The Blur, the Line and the Thickest of Onions

There’s a lot to admonish at the minute, and we don’t get any other platform than song so it would really be a shame to waste it.

When we listen to music we do it because it makes us feel and think, pause and engage: the line “and sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears” is about as good as it gets to capturing the perfect summation of it all. I’ll always remember with bleak ecstasy how a song I’d never previously thought about too much made me burst into tears, on a train, on the way home from receiving the news that my Grandma had just died – and the power of the emotion was rippling.

So, it is with great sadness that every other song either purrs with a bland fecundity or proffers an image of society that I don’t want to recognise – and the chief irritant in a sea of misogynist bile was plain for all to see.

That’s what this song is a reaction against: the incoherent lack of effort to connect with a lyric. The type of laziness which at the same time suggests that all is ok in society – we can recline, we can produce meaningless music, debase women, promote violence all because we’ve cracked it. Parliaments are full with democratic agendas, with all ethnicities, genders, sexualities and regions well represented, business is not an entirely brigand based masculine affair, whilst mass media is of course populated by positive role models for young women, typical gender roles aren’t constantly reinforced and the workplace is not a sexist wasteland of ignorant design.

Yeah, nothing to say at all.

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The Blur, the Line and the Thickest of Onions

Feel good for a minute then implode
As the lack of an aphorism sticks in your throat with ire
Depose your vernacular, argot
Why have pride in a lyric when all the other songs go –

It’s a question of rust
It’s a question of trust
It’s a question of everything you’ve ever been told.

Minimum culture, minimal wage
I’m an onion peel my layers back
Minimum silence, minimal change
I’m an honest man, depths my tears lack
And if there’s love, let me know
Because I want you to come and put the beauty back

Blurred vision and the hobble of thick prose
Why empower misogyny while violence towards women grows?

But this filth stands on a quicker sand
Next to cold hard fear and the deeds of man
The abuse of body image as a form of control
And the typical portrayal of the feminine role
I have never been more appalled.

Pick me up with rhythms and waveform
That can symbolise a culture lost
Sing about the future like you mean to
I’m never going to count costs
Question the agenda of an industry
That only can objectify
You write about a non-existent blurred line
But not about abortion rights

Little Italy was born on August 2nd 2013 in a small room in Kings Heath Birmingham. Me and Mickey had nearly come to the end of an unsuccessful song writing session when I started playing a chord progression he really didn’t like. The rhythm was fairly weird but rather than have an argument about it he pressed record.

We added some strange vocals and a repetitive guitar loop and that was that for a while: it just lay dormant inside a computer until about two months ago, when we chiseled and tapped our way to a finished three minutes.

The lyrics for this song are quite percussive – they sound active and that helps the verses to rasp along. Also, because of the amount of syllables in each verse I could afford to be a little more poetic without having to get to the point within four words – it became really enjoyable to write and I finished the words in a morning.

I suppose the meaning of the song is open to interpretation, but I definitely think that the older I get and the greater responsibility I find, more is the need to find your own moral code to live by. One that isn’t too stringent, is fairly simple and allows you to just focus on enjoying the moment and letting others be, before it all becomes too late… Dictatorial books can’t really be the way forward…

Haha. Maybe it’s because I’m writing all this after a 17 hour day which has featured a cold bath at 5am, standing in a freezing tunnels, bad fish and chips, and one upset baby…

Anyway, here are the lyrics….

Left wing, savoir faire
Ageing flicks of my thin brown hair
Like an elegy, soaking me
Drenched in the language of social mobility
But I don’t seem to mind,
The gruesome link between
people and time
It’s an enemy telling me
The wheels of profit
Are circling in the opposite
Life don’t animate
Just creeps up on you slowly.
Surely holy water
flows as normal water does?
In Little Italy I re-adhere.

Sojourn in my guilt
Wrestle words as the apostrophes wilt
Let the elegiac, question why
Accidents happen or the well will dry
So some come kill me quick
Tie me down
to an anodyne drip
To the will of god
and the people with sticks
For filled with the shrill
They show much better that
Life don’t animate
Just creeps up on you
slowly, surely
Holy water
flows like normal water does
In little Italy I re-adhere.

When the steeple cries
There’s a martyr
For every pause
When a dozen die
It’s a starter for ten
To the men
Who proselytize that
a life isn’t owned but atoned
they solidify and in time become
blackened and martyred.

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