Track One – Scared of America (5.45)
By ‘Les Paul’s’ (The Paul’s)
Music composed & performed by Paul Odiase
Lyrics by Paul Robert Thomas
Released as a single 27/07/17
Released as Track One of the album ‘Scared Of America – Volume One’ 26/03/18.
The album opens with this ‘pop/rock’ track that hits you straight in the face with its clear unequivocal message and may have been seen by some as a commentary on the office of the newly elected 45th President Donald Trump who took office on 20/01/17, but the song is intended as a general contemporary reflection of America.
The track tips its hat to the late great David Bowie’s 1997 track from his album Earthlings’ called ‘I’m Afraid Of Americans’ and if you listen carefully you can hear Tibetan Prayer Bells and a contrasting bass line played against the melody combined with the track’s thought provoking and biting lyrics.
The track opens with the lines’, ‘I’m scared of America/That Alpha Male/‘I’m scared of America/with that sting in its tail’. America perhaps depicted as a scorpion ready to strike when provoked by another country or regime it perceives as being a threat to its own interests (on the follow-up album, ‘An American Landscape – Scared Of America Volume Two’, you will learn about President Bush ‘screaming for war’ and ‘no-one knowing what he’s screaming for’ on the album’s opening track ’Washington’s Blues’).
The track’s storyline takes you to Las Vegas considered by some to be a sinful city (perhaps reminiscent of the Biblical towns of Sodom and Gomorrah) that panders to man’s pursuit of avarice and vice with many of the city’s casino’s originally established and run by the Mafia. The magnetic compass points north, in America it points to Las Vegas – ‘I stepped on a compass/Found myself there/On a bus in Vegas/An American nightmare’.
The track continues, ‘Corruption on Capitol Hill/Discrimination way down South’. So many millionaire US politicians are now under investigation to establish the source of their wealth as many are paid by large US corporations to put forward laws beneficial to those corporations, in most people’s eyes corruption in its purest form but many turn a blind eye to it up on Capitol Hill. And the deep South, still home to the Klu Klux Klan and extremists expounding racial discrimination (refer to ‘An American Landscape – Scared Of America Volume Two’s track ‘When Will We Ever Overcome’), where there are ‘So many ready to kill/you’d better not open your mouth’ and disagree with their right to ‘bear arms’ as the daily toll of murders across the US rises to new levels for, ‘Mama’s got a gun/ And so has her son’!
‘Jesus was American/So Hollywood maintains/Maybe he was Mexican/That sneaked in on the train’, which indeed is a dig at Trump in his often repeated and almost fanatical and scaremongering claim that all Mexicans are criminals and that they must build a wall to stop them sneaking in!
Everyone there is encouraged to believe in and ‘Follow the American Dream’, although for many it is not a dream but a nightmare, and to appear tough and strong and ‘Do the John Wayne Walk’, as the weak and feeble will be left behind.
The track ends not an an anti-American note but in the realization that in spite of all its faults, ‘America, where would we be without you/America, God bless America’!
Recent Comments