There's many a true word, on a Robert Wyatt album:
The Age of Self:
They say the working class is dead
We're all consumers now
They say that we have moved ahead
We're all just people now
There's people doing frightfully well
There's others on the shelf
But never mind the second kind
This is the age of self
They say we need new images
To help our movement grow
They say that life is broader
Based as if we didn't know
While Martin J. and Robert Maxwell
Play with printer's ink
The workers 'round the world
Still die for Rio Tinto Zinc
And it seems to me if we forget
Our roots and where we stand
The movement will disintegrate
Like castles built on sand
A message unheeded by Tony, Mandy, Gordon, their spin doctors, and their fellow architects of the destruction of the political voice of the English working classes.
This is one of those Stevie Wonder type albums (there's probably a proper music industry term, but I don't know it) where Wyatt played all the instruments and provided all the vocals.
Originally released in 1985, lyrically it predicted a lot of the rubbish yet to come our way back then. Including this pop at the Yanks, bringing into question their right to the moral high ground in policing the world:
The United States of Amnesia:
There are degrees of amnesia, ways to forget
Ways to remember all the good that you've done
And if you can't get a witness remind yourselves
Nobody's just perfectly good all the time
And if you killed all those redskins long, long ago
Well, they'd all be dead now anyway, anyway
Don't let that ghost disconcert you - the lord will provide
A nice little headstone for the brave Cherokee
So let's have no reservations, let's have a clean sweep
Clearing the way for the land of the free
Let's hear it for civilisation once more
Build your Aryan empire in peace
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