I Crawled

@owennnnnnnnnn "“I remember reading Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology Of Fascism in ’83-’84 and it had a particular influence on the song ‘I Crawled’ from the Young God EP. In that book, if I can summarise it in a very plebeian manner, he draws the parallel between the typical model of the family with a strong father as a microcosm of the state. He talks about how that shapes behaviour and identity and helps to inculcate a kind of obeisance to authority very early on. It was written pre-World War Two, and he talks about the parallels between Hitler and Stalin,...

@owennnnnnnnnn "“I remember reading Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology Of Fascism in ’83-’84 and it had a particular influence on the song ‘I Crawled’ from the Young God EP. In that book, if I can summarise it in a very plebeian manner, he draws the parallel between the typical model of the family with a strong father as a microcosm of the state. He talks about how that shapes behaviour and identity and helps to inculcate a kind of obeisance to authority very early on. It was written pre-World War Two, and he talks about the parallels between Hitler and Stalin, which was pretty prescient of him: he notes how both men reached back to this mythic atavistic past when everything was great in the country and their goal was to bring it back — they were like avuncular, paternal figures for the nation.

At that time, Ronald Reagan was being re-elected and I thought the parallels — though less overtly deadly and destructive — were very apposite. I wrote that song — “you’re my father, my father, I obey you,” and took it a step further. I had read this essay by J.G. Ballard Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan and thought the image of Reagan fucking and choking me was an apt image for the times.

I had been obsessed with the media’s — not that the media is one entity or one conspiracy — colonisation of our consciousness, particularly in the west and capitalist corporate countries, its shaping of our identities and its formulation of the anxieties that compel one to consume: a recent phenomenon that didn’t begin until the end of the Second World War when advertising and production amped up and corporations had to create need. It had a lot to do with having all these factories after the war that needed to do something, so they began manufacturing anxiety in people so they would consume products. Nowadays that equation is rampantly out of control, culminating in the probable destruction of the planet and the species — all the horrible social effects from mass media on our consciousness and our sense of who we are on the planet.

I felt this whole process, along with working as a low-level wage slave for most of my life, was akin to being raped: being invaded against your will by stimuli over which you have no control and where you’re helpless as it impinges on your consciousness. That’s another reason I used the word ‘rape’, I felt it was what modern existence was. I carried that sort of imagery on for some time and then grew weary of it because it became a cliché in its own right to harp on such things. That was the kind of thing that I was obsessed with in those early days. The song ‘Your Property’ from Cop was probably another way in which I dealt with it, and Time is Money (Bastard), of course… that way of thinking about media, mind control, work as slavery, and consumerism was very much on my mind in those days."

-Swans: “I Crawled” – Beneath the Lyrics of the Song, from nirvana-legacy dot com