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Take​.​Consume​.​Destroy.

from Animal by Higher Learning

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about

Lyrics and Music written in December of 2011
Recorded at Earth Capitol in Los Angeles, California, December 2011

lyrics

Lyrics:
Soul plugged into a hostile, anti-human death machine
Reared by moron beatitudes flashed on a plasma screen
Media the new reality, human compassion now sedated
For your entertainment pleasure watch your brother mutilated
In the fourth installment of the franchise with your sister they were more discrete
They cut her hair, cut our her tongue and lovingly force bound her feet
Catchy corporate slogans are now the only words she'll say
As she starves from malnutrition on Yoplait and Special K

Children's heads bursting with crap, brightly colored, sweet to taste
Nickelodeon, Disney sugar made from cancerous toxic waste
Spinning ring around the rosy, joyfully chant the marketing ploy:
“This product will grant you lasting peace so
Take, Consume, Destroy”

"The screams you hear beneath you are in fact cries of delight
Gouge out your eyes, deafen your ears, we shall provide you sight
Grow these crops of self-destruction in the fresh plowed loamy tilth
Transform you to primate imbeciles in a Jungle of Filth."

Thoughts:

This is a song about our obsession with TV sets, computers, digital media and advertising in general. Technology when existing in its proper context (existing for our own needs as opposed to its own development) is rather useful and nice. However when it goes the other way it, it might be fair to say that it reduces us to uninformed, self obsessed, uncompassionate fools. As Thomas Merton very eloquently says:

"If technology really represented the rule of reason, there would be much less to regret about our present situation. Actually, technology represents the rule of quantity, not the rule of reason (quality=value=relation of means to authentic human ends). It is by means of technology that man the person, the subject of qualified and perfectible freedom, becomes quantified, that is, becomes part of a mass--mass man--whose only function is to enter anonymously into the process of production and consumption. He becomes on one side an implement, a 'hand,' or better, a 'biophysical link' between machines: on the other side he is a mouth, a digestive system, and an anus, something through which pass the products of his technological world, leaving a transient and meaningless sense of enjoyment. The effect of a totally emancipated technology is the regression of man to a climate of moral infancy, in total dependence not on 'mother nature' (such a dependence would be partly tolerable and human) but on the pseudonature of technology, which has replaced nature by a closed system of mechanisms with no purpose but that of keeping themselves going.”

-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

"Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments."
-Thomas Merton

credits

from Animal, released September 4, 2013

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Higher Learning

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