Dog is Life/Jerusalem

You don't see rabbits being walked down the street (1)
And you don't see many cats on leads
Dogs pet dogs dogs rapacious wet dogs
Owner of dogs slow-witted dog owner
Owner of rabid dog saving fare for tunnel  (2)
Euro-dream of civil, civil liberation for dogs
Society secret society inevitable nightmare
Of drift dog pet dogs street bullshit
Dog shit baby bit ass-lick dog mirror
Dead tiger shot and checked out by dog
Big tea-chest-fucker dog
Black collar sends East German refugee back switch and crap pathetic (3)
Of earth-like lousy dog role model for infidel doghouse continent
Mutt citadel dog-eye mirror hypnotic school slaver and learn   (4)
Lot from dog on grass and over nervous delicate dog
Detracts light from indiscrepant non-dog-lover
Dog pet dog come home to ya
Come home we'll talk shit to ya
Dog the pet-owner-owner blistered hanging there death dog 
Plato of the human example and copier dogmaster pet mourner (5)
Dog is life

And did those feet in ancient times, (6)
Walk upon mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth on clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem 
In the dark Satanic Mills? 

Jerusalem

It was the fault of the government  (7)
I was walking down the street (8)
When I tripped up on a discarded banana skin
And on my way down I caught the side of my head
On a protruding brick chip  (9)
It was the government's fault
It was the fault of the government
I was very let down with the budget
I was expecting a one million quid handout
I was very disappointed
It was the government's fault
It was the fault of the government

I became a semi-artistic type person
And I didn't have a pen
And I didn't have a condom
It was the fault of the government
I think I'll emigrate to Sweden or Poland
And get looked after properly by government

Jerusalem

Bring Bow of burning gold:
Bring Arrows of desire:
Bring me Spear: O clouds unfold!

And though I rest from Mental Fight  (10)
And though sword sleeps in hand
I will not rest til Jerusalem is built

In Englands green and pleasant Land.

1. MES reportedly hates dogs. From Mick Middles' The Fall:

"Mark E. Smith has a deep aversion to anything remotely canine. Always a ‘cat’ man, he once lingered for 20 minutes on the stairs of my house, playing cheerily with my two bemused black’n’white cats. 'Mick, your cats are boooootifoool.' Once, sitting in The Foresters Arms in Prestwich, a local toady Fall fan approached him with the words, 'It’s great that dog, isn’t it Mark?' to be swiftly rebuffed by Mark’s, 'No it fucking isn’t … it’s the worst thing about this pub, that fucking filthy dog … wish they would get rid of it and get a cat!'" ['Sic' throughout!]

It is easy to credit the veracity of such reports, in light of the following lyrics.

"A dog is for life, not just for Christmas" is a well-known campaign phrase used by the National Canine Defence League ("Dog's Trust" since 2003) since about 1979ish (Dan).

The other obvious reference is "God is life." 'Dog' is of course 'God' backwards; the more common phrase would be the Christian "Jesus is Life," a slogan which derives from the statements attributed to Jesus in the Bible "I am the resurrection and the life" (John 11:25), and "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). See note 4 below.

Note the possible resonance with George Clinton's "Atomic Dog," which proclaims: "These are clapping dogs, rhythmic dogs, harmonic dogs, house dogs, street dogs/Dogs of the world unite; dancin dogs, yeah, countin' dogs, funky dogs, nasty dogs!" Dan reports that this was pointed out in the article "Sound-alikes" in the Fall fanzine The Biggest Library Yet (issue 7, September 1996).

From Dan:

From Hot Dogs in the Far Out Zone, by MES. NME, 30 July 1988, pp.14-15:
 

HOLLAND

On arrival write vicious anti-dog rant, although I haven't seen one in ages. What actually sparks it off was hearing English cricket commentary on hotel's TV. This was depressing after bliss of six weeks of TV in foreign languages, where you can make it up yourself.

And Rob points out that the title is an allusion to Opus's "Live is Life"; on I Am as Pure as Oranj, MES sings the "na na, na na na" refrain right before the transition to "Jerusalem," which nicely foreshadows the latter's riff. 

^

2.Dan drops some Chunnel science:

Construction of the Channel Tunnel commenced in 1988, and would be opened in 1994. There were widely published fears in the late 1980s that the Tunnel would let rabies into Britain. And dog licences had been abolished in 1987.

For example, see the Daily Mail of 6 October 1987: "Stray dogs are rabies 'time-bomb'" (p.13):
 

Up to a million stray dogs roaming Britain's streets are 'rabies time-bombs' which could plunge the country into catastrophe, animal experts warned yesterday.

Increased traffic between Britain and Europe - helped by the Channel Tunnel - means there is bound to be an outbreak of the deadly disease, says the RSPCA. 

The grim prediction came as the society launched a campaign against Government plans to scrap dog licenses.
 

^

3.A probable reference to guard dogs at the Berlin Wall (thanks, Dan).

^

4. Thanks to Rob pointing out the allusion to Pavlov and what is now known as "classical (as opposed to 'operant') conditioning." 

^

5. In the Republic, Plato likens the guardians of the city to watchdogs. In the Victorian era, a faithful dog that has lost its master is sometimes portrayed in paintings that have been referred to as "dog mourner" paintings. Plato is often thought to have seen the physical world as a copy of an ideal world of Forms ("often thought" because there are debates in Plato scholarship about this, but in any case it is a hypothesis that is treated in the dialogues). 

Note also again here the inversion "dog::god." The dog "blistered hanging there" can also be seen as a image of the crucified Christ, who in the traditional hierarchy of things would in a sense be the "pet owner owner." The Platonic god, a type of what is sometimes called "the god of the philosophers," is inverted by the notion of god-as-human-as-dog. Note that William Blake, the ultimate source of the Jerusalem lyrics, saw the human form as the highest way to understand god, an inversion of the philosophers' conception of god which in whatever form generally takes anthropocentric notions of divinity as a mythological approximation to the truth. And "Dog is Life" is inverted here as the "death dog"...

^

6. Most of the following lines are taken from William Blake. They appear in the preface to Blake's lengthy "prophetic" work, Milton a Poem. Blake's verse gets chopped up a bit in the process; the original lines are as follows:

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

This section of Milton was famously set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 as a hymn called "Jerusalem." The Fall's version has a melody that is simpler, yet somewhat similar, to the hymn. Emerson, Lake & Palmer recorded a version of the hymn in 1973 on Brain Salad Surgery, and Jonder points out that Blake's poem was first set in a post-punk musical context by Mark Stewart and Maffia on their 1982 single Jerusalem.

Courtesy of mountainoaf:

From an interview with Liz Kershaw on Radio One, circa "Kurious Oranj": LK: Now, it's rumoured that you're doing a cover of Jerusalem. MES: That starts the show off. LK: You've actually done it. So how do you do that, 'cause it was our school song, do you give it a totally different interpretation? MES: It was your school song... well, I think it was everyone's school song. We approach it like the Velvet Underground would. There's a nice joke section in the middle of it as well.

"Jerusalem" is technically a distinct song from "Dog is Life," and they have been performed separately.  

Harley has dug up some apposite comments from MES:

Been doing some clearing out and I came across this snippet on a xerox sent (I think) by the Fall fan club back in the day... original capitalisation and punctuation preserved.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE ORIGINAL OF BLAKES 'MILTON'? THEY BROUGHT IT OUT. IT'S INCREDIBLE. IT'S JUST LIKE YOU WERE SAYING. THE PREFACE IS 'JERUSALEM'. THERE'S THIS BIG RAP ABOUT HOW CRAP GREEK ART IS AND HOW BRITAIN'S GOT TO GET IT'S SHIT TOGETHER THEN THERE'S 'JERUSALEM' THEN THERE'S THE POEM. BUT IT MUST'VE TOOK HIM AGES COS EVERY PAGE IS ART WITH HANDWRITING OVER IT. I'VE SEEN NOTHING LIKE IT IN MY LIFE. APPARENTLY HE HAD TO DO IT ALL BACKWARDS SO IT COULD BE PRINTED UP. YOU GET 'JERUSALEM', YOU READ IT IN A BOOK AND IT'S OKAY BUT IN THE ORIGINAL IT'S JUST THIS FUCKING RAP, DEAD CONCENTRATED LIKE, THEN THE POEM BUT UNDERNEATH THERE'S THESE RAINBOWS AND TYPICAL BLAKE STUFF AND AS IT GOES ON THERE'S LANDSCAPES AND STONEHENGE. YOU CAN'T READ THE POEM CAUSE OF ALL THIS GREAT ART BEHIND IT. WITH BLAKE I TEND TO JUST READ BITS OUT OF IT AND JUST MEDIDATE ON IT. I THINK THAT'S THE BEST WAY TO TREAT HIM BUT WITH THIS IT'S LIKE TOTALLY DIFFERENT. WHAT AMAZED ME WAS IN THIS BOOK IN THE RAP HE GOES ON ABOUT HOW FULL OF CRAP PLATO IS AND ALL THAT AND THAT'S WHAT I WAS SAYING IN THAT 'DOG IS LIFE' THING AND I'D NEVER ACTUALLY READ THE PREFACE.

I THOUGHT THAT WAS QUITE A COINCIDENCE.

And from Dan:

Sounds,  5 November 1988:  
 

Oh, I'm a complete William Blake fan, always have been. Someone gave me the original book, and the rap before it is brilliant.

"It's funny, cos in this poem before 'Jerusalem' I'm going on about Plato and how crap it is, and in the book Blake wrote, Milton, the preface has this rap about how we should cast off all these stupid Roman and Greek ideals and build the new art. He goes on about Plato being perverted and that."

See "More Information" below for the full text of Blake's preface to Milton.

^

7. Dan:

For the left and the labour movement, "building Jerusalem" has a radical meaning; it's about establishing socialism. For the right, they see it in nationalistic and conservative terms.

Either way, this song ironically contrasts the transcendent utopianism of Blake's poem, and the petty whinging he hears in his local pub, or from fellow artists. Visionary politics has been replaced by nanny statism and self-interest and entitlement. Now it's not unreasonable to see that, in the context of the time, and given the "the government should look after me" content, and MES's frequently expressed anti-socialism (derived more from betrayals by socialists, perhaps, rather than a rejection of progressive working class politics per se, but who knows), as targeting the left. But it's not necessarily so - such sentiments are common across the spectrum.

Anyway, none of that is uniquely insightful. In terms of a note, I think it's just about flagging the irony and identifying Jerusalem's political meanings.

^

8. This is a favorite line of MES's, who also uses it in "Blindness" and "Ol' Gang," and variants pop up elsewhere.The following anecdote is told by Stewart Lee about seeing comedian Ted Chippington open for the Fall:

Ted took the stage to a crowd that weren't expecting him, rooted to the spot in Teddy Boy regalia, scowling and supping a beer. He spent half an hour delivering variations on the same joke, each of which began with the phrase "I was walking down this road the other day," in a flat Midlands monotone, interspersed with listless interpretations of pop hits. A typical joke would run like this "I was walking down the road the other day, this chap came up to me. I said to him, 'Haven't seen you for a while.' He said 'Well, I've just got back from Nam.' I said, 'What, you mean Vietnam?' He said 'No, mate, Chelt'nam.'"

According to Lee this happened on October 28th, 1984, at a place in Birmingham called the Powerhouse. The gigography confirms this date and time, and various sources on the web mention Chippington opening for the Fall. Anyway, it's possible MES's frequent use of the line is a kind of homage to Chippington.

On the other hand, purple_prince remarks: "It seems too much of a coincidence for there not to be a connection to the countless folk songs that begin with a variant of 'As I walked/rode out one May morning' as an introduction to the tale. It seems to connect the Fall - if obliquely - to the folk tradition. This connection is not as remote as it sounds really if you think of Smith as the skewed working-class balladeer and some of the ancient ballads are full of strange imagery." I think he is absolutely correct to identify a link to folk balladry in MES's lyrics, an idea which should be explored in more detail.

^

9. Hexen Blumenthal submits this, which is worth including in full. From H P Lovecraft's TS Eliot parody “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance”:

Bootleggers all and you’re another
In the shade of the old apple tree
’Neath the old cherry tree sweet Marie
The Conchologist’s First Book
By Edgar Allan Poe
Stubbed his toe
On a broken brick that didn’t shew
Or a banana peel
In the fifth reel
By George Creel
It is to laugh
And quaff

^

10. Blake has "I will not cease from mental fight" (see note 3 above).

^

Dog is Life: Fall Tracks A-Z

Jerusalem: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1988

William Blake's preface to Milton:

PREFACE

THE Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all Men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible; but, when the New Age is at leisure to Pronounce, all will be set right, & those Grand Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly Inspired Men will hold their proper rank, & the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakspeare & Milton were both curb'd by the general malady & infection from the silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword. Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, forever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters, on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live forever in Jesus our Lord.