Roman Moloch Blues

'Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! 'Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! 'Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! 'Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! '[…] 'Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!' —Allen Ginsberg, 'Moloch' '"The Empire never ended," Fat quoted to himself. That one sentence appeared over and over again in his exegesis; it had become his tag line. Originally the sentence had been revealed to him in a great dream. In the dream he again was a child, searching dusty used-book stores for rare old science fiction magazines, in particular Astoundings. In the dream he had looked through countless tattered issues, stacks upon stacks, for the priceless serial entitled "The Empire Never Ended." If he could find it and read it he would know everything; that had been the burden of the dream. 'Prior to that, during the interval in which he had experienced the two-world superimposition, had seen not only California, U.S.A., of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within the superimposition a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: a Black Iron Prison. This is what the dream referred to as "the Empire." He knew it because, upon seeing the Black Iron Prison, he had recognized it. Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world. '[…] 'Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of "The Android Cried Me a River" over that, you got the Empire, the Black Iron Prison, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it—except for the gray-robed secret Christians.' —Philip K. Dick, 'VALIS' May the Empire fall, and may the Kingdom be inaugurated. • Lyrics: Woke up this morning, opened up the newspaper. There's no good news today, just war and genocide. Roman Consul lying, people blindly believing, conquering for Empire, making sure that millions die. Just makes me wanna sing the blues all day. Just makes me wanna sing the blues all night. Just makes me wanna sing the blues every hour, just 'cause there's no respite. Went down to work and did some mindless drudgery, just alienated from God-damn everything: Doing work for Cæsar, not for my own self, not for anyone else. Ground up inside Moloch's jaws. Just makes me wanna sing the blues all day. Just makes me wanna sing the blues all night. Just makes me wanna sing the blues every hour, just 'cause there's no respite. Just makes me wanna sing the blues all day. Just makes me wanna sing the blues all night. Just makes me wanna sing the blues every hour, just 'cause there's no respite. Just 'cause there's no respite. Just 'cause there's no respite. Just 'cause there's no respite. • Credits: • Evangeline Sutherland ——vocals, production, guitar, synths, lyrics, composition