Dead Flag Blues — Godspeed You! Black Emperor
#365Songs: August 17th
The car’s 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
Let’s start at the end.
After the fires and floods and civil wars, after the militias and political imprisonments, when it’s already too late to turn back and do it all over again. After the history books have been rewritten and our allies have fled, after unregulated AI turns us all into gig workers with no rights or benefits, long after the billionaires who burned it all down have fled to their bunkers.
But let’s back up a bit.
I made a few questionable judgment calls during the pandemic. Not only did I read The Road for the first time, I also tamed my quarantined restlessness with hours of the video game, The Last of Us — worlds that once felt so far away suddenly revealing similarities to our own.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century writer Timothy Synder warned us in 2017 that “post-truth is pre-fascism,” and “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.” That was almost four years before election denialism, before corrupt pro-Fascist Supreme Court Justices were surgically embedded to serve Trump’s narcissistic ideology, before an insurrection attempt that now almost half of America believes never happened, before a handful of America’s wealthiest business leaders rallied around Trump with only dollar signs in mind.
Today, American flags now fly lower on the pole than MAGA flags, a country recentering around an idealogue, around the one thing we were built to prevent. Today, caravans with heavily-armed MEN roll through progressive towns to intimidate, a warning of what happens if they don’t get their way. Today, Trump’s definition of “Patriot” is no longer a war vet but a groupie, the ones who fund his campaign, the ones who wear the leash as they do his bidding, the ones he’ll eventually turn on because he turns on everyone, the ones who — for now at least — do the time Trump will never do himself.
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
I fell in love with Montreal’s anarchist, anti-capitalist post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the late ’90s, during times of relative peace, when my only knowledge of dystopias lived within books and films best experienced stoned. It all felt so far away because it was so far away, and buried within the bleak darkness of Godspeed songs there’s always violins and cellos and soft rhythmic guitar lines and hypnotic rolling drum sequences. A beauty, a sense of hope, something alive poking through the ashes. Guitarist Efrim Menuck said, “All music is political, right? You either make music that pleases the king and his court, or you make music for the serfs outside the walls … We started making this noise together when we were young and broke. Whatever politics we had were born out of living through a time when the dominant narrative was that everything was fine.”
And we do that, don’t we? Whether in times of peace or times of chaos, we do our finest to pretend everything is fine. As long as what we see before us isn’t on fire, all the world is just fine. Read the liner notes printed on the covers of any Godspeed album and you’ll learn just how not fine we are, whether they’re ranting about anti-Zionism, environmental terrorism, Trans rights, the military industrial complex, or the demonization of student protests. All these topics are more relevant today than when the band printed those rants, beginning in 1997. They were warning us long before we were ready to hear it.
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
Dead Flag Blues is the opening track on their 1997 debut album, F♯ A♯ ∞, a mere three epic-length tracks built on movements within each — entire worlds populated and explored through melancholy and bursts of anger. Don’t get me wrong, this is some bleak shit, some of the darkness music I’ve ever loved. The music exists as a warning, and yet it’s in that warning that there’s hope: we don’t belong here, we can still turn back, we can put down whatever numbs us and still walk away with only dense scars and a lot of perspective.
We’re not yet buried in a Cormac McCarthy post-capitalist hellscape, but we’re bleeding out. Whatever you believe, no matter how conservative you may be, whether you must grit your teeth and merely tolerate the Harris / Walz ticket, your vote is the ripped T-shirt tourniquet tied tight around the wound, the only way to stop what comes next.
Understanding what comes next, if Trump wins, requires no imagination, no orchestration. It’s front and center, clear in every rambling speech, in every gesture. It’s clear in how the crowds dress, in how they express anger as their only form of happiness, in how they’re willing to sacrifice everything for a man who has never sacrificed anything.
Artists like Godspeed are essential, the ones that burrow deep within the darkness of what’s possible and scream at us to pay attention, to wake up, to fight for what’s left. A Kamala win in November won’t heal our dying Capitalism, our underinsured, our hopeless anti-empathetic approach to the homeless, our underfunded schools, our aggressive military presence, our support of genocidal leaders, or the incoming onslaught of more tech disruption, but it will at least pause our free-fall into Fascism for the time-being.
That’s the beauty of the moment we have right now: we can still rewrite how this story ends.
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
