Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor
I was going to do another music diary on guitarists who “don’t need no stinking picks”, one of them being Bruce Cockburn. Others would be Lindsey Buckingham, Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler just to name a few. However as I did the old YouTube search on Bruce, his song “Call it Democracy” popped up and it was Deja Vu all over again.
It was released in 1986 at the height of the Reagan era and yet the lyrics ring as true now as ever.
Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor
Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom
Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament --
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called "developed" nations'
Idolatry of ideology
North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery
IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you're going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution
IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there's one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
Of course the album it was released on had to have a warning sticker on it.
[Commenting after the agreement between the Parents Music Resource Center and the recording industry that resulted in a warning sticker on the first American pressing of this song] "I think it's really stupid, and it's tempting to believe that there's a connection [between the political content of recent music and people wanting to censor it] but I haven't seen any real evidence of that effect. The connection may go the other way, too. When you get [a] very uptight metality trying to enforce itself on the rest of the population, people are driven to react."
-- from "Bruce Cockburn - A Voice Singing in the Wilderness" by Steve Perry, Musician magazine, March 1987, transcribed for the Web by Rick Evans. Submitted by Nigel Parry.
cockburnproject.net/...
Here’s another one that he doesn’t hold back on.