Revolution Lullaby
Musings on the nature of change, the duality of revolution, and a song.
Hey look, I wrote another song!
I’m aware that few of you are here for the music, and that’s okay. I’m a writer and critic and blogger and YouTuber. I rant and ramble about The Walking Dead and The Rings Of Power and write Wordle and Call Of Duty guides. In this space, we talk about all kinds of fun things, from Game Of Thrones to A Clockwork Orange to politics and censorship and various diabolical musings on the pop culture wars. Music is an infrequent piece in this equation—so bear with me.
Every occasional now and then, I post a poem or a song and hope that it clicks, at least a little, with some of you.
This song—Revolution Lullaby—is one I wrote some time ago, but I just put together the above music video, and it has me thinking about the meaning of it all now that I’m older and have gone through more and have, in many ways, come to understand what I wrote back then better.
Every song I write is a map into the future, to places I’m not aware of yet, that someday I realize I needed to travel to. Or perhaps not a map; perhaps a cipher. One I won’t understand until later.
I write songs like this: I sit down with my guitar or, occasionally, a piano, and I play until I find a melody I like and then I sing… often a garbled-up mess of words and mutterings, and hope that out of this scrambled-egg-stream of consciousness I’ll come across something worth returning to someday. If I remember to, I record it on my phone.
I’m one of those guys hobbling along sunburnt on the beach with a metal detector (but it’s a guitar) and I wander and shuffle about the sandy scrawl-yards of my mind, at high tide and low, and hope I get lucky and find something meaningful. Something real.
So Revolution Lullaby.
At first I just called it Lullaby. But it’s more than that. Not just a song for slumber, but also one for waking and rousing. I like how discordant the two words seem to be, at least at first.
Revolution can mean two pretty profoundly different—and yet profoundly connected—things. On the one hand, there’s the violent overthrow of an established order, the rising up of a resistance to oppose the status quo. Rebellion. The radical imposition of change. Bloody evolution.
But revolution also means to spin in a circle—to revolve. Perpetual motion. The revolution of the earth around the sun. A vinyl coasting around the spindle. A globe on its axis. The revolving door. The merry-go-round. The perfect circle. The spinning top.
We revolve around each other, too, in the tilting revolution of our own metamorphosis. Violent, flesh-rendering change that we barely notice happening in our dusky cocoons.
This song’s verses are somewhat mundane—a plea to calm, if you will.
Don’t start a revolution And if you do, don't let in my head There's no room, please be aware It's no solution. Find a solution To this aching, burning in my brain Have some food, get some sleep That's my conclusion.
These are actually the only two verses in the song and they describe—I’ve realized now—part of my philosophy of being. When the world is overwhelming and cruel and painful: Have some food, get some sleep. Let it go. That ridiculous belief that we can control all the outcomes. There’s only so much we can really change, and yet we seem gravitationally drawn toward fixing things, fixing ourselves, fixing one another.
The chorus is an animal of a different snarl:
I'm so worn out. I'm torn To pieces I am sleeping. You're born again. You're worn so thin. We're both weeping.
I suppose this is the other revolution. The revolution of loss. Of breaking and wearing down; the slow erosion; spinning dizzy and forlorn between love and pain; brushing up against the branches of despair and death and heartache.
Resentment and grief. Self-pity. Animosity. Revenge. Beauty. Insecurity. Hope. Clinging to the wet wet sticky sweaty stumbly atrocities of love.
Changing and—impossibly—not changing. Shifting, growing, and yet standing still. The old dog is new, whether or not it can learn new tricks. The old dog has changed and so have you. So have I. We both have. We all have.
I squeeze water from stone. Such is the curse of pondering and late nights. Thank you for bearing with me, dearest droogies. Peace.