The People Who Run The Country - Beachhead

Millennials!
Gather round and let my Insta-insights clock your age and social grade
Form yourself into a mob
The churning brick-dust sea behind you
Grey clouds swelling overhead
And watch me clamber on this pillbox
Its innards slicked with litter
Its purpose long forgotten
Hear me preach!
Click, click along to the sorrowful song I wept into my MacBook
As Boris alas-ed nearby in a minimized window
We didn't see it coming, did we?
That we'd be bitching over pronouns as the structures of the state
Were duct-taped, cabled-tied, and bundled in the boot
But don't pin it all on us
Blame Generation X and their Ottolenghi salads
Their grand designs
And their noughties landgrab of all the decent rundown seaside towns
Those bastards!
Blame good design, capitulation to the color wheel
Blame all this good living
It wasn't our intention
But we made being the good guys
Look like being the bad guys
Oh I dreamt of revolutions
But I can't be asked to rinse this carton out
I gawp at docs of Chinese peasants melting plastic down
Recognize the brand names on the bags
Like that
Like that
Just like that
Like that
Like that
Just like that
And now I wrap my compromise round my neck like a vintage scarf
And take it for long walks around one of the less fashionable rundown seaside towns
And contemplate how it will go from here
As Gen Z manufacture memes
To mock our Hufflepuff humblebrags
And our stupid skinny jeans
Of course, our parents doubled down
On history that they learned by rote
On how the empire did such good
Just look at all those statues - there's your truth!
No one wants to admit they've been a dick their whole lives
What's to stop them stepping round the bars
Of our manufactured rage?
Like that
Like that
Just like that
Like that
Like that
Just like that
I took the rulebook, and I drew a cock and balls on it
But never dared to rip it up
And now I shake the Etch-a-sketch until my wrists ache
As a 22-year-old who really actually doesn't secretly think that skinny equals cool
Stares me down
From an app I don't fully understand
With a simplicity I didn't realize was permitted
And asks me, straight out
"Why didn't you do something about all of this?"
While over at the corner table
The boomers puff on their Captain Tom ceramic bongs
And say, "See
It's complicated, isn't it?
It's complicated
It's complicated"
Like that
Like that
Just like that
Like that
Like that
Just like that
Oh I want to stop and gaze at waves
But all I see are dusty fighting pits
And rings of baying punters
Waving wads of notes
The sinewed muscles of the fighters
The pistons of their shoulder blades
Oh, the crack of bone
The smell of blood
Like that
Like that
Just like that
Like that
Like that
Just like that
Like that
Like that
Just like that
Like that
Like that
Just like that

Written by:
James Taylor, Luke Wright

Publisher:
Lyrics © O/B/O DistroKid

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