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The Bottom Line
Negativland
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๐ฌ๐ง English ยท Original
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Lyrics
Original
Translation
Bilingual
I was sitting there on Sunday morning in the
Chief of police's office at a large table
Torture
He was listening to a football game
Let's be upfront about it
A football game
Torture, T-O-R-T-U-R-E
On a small transistor radio
That's the bottom line these days
And I had a very low
It's replaced death
Even teenagers kill themselves these days
And I
Along with the depressed
And I
And terminally ill
And I began to hear
Death's a release from pain and anxiety and humiliation
This very low
Valued reward
Very low wailing sound
But the threat of death just isn't enough to control people
So the ante's been raised
Coming through the walls
Now it's torture
Then it got louder
And high-tech torture at that
Then it got louder
And it was a moaning sound
As the technocrats say, it's functional
The chief of police told the colonel to turn up the radio
That's why everyone who's intelligent
And unanesthetized enough to care
Then
Has sort of put their life on hold
The tone sound got louder
Underneath all the defensive layers of denial
I turned to
We're all afraid of being tortured
Anguish
Or homosexually gang-raped or having
It happen to someone we care about
Dreaming
And we're all self-consciously living a lie
And I knew what it was
We're all happy Joes
And I knew that this man was being tortured with
How did it happen here in the land of
The free and the home of the brave?
Tortured with electricity
I mean in some banana republic
Well, it kept getting louder
Some distant past like the Spanish Inquisition
And more horrible
World War II, the Nazis and the fanatical Japs
And each time
But not us Americans
And each time
G.I. Joe
And each time
Frank Sinatra
And each time
Jerry Lewis, autumn in New York
The chief would tell the colonel
Baseball
To turn up the radio
College football, Glenn Miller
Pretty soon
Somehow it doesn't fit with torture
Pretty soon the radio was very, very loud
But it does, of course it does
I could still hear those sounds
Because it was always a facade, the image of America
And now the facade has finally failed
Anguish
Like a burned-out clutch
Dreaming
Or a decayed tooth that breaks open
Horrible
They both smell bad
Strange
Ominous
Going back to the office in the embassy
Naturally I was speculating who that possibly could have been
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