Apparently, one of my old lyrics is trending as a hashtag on Twitter. Something similar happened to me in Hollywood: I heard a line from a song I used to play regularly at a well-attended open mic in a movie that came out the next year. The song was called "The Man Upstairs," which was about the drug dealer upstairs, and the movie was The Wedding Crashers. The line is "keep your mouth shut, boy, when you're talking to me." Isla Fisher says the same thing to one of the guys in that film. For the legalists, I think the line in the film is, “you shut your mouth when you’re talking to me.” It was a popular open mic, with many performers, and you only got one song. “The Man Upstairs” was my crown-jewel song at the time, and I played it every week. Somebody stole the line. I understand I will never be able to prove it, but that’s what happened. Nobody will ever be able to tell me otherwise.
This isn’t that. Nobody is aware that I coined the term “Freedom Flu” in 2007-2008 and put it in a song called “Bad Americans," then stole it to create a hashtag on a cheesy police station bulletin board. That's not what happened. The phrase was bound to cross somebody's mind eventually. In my case, I was probably thinking of Bush's "Freedom Fries," from when he stopped calling French Fries French Fries because France didn't want to help him invade Iraq. A similar thought process is behind my lifelong determination to call the "Freedom Tower" the "French Fry Tower." I will always call the Freedom Tower the French Fry Tower, to commemorate the propaganda that cost 3,000 people their lives on 9/11, and however-more many in the ensuing 20-year war. In fact the Freedom Tower looks like a large, glass-coated French Fry, which has always amused me.
"Bad Americans" appears on the American Refugee album. Of course, it had to end up on the "refugee" collection. I find that even more morbidly amusing than the French Fry/Freedom Tower comparison. It's hilarious, in a sad, dead way that doesn't elicit laughter of any kind.
Somebody would have thought of the term "Freedom Flu" eventually; it's that kind of phrase. But the fact that nobody is aware that one of "their own" artists in fact coined the phrase to use in a song about an ENCROACHING FASCIST DICTATORSHIP OVER TEN YEARS AGO is the main reason I never write. You can only be ignored so long until you finally say goodbye. There are only so many nights you can spend "camping" in the parking lot in cities full of people who think it's "cool" or "quaint" or "eccentric" to "choose" to live in a van before you finally leave town, or the entire nation and interest in the language altogether. I know dozens of people personally who could by all rights be household names, but whom you've never heard of either. If I've met dozens, meaning probably around a hundred, it means there are thousands.
What performer thrives while being ignored and robbed indefinitely? There was a time I had to write, but I finally took the hint.
Will you?
You got the culture you paid for. Worse, you've allowed yourselves to become soft with "positivity" to the point that you've actually been psychologically trained to abhor an actual, legitimate warning. That's actually the main reason I left, even more than the cultural reason. There is no hope for people too soft and arrogant to actually consider the possibility that they're soft and arrogant. Now that you let the vultures destroy your culture and artists, there's nothing between you and the destroyers but the warrior class. They're the last line of defense, not the first.
You should have taken the hint. Sooner than later, you will receive your final warning. This might be it. Don't make the soft, arrogant mistake of thinking people are holding their breath in anticipation of your wise decision. If I thought you were going to do the smart thing, I never would have left. And I'd probably still be writing songs for you.
As it is, I'm in a lifeboat. I do not revel in watching the ship go down, in listening to the screams of the passengers, in watching the incredulity of the crew who thought the ship could never sink, turn into horror and disbelief as they realize they have a very strong chance of not only dying VERY SOON, but in fact POSSIBLY TONIGHT. My heart has been frozen from years of cold, aloof spiritual air blowing over it, but I receive no pleasure in watching my homeland go down in flames. God has taught me not to look back, and I don't, but you are all in my heart, and always will be, and I never wanted anything more than for all of us to live in peace together. I'll sweat and sing my guts out for you, you sweat your guts out for me. We'll make an even, mutually-beneficial exchange and share a smoke or a beer or a glass of tonic water together afterwards. I'm a tradesman, not a diva. I'm a car mechanic; songs are my cars; tunes and words are my wrenches. I am not above you. Are you above me? I wrote that song a thousand years ago too, y'know. Before some frog-worshiping Meme Lord anonymously starts a hashtag about it again tomorrow, the song is called "I Make The Rules," and the lyric is:
"Do you think you can judge me?
Would it make you righteous
if your opinion turned out to be true?
Is the reason you're so much better than me
the fact that I'm no better than you?"
Is that what you think? There is nothing better about what I do than what you do, and like all trades, it deserves compensation. But you took it all for free. And you think you're entitled to it. And the weight of this attitude will pull you to the bottom of the sea faster than a lightning bolt. You will reach the event horizon naked, with nothing of your ego intact, your clothes long-since shredded off by the velocity of your descent, and the proverbial "ton of bricks" will feel like a feather pillow, compared with the force with which you greet your fate.
Repent or die.
