The Ghost of Rock & Roll

My Girlfriend's Way Too Hot For Me
you might have all the moves, you might be in the flower of youth
you might have girls for every day of every week
but for all the seeds you sow, there’s one thing you don’t know
my girlfriend’s way too hot for me
your stock portfolio might buy an S-type 3.0
to drive you home up to your castle by the sea
but for all the things you own, there’s one thing that you won’t
my girlfriend’s way to hot for me
don’t ask me to explain why she’s not in some club waiting
for some template dick like you to sweep her off her feet
if you saw us together you’d have to wonder whether
a god existed who could so bless a dick like me
I don’t know why she likes me, can’t be my charm it can’t be
My looks, my beergut or my judgment or my gall
Maybe it’s my socio-economic insight
That, come the revolution, sees you up against the wall
You might have all the goods the magazines tell you you should
To fill the gaping chasm where your soul should be
Not like I’m so hot, but one thing that I’ve got
My girlfriend’s way too hot for me
My girlfriend’s way too hot
(His girlfriend’s way too hot)
My girlfriend’s way too hot for me
Wrath of God
God’s love lives in the flowers and the trees and the rain and the storms that drown whole cities
In the toxified corpse-strewn wards where angels fear to delve
Gods love lives in the birds and the planes that soar over the forsaken of a modern day gamorrah
Looking in vain to leaders who say God says to help themselves
God is merciful and mild except all the times he’s something else
But is the fault the stars’ or the lesser angels of ourselves?
Come the wrath of God you can hide like thief
You can bray Revelation as the floodwalls breach
You can judge your neighbors as the ice caps melt and the waters rise
You can pray for the sinners who deserve their fate
While you’re living in a house made of clear-plate hate
Rubbing your crosses and waiting for the Rapture to be televised
Or you can pick up a shovel and get on the line
God’s love shortchanges schools and levees to bankroll holy wars
God made the market as his loving unseen hand
To bless the blessed and give just deserts unto the poor
In spite all these social heresies of man
God is loving, god is kind, except when he’s venal and austere
Except when that’s just the dicks who claim to have his ear
Come the wrath of God you can hide like thief
You can bray Revelation as the floodwalls breach
Blame the liberals and the queers when the food runs out and the waters rise
You can pray for the sinners who deserve their fate
While you cower in a house made of clear-plate hate
Awash in your vanities and hoping Armageddon will be televised
Or you pick up a shovel and get on the line
Cry
The bourbon doesn’t help, but doesn’t hurt
Not nearly like the things he told her
No words and no convenient shoulder
Can make her less alone
She thinks that love has fled, and left her wondering
If or when or how again it finds her
Not understanding that what glows inside her
Burns all on it’s own
Cry for children dying young and lying down at day’s end hungry
Cry for all those sacrificed at despots' heartless whim
Cry for lovers of young men who won’t see them again
But if he don't understand
What he let through his hands
Don’t cry another goddamn tear for him
She sways a little in the jukebox light
As the voices tell her love is all she needs
Who is she to not pay heed to
Truth so undistilled
The stuff of poets, stuff of dreams and songs unending
All sadly grandly misconstrued
Ain’t no goal, no grail, s’just the stuff we do
And what we always will
Cry for those who need your tears, who huddle nights in abject fear
For millions slaving, starving at the rich men’s heartless whim
Cry for mothers of young men who won’t see them again
But once you come know
What was never his to own
You won’t cry another tear for him
Don’t cry another goddamn tear for him
Ghost of the Rock & Roll
She checks her makeup in the rearview
Wonders how much time she’s got left
Her mama had such plans for that face and that man
Who’d get em in with the Gold Coast set
So she weaved and bobbed from town to job
None of em paid like workin the pole
Now she waits for the next show, sittin in the glow
Of the ghost of Rock & Roll
He drives dark roads through Lake Effect snow
Branch office to the next sales lead
Got the career and the wife, the template life
That everybody told him he’d need
Now’s he’s mortgaged to bone, home number’s on the phone
But their words have lately grown cold
So he lets it ring, cranks some punk kid singing
Through the Ghost Rock & Roll
chorus From the heart of the night, where a lightning strike can
Split the night like a sheet
Come the strains of the rage and the pain forsaken
By the lordly powers that be
All the guitars and beats of forgotten streets
She sends em out to all the lost souls
Draws her line in the sand of the vast wasteland
She’s the Ghost of Rock & Roll
80 watts of militant resistance unabated after 50 years
She says there’s realms, there’s dreams you’ve never seen because you’ve never opened your ears
She checks mail today again in vain
While she waits for the sitter to show
Gets jacked at the pump just to make it to hump some
Job barely pays what they owe
They sent him back to jihad to appease their God
To make money for some rich asshole
Now she takes the long way home, scans the radio
For the Ghost of Rock & Roll
Chorus
Hang Up & Drive
Get outta my way, take a train, take a plane,
you’re going sixty in the passing lane
Weaving round like a monkey on crank,
be dead right now if this car was an Abrams tank
You must be far too cool
To think society applies to you
Pull that SUV aside
And hang up and drive
chorus
Hang up and drive
You narcissistic ass, don’t need three tons of steel and glass
To call your wife
Take your own life
Just don’t do it on my time
You’ll be back to work by nine
So hang up and drive
For god’s sake would you just pick a lane
Every thought in your Crate & Barrel brain
Ain’t worth articulating
Odds are they’re pointless and inane
There’s nothing you can say
Can’t wait ten minutes or a day
Get a job or get a life
Or hang up and drive
chorus
Ayn Rand Sucks
She pulled herself up by her bootstraps, from the magnate schools and sandtraps of the
Gritty streets of the northshore burbs
With but her wits and her trustfund, she set herself off from the poor and dumb
Whom she would gladly kick back to the curb
See all her piercings and tattoos belie her straight conformo views as spewed by
Think tanks, Wall Street, all the rightwing thugs
She’s kinda smart but not enough, cause her facebook page lists all the stuff
she likes, foremost them Atlas Shrugged
(But) Ayn Rand sucks
She wrote really badly workmanlike and dogmatically
Ayn Rand sucks like any other high-priced whore
Ayn Rand sucks
Overwrought and deified harlequin romance scribe
She sucks so hard her jaw must still be sore
The Unseen Hand might lift all yachts
But the rest it seems to punch right in the dick
“Enlightened self-interest” is a goddamn oxymoron
Used by lazy-thinking douchebags to be narcissistic pricks
She says Ron Paul is cool, though he’d defund her hipster school
Mainlines Friedman’s fascist crap like bathtub crank
Says the cream will always rise by DNA and enterprise
But denies she’s just another Nazi skank
(But) Ayn Rand sucks
She wrote really badly workmanlike and dogmatically
Ayn Rand sucks like any other high-priced whore
Ayn Rand sucks
Overwrought and deified harlequin romance scribe
She sucks so hard her jaw must still be sore
Ayn Rand sucks
She wrote really badly, hamfistedly, dogmatically
Ayn Rand sucks beyond all circumstance and pomp
Ayn Rand sucks
If rich folks’re all so keen, what’s with the meltdowns and subpoenas
Mein Kampf by other names is still Mein Kampf
Cinderella
So he didn’t call so he didn’t write so he didn’t email you last night
Is he out somewhere having fun, does he know he might be the
One who saves you from being alone
With the grinding fears of a life of your own
Does he not bring you flowers for every hour absent
Does he just not get the gravitas of real commitment
To the fairy tale that every life can be
Just like you saw on The OC
Cinderella dressed in yella
Went upstairs to cry herself to sleep
Didn’t anyone tell ya Prince Charming’s boffing Buffy Michelle Gellar
And ever after’s hardly ever happily
If you ever parsed things for yourself
Maybe you would figure out that
Oprah, Cosmo, Dr. Phil,
And all the easy-answer shills they
Don’t know what the hell they’re talking bout
Dream of rosewood, potpourri, McMansions far as eyes can see
A faithful boy who lives to serve up everything that you deserve
Odds are you'll be divorced by 28
Or slogging through some loveless charade
Cinderella dressed in yella
Went upstairs to cry herself to sleep
Didn’t anyone tell ya Prince Charming’s boffing Buffy Michelle Gellar
And ever after’s hardly ever happily
Cinderella in bridesmaid yella
Went upstairs to eat ice cream and watch a DVD
Didn’t anyone tell ya Desdemona winds up murdered by Othella
So you might as well schtup me
White
who goes to all the adam sandler movies? who thinks Fox News is news?
who thinks lies and hate and greed are Christian values?
who joins sigma chi, bear stearns and skull & bones and the klan?
who still thinks styx, the dead and skynyrd are fuckin awesome bands?
I don’t wanna be white anymore
Turning in my NASCAR cap, my golf clubs and my gun
Does a mind dry up like a Caucasian in the sun
Or does it fester like a sore and then run
Till it runs dry
who thinks Sarah Palin's smart? who still watches MTV?
who thinks sitcoms are funny and reality shows are reality?
who deducts hookers, cooks the books and burns the paper trail?
grifted away your 401K, won't ever spend a fuckin day in jail?
I don’t wanna be white anymore
Turning in my Amstel Light, my golf clubs and my gun
Does a mind dry up like a Caucasian in the sun
Or does it fester like a sore and then run
Till it runs dry?
little bo beep has lost her flock
they’re at the mall, they're at the club sucking corporate cock
sheep in the meadow seig-heiling new tribalism
sheep in the barn watchin Idol
who buys Christian rock? who buys big-ass boats?
who shoves their motherfuckin god down everybody’s throat?
color ain’t shit, it’s just a trick of light
white people ain’t the real problem
just people acting white
I don’t wanna be white anymore
Don’t give a shit where my forebears of yours came from
Does a mind dry up like a Caucasian in the sun?
Or does it fester like a sore and then run
Till it runs dry?
One Twenty Oh-Nine
We need not pretend we could ever be friends
But I don’t think it’s too much to ask
That after eight years of rows and untold broken vows
You give every day of it back
You may’ve done what you thought best, but it’s conspicuous
How the inverse transpired
So with a world now in flames, I won't bother to deign to
Piss on your head if your hair catches fire
I’m normally not a mean-spirited guy
But if you got cancer I’d laugh till I cried
One twenty oh-nine the day of our new jubilee five-point-
nine billion voices and glasses upraised in the joy of your egress to ignominy
The skies will open in cool cleansing rain of ambrosia that all may partake
And next day we’ll start digging out of the wrack and the ruin you leave in your wake
I know you
won’t soon be troubled with staid self-reflection
Still a cloistered and dull trustfund kid
You’ll never be hungry, foreclosed on or held to the
Laws that hang others who did what you did
But maybe one shiny day
We’ll all see each other again in The Hague
One twenty oh-nine the day of our new jubilee five-point-
nine billion voices and glasses upraised to the end of our national ignominy
The skies will open in cool cleansing rain of ambrosia that all may partake
And next day we’ll start digging out of the sad, bloody nightmare you leave in your wake
And the next guy might well be a trainwreck but he won’t be you and that’s saying a lot
And if the myths you damned thousands by prove to be true, pray you outlive the devil and god
One Big Union
When the paycheck isn't stretching like it might’ve once before
Cause the good jobs all are gone and left you in some bigbox store
Between food and rent and medicine, the suits just rate a whole lot more
When the bosses cut that last corner and you walk out those doors
When the truckers hauling sweatshop stuff don’t stop there anymore
When folks won’t cross your pickets cause their boat’s the same as yours
That is one big union
When the nickled and the dimed have had enough of being screwed
When they walk out of the sweatshops and the cops refuse to shoot
When the puppet regimes fall, when the World Bank gets the boot
That is one big union
They call it a labor surplus
Market-value poverty
But what if that which ye do to the least of my brethren
So you do unto me
We built the tanks and ships that
Saved a world in darkest throes
Back when young men fought for the rights of mankind
Not just some fuckin CEOs
When a simple, decent living is a right that we all share
When the suits see us as people not just assets to be pared
When they can’t just ship your job off cause it’s happening everywhere
That is one big union
When the volume of this chorus grows till they can’t help but hear
When our leaders serve the people, not just banks and profiteers
When the food and labor of the earth feed everyone here
That is one big union
That will be one big union
Come join our one big union