Dead Flag Blues

Godspeed You Black Emperor

Trigger warning: Dystopia, Waste land is like “touchings” before GY!BE’s apocalyptic vision and sensorium of melancholic fire.

But this melancholy, this clarity of prophetic vision, with the paint peeling off to reveal centuries of phantasmagorical fresco work, always forming something new, something filled with the beauty of terror, of seeing something true, real and livid with potency, for the very first time. I’m just going to share a few youtube comments before the words of the original, and a link to the full audio on youtube. Do listen to the complete audio, there are three other ‘instrumental poems’.

This is a masterpiece.

“2020 - The soundtrack”
“So this is going to play when the world ends?”
“I'm thoroughly convinced that GYBE are a group of time-travelers, and this music is them reflecting on seeing the apocalypse.”
“I wish I could listen to this for the first time again”
“I'm almost sad to say this song has aged very well and still rings very true”

“This is music about life, and all the joy, sadness, rage, death and any other stuff you come across in your period. It's all here. the music swirls around and builds and builds, until you're so caught up in it that you can't leave until it's all over, and at about this point the music breaks. It explodes in a holy fury of brilliant white light and noise and passion, and it's a sort of surrogate emotion in and of itself. We've all been here. This is gooesbump music. It makes you die. Very possibly the best album of the '90's”

Dead Flag Blues (from F♯A♯∞)

The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides and a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs with the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering

And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles
It went like this

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies

Picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair
The skyline was beautiful on fire

All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful, these are truly the last days"
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it

Like a daydream or a fever
We woke up one morning and fell a little further down

For sure it's the valley of death
I open up my wallet and it's full of blood