Fight Or Flight
As most of you by now know, all Abney Park songs have three meanings: The fictional story at the surface, the deeper meaning that the story is trying to convey, and the deeply personal meaning that's typically know only to me and a few close friends. This track is a good example of all three.
The surface story of Fight Or Flight is its the sequel to the The Change Cage. A steam powered world far after our days imprisons everything that's innovative, or new. Artists, and free thinkers get thown into a huge cage at the center of the city called the Change Cage. This song, being a sequel, is about one artists escape from this structure.
The Deeper meaning: This song (and this whole album, really) is about breaking free of the "worker bee" life we are all trained from birth to live. My mother is a well known anthropologist, and once over dinner I had posed the question, "Why on earth do we make kids go to school for so damn long each day?" She replied something to the extent of, "to train them to join the work force. Our culture has a very high maintenance system in place that requires a lot of people to work very long hours their whole life in order to keep the system running. School is mostly about preparing kids for the long hours they will be required to work as adults." I was horrifed to see how true this is. There is no other reason we would keep little kids behind a desk for 6 - 8 hours a day gluing beans to paper, etc.
The Deeply Personal meaning: there was a time, now long ago, when I left my day job as a graphic designer to be a full time musician/artist/bad-ass-airship-pirate. For months - and to some extend, even to this day - I would get these horrible paranoia fears that I wasn't REALLY allowed to not have a "day job". I feared I'd some how do my taxes all wrong, and go to prison, or I'd have nightmares that my old bosses would come to my house and start yelling at me for not coming in to work. Our cultural training runs deep, I guess, and I still live in fear that I'm allowed to truly be free of it.
So one day months ago took my bouzouki to this desolate and cold beach of mud and rocks, and in that isolation I wrote this song of escape.
Fight Or Flight
lyrics by "Captain" Robert Brown
I fear what they'd do if they find I've escaped
I fear what they'd say if they find I play, I get scraped.
They want you to think it's possible to live a life without their chains
But if you, if you go too far, you'll find they're pulling on your reins.
I fear what they'd do if they finally catch me.
I fear they'd take my home if they find I roam, find I'm free.
They want you to think it's possible to live a life without their chains,
But if you, if you go too far, you'll find they're pulling on your reins.
But if they catch me, I will fight! I will run!
I will burrow underground!
They won't catch me, I need hope! I need air!
And I won't, I won't make a sound!
I fear the life I know if they make me go back
I fear I couldn't stand any more of the stifling black
They want you to think it's possible to live a life without their chains
But if you, if you go too far, you'll find they're pulling on your reins
But if they catch me, I will fight! I will run!
I will burrow underground!
They won't catch me, I need hope! I need air!
And I won't, I won't make a sound!
I fear what they'd do if they find I've escaped