Dumpster-fire Days
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". . . his hardest-rocking and arguably most witheringly lyrical album in a long and incendiary career." – New York Music Daily
". . . a wry, funny, poetic, inspiring, antifascist protest album for 2020 and beyond. He’s turned his trademark incisiveness on the people and the times around us, and he pulls no punches in the truth he spits. His language is unfiltered . . . and spun brilliantly, like someone wove Arlo Guthrie and Fiona Apple into the same intricate tapestry . . . If you feel crazy, or alone, or unheard, or gaslit, or just despondent: listen to Dumpster-Fire Days. It’s the best self-care you’ll give yourself all year." – Little Village
"Liner notes"
So something weird happened. Something dropped out of me somewhere along the road, and I just didn't want to play anymore. A bunch of things went into the "why" of it, age, depression, even a bit of paranoia as to how and on which interstate I might finally crash and die. But one big factor, I realized after some months and rumination, was that I'd lost the confidence and maybe the "swagger" that go into, well, the ego it requires to stand in front of people and assume your words and notes are worth their time.
That's not a poor-me thing, mind you, and I'm not looking for kindly reassurance. It's just some self-analysis. We start playing rock & roll when we're young and utterly giddy to go out there and rage and belt on stage and make something in those sweaty live moments that people remember. But something had shifted in me, and the shift had transformed the righteous furious fun of playing for people into a lot of second-guessing. So I just kind of quietly stopped booking shows and, as I did, a lot of anxiety went away.
But then America went insane.
America went insane and at least some of the political stuff I'd worked into my songs over the years - a lot of the subtext or ragetext or whatever about how most people were good, we just needed to find our common bond again - seemed upended and I had to grapple with my premises all over again. More than anything, I had to figure out how to cope with the thing millions upon millions of us were coping with, which was impotence in the face of absolute horror done in our name. That had happened during the Iraq war, but something newer and older and even more insidious underwrote this new battery of crimes and chicanery and corruption and perfidy and xenophobia of American "leadership." It was a movement, a concentrated, sputum-flecked mobilization of the worst angels of our nature. They demanded conformity, homogeneity, fealty and demonized all who didn't shut up and toe the line.
It was fascism, and its dutiful, accessorized, red-capped members could dispute that all they wanted, but those of us who'd done the reading knew. It was, and remains, crystal clear if you've studied anything about revanchist conservative movements galvanized around kneejerk half-ideas of a purified Herrenvolk society. I'm not going to go too deep into these weeds, but if you've declared absolute fealty to a leader you consider infallible, if you declare all who dissent heretics and apostate, if you obsess about the dangerous "outsiders" coming to threaten your "values," if you demand all other aspects of government fall in line irrespective of law, if you declare the Great Mission of your Great People ordained by God, thus justifying every dark, violent, exclusionary machination - yeah, you can call all that "freedom" all you want but it's not. It's fascism. It's pure Dogpatch American fascism lined up behind the stupidest, shittiest human being imaginable and tragicomic at times, but its net effect has been the closest thing to smashing the best parts of a flawed republic as I have seen in my lifetime.
So how do you say "no"?
A lot of us marched. A lot of us joined organizations to protect our neighbors and to gird civil society against the daily onslaughts. It helps, by the way, and you should do it. It helps to go be around people who share your cause, not only to forward the cause but to not feel so alone and swamped by the tide. But in addition to that, I needed to yell. I needed to channel my yelling into to something that made the yelling more than just yelling. I needed to just do something to not feel so impotent and old and lost in the ominous, bloody tide. And put a big fucking beat to it. So I started writing songs again.
After three years, that yielded Dumpster-fire Days. And yeah, it is pretty focused in its subject matter. I didn't set out to write a "theme" record but, well, I guess we can call this an aural chronicle of a truly garbage epoch, if you want to be fancy about it. It's mostly just a rock record, but it's also shouting id into the face of the superego, because even my exhaustion and depression, I had to shout something. And I get that me shouting doesn't mean that much - I don't sell a lot of records - but please please please remember, if a lot of us do, they'll hear us. And it's not about hoping they do, it's about making them. That is what democracy sounds like.
The optimist's democrat likes to trot out the bromide "we have more in common than we have things that separate us," and I firmly do not believe that anymore, because we've seen proof. Too many in the kindly decent God-fearing "Heartland" of America now insist they are somehow more American than Americans, and they want my friends and neighbors dead, deported or beaten into line - I wrote an essay about this for the Des Moines Register - so I'm no longer interested in politely dancing around their feelings or their bullshit ideas of what patriotism is. They have proven, exhaustively, that it is no virtue in America in 2020 to be a Good German. And there are more of us than there are of them. There's millions upon millions of us, and we need to start acting like it. Dumpster-fire Days - if you have purchased it or intend to, thank you - is just some marching music for the way more important work we have ahead of us. The lot of us.
There's a better fucking world to be made.
Salt of the Earth
My dear grandma was the salt of the Earth and the pride of Magnolia Street
Never missed a Sunday at Grace Lutheran, proud member of the Moral Majority
Couldn't do enough for you long as you'd accepted Jesus, thought Mexicans society's bane
She said Martin Luther King was a commie troublemaker and AIDS was God's cleansing rain
We're the kind of folks who know that where you come from is all really anyone needs
Traditional values, fear of God, fear of anyone who looks, acts or thinks a little differently
Eschewed book-learning but showed up for book-burnings cuz ideas are how apostasy breeds
Yet somehow we know everything about everything and never met a war we couldn't cheerlead
chorus
We're the salt of the Earth, we're the last and the first and we stand tall down on our knees
We're the nose-led footsoldiers of nobility who've kept us in our place for twenty centuries
We're the rueful, dutiful, glory-hallelujah-ful, marching in fanatics' thrall
The salt of the Earth is no spice of life, it's the poison that'll end it all
We're the peasants who cheered as heretics burned, put synagogues to the torch
Lined up to die for rich men's right to own people, enforced apartheid a hundred years more
We gathered in the square to watch Black men hang like a Friday night football game
We'll greenlight genocide long as some charlatan tells us it's in Jesus' name
chorus
We're the salt of the Earth, we're the last and the first and we stand tall down on our knees
We're the nose-led footsoldiers of nobility who've kept us in our place for twenty centuries
We're the rueful, dutiful, glory-hallelujah-ful, marching in fascists' thrall
The salt of the Earth is no spice of life, it's the poison that'll end it all
Tommy Keene Is Playing Kiki's House
Hey, baby, did you hear the news, there're fascists in the White House
And half the country's cool with that
Jim Crow is all the rage again, measured reality suspended,
Like we all went back in time and unlearned good and bad
But long ago and far away, we read books and argued
Late into the mornings how to clean up our parents' cratered waste
Meet me at the Record Shack each Friday after last class, maybe
Punk rock, ideas, sex and booze could be the fuel of better days
chorus
Twelve-pack in a gym bag, 6 Bus at Baldwin Street
Smoke count at half a pack, I'm 50 going on 23
It's a dumpster-fire day in an End Times kind of life
But Tommy Keene is playing Kiki's House tonight
1986, Songs From the Film, JP finds it in the cut-out bin
We spin it again and again like it turned some secret key in our restless brains
Niebuhr, Gramsci, Scruffy the Cat, Hobsbawm, Wiesel, the Mats
Social D, Marcuse, Del Fuegos, Dewey, threads the wove what we became
Morning in America, pastel propaganda
Corporations, Christians, contras, all fronts in one never-ending war
We raged at the sacred and austere, revenge for childhoods lived in fear
Rock & roll won't save the world, it's just the breaths between the horrors
chorus
Aspire
We drove until the west became the last orange-purple gasp of day
A purity of moment rife with perfumed breezes of epiphany
Like time would somehow stop and truth would be revealed and all the miles would roll the other way
That's what sagely people say, but sagely people bore the piss right outta me
Venture unto roads less traveled, unless you're in the South
Twelve amazing places you must see before you die, just go back in time and be born with a trust fund
Be the best You you can possibly be, unless you're on coke, then tone it the fuck down
Never give up your dream unless you're bad at the skills it would require or unless it's kind of dumb
chorus
Fear falling and you'll never fly
Unless you're on a building and don't have powers or some jet-pack kinda thing
In which case you also won't fly and the fear is reason
So just sleep it off and we'll talk in the morning
Whether you think you can or think you can't get the hell out of the way
Because some people might actually want to jump off this bridge and there's no day like today
It's the first day of the rest of your life, which, by the way, is a day shorter now
God only gives us as much as we can handle, just ask those badass kids in the cancer unit
If you're gonna light a candle instead of cursing darkness maybe go ahead and burn some stuff down
What you're looking for might be in front of you the whole time unless, of course, you already blew it
chorus
Fear falling and you'll never fly
Unless you're on a building and don't have powers or some jet-pack kinda thing
In which case you also won't fly and the fear is reason
So just don't be stupid and we'll talk in the morning
Be Saffiyah Khan
EDL blitzed the Midlands in the spring of '17
To show the urban mongrels true champions of realm and queen
Saira joined her Brummie Brethren to shout the fascists down
But hateful eyes spied her hijab and in seconds they'd swarmed around her
Saffiyah came out to lend her voice to the antifascist choir
Hoodie, denim, raven hair, eyes that could conquer hearts and empires
She saw Saira beset by thugs shouting "Muslims out!"
Pressed her way into the scrum, smiled and stared the fascist capo down
chorus
Be true, be brash, be a mensch, be antifash
Be heard, be undaunted, be what bad men fear, be Saffiyah Khan
Hands in pockets, cool as steel, she weathered waves of racist spite
Till the cops moved in and Saffiyah got Saira safely back to the Brummie side
The capo raged, "The unwashed left-wing scrubber's lucky she's still got teeth"
As photos beamed around the world and showed us all the hero we can be
History is a churn of peoples, now and for centuries
Africa to Fertile Crescent to every point beyond, unceasing
Empires, trade routes, slave ships, bleeding frontiers, soil churned by war,
carnage, famine, machinations loosed by rich men wanting more
There's no static pristine culture, no magic dirt under sacred stars,
We're waves all merging into waves, the sums all better than the parts
Charlatans sell pride like crack and the only ones who think it's true
Are the dimwit, nose-led Nazi bullies Saffiyah stepped up to
Be true, be brash, be a mensch, be antifash
chorus
Stay the fuck home, Becky,
It’s global crisis not an asshole competition
or a Chinese/Democratic plot
Stay the fuck home, Becky
There’s plenty of toilet paper to go around
Long as you don’t hoard the fucking lot
Stay the fuck home, Becky
Wash your fucking hands and keep your fucking distance
And maybe find a Netflix show to binge
Stay the fuck home, Becky
At least so the epidemiologists
know where to find you in a pinch
chorus
Stay the fuck home, Becky, it’s the
literal LEAST you can do to help people not die
I know it’s not fun but times are shit for everyone and so just help us to get to the other side
And stay the fuck home
Stay the fuck home, Becky
Fox News might’ve told you science is heresy
But guess what might actually save you
Stay the fuck home, Becky
No one cares you’re asymptomatic cuz
All the sick folks were once too
If this were a movie not real life
You’d be the the character everyone hopes will die
Thus boosting everyone else’s chances to survive
(Stay the fuck home)
Stay the fuck home, Becky
The virus has shown no clinical response to
Your fucking lazy thoughts and prayers
Stay the fuck home, Becky
Maybe just try not to be a vector of
Untold suffering and despair
chorus
Reply Guy (The Dick Nextdoor)
He played high school football, maybe all-conference, grades just good enough to get himself a scholarship
At a college just down the road and a degree in liberal arts
He's got an office job now, a wife he calls a "little lady," house in the burbs a room he calls a "man cave"
He knows the God-given order of things and every Toby Keith song by heart
And every night after dinner he logs onto twitter and he tells the libs what's what
Reciting the news just as Hannity spews it and letting every slut know she's a slut
chorus
A community pillar of family values who threatens to rape women online
Because they'd expressed opinions and someone's got to police God's design
So the dick nextdoor sends rape threats online
And a handful of suburban white folks will tell you he's a decent man
He keeps his lawn mowed the school board up on books he thinks should be banned
He's pro-life, pro-gun, AllLivesMatter, all equal in Jesus' eyes
But he's got a pretty long and well-researched list of people who deserve to die
He goes to church and makes damn sure you know about it cuz the very best Christian are the ones who crow about it
Only sort of pays attention cuz fuck what Jesus taught, what's important is you believe
And sure, he's got a problem with atheists, millennials, Mexicans and Muslims and some of the Jews
Especially those teenage massacre-survivors he wishes caught a round or three
And after a few too many, sure, he'll say some dark things sometimes
Friend chalk it up to the booze never suspecting it'll all come out badly typed online
chorus
He's a man's man Alpha just dropping the truth and he threatens to rape women online
A community pillar of family values who threatens to rape women online
It might be your daughter, your wife or your mom and, if not, no less malign
Cuz the dick nextdoor sends rape threats online
Look at the kid across the square, proud like a lion, pure like a child
Clean-cut, blue-eyed future of America exercising his free-speech rights
Standing up for tradition and heritage . . . oh, hey, he just did a sieg-heil
And maybe if we listened we'd learn some fresh new takes on Euro-ethnic pride
And maybe it clocks with you because you hearken a Utopia that never was
A Rockwell painting where folks kept to their end of the bus
chorus
You agree with Nazis and Nazis agree with you
You want to make America great the same way Nazis do
You might not so-identify but you don't have to
If you agree with Nazis, your views are shit and so are you
You say it's just their two-cents, oh no
See, books would tell you we had that debate and it ended with Germany a smoking crater
And thus to all tyrants and anyone who wants to kill my friends
Look at that patriot driving his car into people like they're bowling pins
Because antifascists are somehow worse than fascists these days
Cops deport and gun down brown folks every day cheerled by Fox and Friends
Because God blesses certain very pale people but somehow that's different from a master race
What does your Utopia look like cleansed of color, culture and enlightenment?
A brain-drained waste where all must assimilate or die
You want to make America great the same way Nazis do
You might not wear an armband but you don't have to
If you agree with Nazis, your views are shit and so are you
Monument
There’s a torchbearer marching with shield and sword
He spits hatred at his neighbors in the name of his Lord
Murder on his mind and a rifle in his hand
We don’t need a monument to that kind of man
The congressman sends thoughts and prayers but sticks to his guns
Sleeps safe atop his hill of laundered campaign funds
There’s graft in his pocket and a bible in his hand
We don’t need a monument to that kind of man
There's a lady in the harbor now a monument to tempest-tossed
millions who came here yearning to breathe free
All the men you now bow down to would snuff her light forever,
burn down everything those people built and call the smoking embers 'peace'
The king of the world wears a cap for a crown
He says rapists and criminals are living in your town
You might’ve known them for years, they might live right down the street
Now you’d heard them into boxcars if your messiah so decreed
He vows to build a wall and paint the country red
He rips children from their mothers while they’re sleeping in their beds
There’s malice in his heart and there’s blood on his hands
We don’t need a monument to that kind of man
Friney's Song
Heard you had a bad day that turned into a worse year
Like every wall on Earth closed in until you couldn’t breathe
Like you don’t have better things to do than fight off time and fear
Kids to teach, art to make and dorkess jokes to tweet
Some people say life isn’t fair like that makes it okay,
so rise and shove their hackneyed bromides in their stupid faces
chorus
Look up at the Milky Way tonight, count the stars and multiply
By every galaxy beyond to the edge of time and space
Every ray of starlight
traversed the void unto our skies
Still can’t hold a candle to that perfect thing you radiate
You could light the darkest night with just the sparkle in your eyes
Not to be glib, I know I have no clue how one bad day can
Feel like it cut you deep and let you leak out on the floor
And even if the Earth’s a cesspit run by vile and venal men
You’re the exact thing that makes a better world worth fighting for
Sometimes even days seem dark
But you’re a beacon inspiring us to be better than we are
chorus
Look up at the Milky Way tonight, count the stars and multiply
By every galaxy beyond to the edge of time and space
Every ray of starlight crossed the void unto our skies
Still can’t hold a candle to that perfect thing you radiate
You could light the darkest night with just the sparkle in your eyes
chorus
Look up at the stars tonight, imagine each a metaphor or rhyme unequal
to that perfect thing you radiate
Every ounce of love you poured for everyone in good and bad times
flows back to you a millionfold like a tidal wave
You will ever light the darkest night with just the sparkle in your eyes
So Long, Good Luck and Fuck You
Another Saturday night, there’s pandemic outside
The world is closed until some date unknown
A better person might mull all we have in common
But the bigger crux now is some key things we don’t
Like you thought letting xenophobe science-averse sociopaths
run shit would work out just fine
And once we bury their victims, we’ll still be infested
With the virus that was here the whole time
chorus
If you haven’t learned making life shitty for millions is a worse thing than helping them through
If a plague cannot teach you that death and privation are bad no matter who it’s happening to
If your god can’t convince you to love your damn neighbors and you’re as good as the deeds you do
Then any words we might share would be goddamn pointless, so so long, good luck and fuck you
I’m emotionally stunted, I’m a dumb fucking drunk
But I’ve tried to learn from my mistakes
And I’ve never once justified children in cages
Or made senators of dicks who cashed in on contagion
Or said eight million dead on the altar of Wall Street
Was a sacrifice patriots must make
But go on, say “it’s just politics” as the world bleeds
And pretend you didn’t hand them the blade
chorus
If you haven’t learned making life shitty for millions is a worse thing than helping them through
If you can't see that wealth is not a measure of virtue, if you haven’t just fucking learned how to be human,
If your god can’t convince you to love your damn neighbors and you’re as good as the deeds you do
Then any words we might share would be goddamn pointless, so so long, good luck and fuck you
Now the chuds have switched this off so, friends and neighbors, let us talk
Of a better fucking world to be made
I might not make it out alive so it’s down to you rise up
And smash the garbage system that led millions to their graves
Tell the toffs who wrecked the earth to recognize your actual worth
And shut this fucker down until they do
Make a nation that fulfills every promise we were shilled
They don’t like it tell em “So long, fuck you.”
Yeah, so long, good luck, fuck you
March
We are gathered here today as in years and eons gone
To remind our would-be lords their time has passed
O brothers and sisters, it falls to us to right their wrongs
And we're not here to ask
We march for our neighbors whose dignity they've stolen
We march for the broken that they might be made whole
We march for the voiceless that their words might shatter thrones
Ever forward because we're not going back
We've amassed against tyrants, against bosses, kings and cops
When left no other recourse
We march for that denied us by those born on top
To make a world of no masters and no lords
We march for our sisters whose dignity they've stolen
We march for the broken that we might be be made whole
We march for the silenced that their words might shatter thrones
Ever forward because we're not going back
We march for those who marched before us that our song might shatter thrones
Ever forward because we're not going back
The Whirlwind
The ICEmen stalk the cities, dead-eyed craven soulless ghouls
Haunting daycare centers, hospitals, factories, shops and schools
Dragging parents from their families, culling neighborhoods like herds
Just following their orders like those men at Nuremberg
Neo-Nazis in our streets, straight-A DREAMers hauled to jail
Children trucked to concentration camps as their shackled mothers wail
Another day of ethnic cleansing by the enemy within
Think you walk between the raindrops, don't be surprised when it's a whirlwind
Fire civil servants, threaten judges, for being true to vows they swore
Presume to rule by fear and tantrum forsaking every one of yours,
Demonize all who won't bow to you, set loose your zombie thralls
Pack the courts with sneering yes-men to raise you above the law
Did you think we’d take your hand and just go gently into a new dark age
That we’d turn our backs obeisant while you dragged our neighbors away,
That all your Russians and your fascist cult can save you from your sins
Well count your days and open wide and prepare to reap the whirlwind
We’re Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Pagans, Buddhists, Sikhs & Jews
We’re ironworkers, scientists and LGBTQs
Latino, Arab, lawyers, artists, teachers, atheists,
Irish, African, South Asian, every color that exists
Service workers, Teamsters, Trekkers, rockers, rappers, clerks and maids
NGOs, reporters, Parkland kids and veterans and DAs
We’re the machine that kills fascists, as American as you,
And you’ll go the way that all the tinpot despots always do
Did you think we’d stand by while you tore down all the good we’ve ever known
And make the world a rich mans' playground where the rest are on our own
That filth like you goes anywhere but history’s rubbish bin
So count your days and open wide and prepare to reap the whirlwind
We’ve dealt with men like you before and we’ll deal with them again
So count your days and open wide and prepare to reap the whirlwind
