| Electric Six – Late Night Obama Food Lyrics | 8 years ago |
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I think this song is a criticism of the eager and blind acceptance of the Obama administration by many, especially pop culture. Obama's 2008 campaign was shiny and promising; he was a young minority darling, had very tastefully branded campaign art, and he promised to bring change and transparency to our government. However, he failed on many of these counts by prosecuting whistleblowers, failing to end the War on Drugs or close Guantanamo, bailing out bankers, making no progress on minimizing corporate influence in Washington, and killing civilians (a topic lampooned in Electric Six's song "Drone Strikes" a couple of years later). This song's fast food metaphor is about how the Obama administration, despite it's attractive marketing, perpetuated the toxicity in Washington, and how pop culture just kept eating it up without regard to if it was really good for us. Instead of voting in real change for something that would be "healthy" for our political system, our society plugged its ears to the administration's problems and reelected Obama in the year before this song was released. We've been "starving" for change, but just eat up "anything they put inside the box" and package well. Even if what we are opting for is making our society sick and "barfing," we don't care how it makes us feel (i.e. the real effects of our "corporation food"). The last lines drive the point home. We are obliviously celebrating on a greasy floor, as though we've really enacted change via who we've elected. We are prisoners of our own war, inflicting these problems on ourselves. But at the same time, in the end we are effectively being told to shut up, as we seemingly have no real good alternatives. |
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| Born Ruffians – Red, Yellow, & Blue Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| The Vonnegut connection is good. However, it's worth noting that the colors of Arizona's flag are red, yellow, and blue, and the album (which shares the name) has a cowboy on the front. Perhaps it was an ode to Arizona using a Vonnegut allusion? | |
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