothers and sisters, all of humanity.

The lamb lies down, dead, and the light dies down, dead.

The surreal world Rael feels trapped in seems fake because of its fantastical qualities, yet it is the real world of his New York City home that is fake, the Broadway world of theatricality and phony performance, the stage that is the world.

XXII: Riding the Scree

Not only does Rael have to give up his chance to go through the window and back to New York City, but he also has to risk his life slipping down the loose rocks of the scree along the side of the ravine if he wants to get to drowning John in the water below.

Still, he chooses to be brave and go down to save his brother’s life. He imagines himself much braver than even Evel Knievel.

The music is largely in 9/8 time, the subdivisions of the beats being tricky and ambivalent in how they could be heard as 4+5 or 3+3+3. Banks does some flamboyant synthesizer soloing.

XXIII: In the Rapids

This is where Rael has to confront a turbulent, chaotic, unpredictable world, a kind of hell that is the only way that leads to heaven. For to save oneself, one must be willing to save others.

The turbulent hell of the rapids, where he must swim to rescue drowning John, is symbolic of the undifferentiated, non-verbalizable Chaos of what Lacan called The Real–a fitting place for a man named Rael to enter, since he will soon become one with this Void.

This climactic moment, of course, is also what is depicted in the photos on the front cover of the album: specifically, the left photo showing John being pulled by Rael out of the rapids. For the great climactic moment of the story, though, it’s odd that the music would begin with soft, gentle 12-string guitar playing.

The emotion and the volume build, of course, towards the end, where Rael has succeeded in pulling his brother out and back onto land. We realize at the end of all of this, though, that the real climax of the story is not Rael’s brave self-sacrifice and his defying of the danger in the water: it’s his realization, upon seeing John’s face on the land, that he’s seeing himself. It’s like looking in a mirror. In saving John, Rael has saved himself.

XXIV: It

Now with the polarized sides of himself fused, Rael–as a complete human being, complete with John as the complementary good half of him–can feel his Atman, “It,” linked with everybody and everything around him. Hence, the victorious, triumphant, rejoicing music.

“It” is described as being a host of diverse things: cold, warm, all around Rael, and most importantly, “It is here. It is now.” It is Brahman, the pantheistic oneness underlying everything. Rael has attained the nirvana of Brahman, absolute bliss and blessedness.

Other things that are part of “It,” include any food “cooking in your hometown,” “chicken,” “eggs,” and what’s “in between your legs,” that is, sexuality–even that can be a part of It.

“It” is inside spirit, too…literally, so it is in both the physical and spiritual realms, and as spirit, the essence that can be known to be manifested in so many different kinds of things, “It” is the divine spark of everything–Brahman.

That It is here and now also emphasizes the immanence of the divinity, to be understood as a pantheistic concept, not a monotheistic idea, a divinity separate from humanity. “It never stays in one place, but it’s not a passing phase.” It’s eternal, but always moving. As Heraclitus said, “Everything flows.”

A useful connection to be made with “It” that can make the meaning clearer is to compare the idea with a concept in a famous passage in the Chandogya Upanishad. “Tat Tvam Asi,” or “That thou art,” is a famous expression a Hindu spiritual teacher, Uddalaka, says of a number of things to his son, Śvetaketu, to get him to understand how “that” is in everything…even in his son. So we can say that “it” here is “that.”

This is significant when we hear Gabriel sing, “It is real. It is Rael.” “It” is real, in that it is the truth. It can also be compared to the Lacanian concept of the undifferentiated, ineffable Void mentioned above. It is also Rael, because his Atman is now at one with Brahman. Yes, Rael, that art thou!

As often happens throughout TLLDOB, Gabriel makes a reference to a popular song: in this case, “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It),” by the Rolling Stones; but Gabriel sings, “It’s only knock and know-all, but I like it.” “Knock” seems to refer to the pain of life, the school of hard knocks; “know-all” seems to mean Rael’s attainment of enlightenment, from having been absorbed into the oneness. It’s painful, but he likes it.

XXV: Conclusion

TLLDOB is a difficult album to understand conceptually, but an ultimately explicable one. As I said above, Gabriel’s obscurantism is valid because the story is about understanding the deeper mysteries of life.

Rael’s character arc is a voyage of self-discovery and enlightenment. He must learn that being angry and violent is no solution to his problems. Learning to see beyond himself and to help others is the solution.

The surrealism of the story is an expression of the non-rational, symbolic world of the unconscious mind. That Rael would become one with Brahman suggests a shift to the collective unconscious.

All of these things tell us that TLLDOB is a universal story with themes we can all relate to…despite Gabriel’s idiosyncratic way of telling it.

The Tanah: Troughs–Chapter One

[The following is the forty-first of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, here is the thirty-first, here is the thirty-second, here is the thirty-third, here is the thirty-fourth, here is the thirty-fifth, here is the thirty-sixth, here is the thirty-seventh, here is the thirty-eighth, here is the thirty-ninth, and here is the fortieth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

The ancient tribe that wrote the books of the Tanah conceived of history as a series of crests and troughs, the former being periods of good fortune, and the latter being periods of bad fortune. The writers chose to collect the major troughs of their sacred history and narrate the happenings of each in the chapters of this book, and to collect the major crests of that history and tell of them in the chapters of the next book.

The beginnings of these books of crests and troughs deal with those current to the writers at the time of writing; that is, the first chapters of each deal with the enslavement of the Luminosians by the Zoyans (Troughs), and their prophesied liberation (Crests).

Subsequent chapters in each book deal with scenarios believed to happen hundreds of years after the writing: a trough of servitude to wealthy owners of land, what reads like a prophecy of feudalism; then, a crest will come, liberating the people from this servitude. A final trough concerns a world with increasing and extreme wealth inequality, with authoritarian states that use violence to keep the masses in check, and various methods of lulling the masses into docility and complacency, again, to keep them in check–that is, breads and circuses. It prophesies a world disturbingly close to our own, so accurate is its prescience.

As for the corresponding crest meant to lift the world out of that distant, dystopian future, there is an ambiguity to it as to whether the future world will be saved by the leadership of some messiah-like figure, or if the Earth’s only salvation will be a kind of Armageddon, killing and wiping out all of human, animal, and plant life, leading to a far-off, gradual regeneration of life in a completely new form. Again, the prophecy seems chillingly prescient.

Chapter One

Woe to us Luminosians! Our punishment is just!

We have been under the yoke of the Zoyans for ten years now, and no end to our misery is in sight! We only know that a crest will one day come to liberate us, yet it seems so far away from us.

We toil, we dig, we build, we break up rock, we serve meals to and clean for our betters, the Zoyans. We do all of these tasks as just punishment for our wicked and selfish use of magic, turning the once-benevolent Crims against us! We deserve our suffering!

The Zoyans degrade us because we degraded others. They conquered us because we conquered others. They make us slaves because we made slaves of others. They use our women for their sexual sport because we used the women of others for our sexual sport. The Echo Effect taught us of these dangers, but we would not listen.

These hard times that we must endure are a trough. A trough is part of a wave, and therefore a crest will come. Ill fortune is no more permanent than good fortune is. A trough will move up into a crest just as surely as a crest will move down into another trough.

We cannot know how long this trough will last. We only know that, one day, the wave will begin to rise again. Will that day come tomorrow? Will it come next week? Next month? Next year? In how many years will it come? In how many decades will it come?

We do not know any of this. We only know that the wave will rise again into a crest. We must therefore be patient, have faith, and endure.

So for now, we must continue to do our work, as hateful as it is. We must continue to toil, to dig, to build, to break up rock, to serve meals and clean for our betters, the Zoyans. We must do all of these tasks as penance for having made others do these tasks for us one time in the past, what had been a crest for us.

We must remember: if the beginning of a new crest has not come yet, it is because our penance for our own sins is not yet complete. It will be complete one day: we must have faith, and be patient. The Crims know when that day will be, and we know that they are faithful to us.

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