In My Area

The dwarf plays pool to prove his height (1)
People play games when they lose in life
There's no sport, lad, just acid tension stomach flash
A madness in my area

I have seen the birth of bad (2)
I have seen declining tracks
I have seen the madness in my area

Understand time till I'm asked about it   (3)
Years cross-check, days become a tick
Can't remember who I've sacked, just stupid faces looking bad
The madness in my area

I have seen the birth of bad
I have seen

declining tracks (4)
I have seen the madness in my area

Former friends suck on the Fall
Genuine white crap article (5)
Their future cries
of broken pain are idiot victims'.
Just adds to the madness in my area
 

I have seen the birth of bad
I have seen declining tracks
I have seen the madness in my area
 

Politic comic fools in full bloom
McCarthy reincarnate soon (6)
See the bones on the two-late faces
The me generation (7)
See the traces of
The madness in my area
 

I have seen the birth of bad
I have seen the declining tracks
I have seen the madness in my area
 

I have seen the burrowmen (8)
Frozen pain that is so bad
I have seen the madness in my area
I have seen the madness in my area

Madness in my empire
In the writer
The Berlin fighter
In the mirror
The doppelganger (9)
The blue sweater

Blood and sand.... (10)

1. Well, either people know how high a regulation pool table is, and thus they can gauge how tall the dwarf is when he shoots, or this is a garbled way of saying that the dwarf has what is sometimes known as a Napoleon complex (despite the insistence of revisionist historians that Napoleon was actually 6'3'') and is trying to prove that his pool game, at least, is quite tall.

Junkman: "I think the clue to the dwarf line is in the following line: "people play games when they lose in life." So the 'dwarf' is just a metaphor for a person of small achievement/status."

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2. Dan's comment conveniently comes with its own disclaimer. Nevertheless, an otherwise silly line like "birth of bad" needs to be a quote or allusion in order to not suck, so his dicovery is welcome:

"I found this phrase in the book The Harley-Davidson Reader, MBI Publishing, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7603-2591-X. It's an edited collection of essays by people like Hunter Thompson.  

Chapter 4 is headed "The Birth of Bad". I can't find any context for this, but I wondered if it had something to do with the film, "The Wild One", which a number of the essays are about.

Having found online a draft script of the film, I don't see the phrase used. But I haven't seen the film in many years, so perhaps I need to watch it again. MES, who's sister we know was a biker (noted in "Renegade", for example, among other sources), would surely be familiar with this kind of stuff.

So I dunno. I have a gut feeling I'm onto something here. But I've had that feeling before and it's amounted to zip."

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3. In Book XI of his Confessions, Augustine says: "What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not." In the early lyrics these allusions often seem half-digested...

^

4. Dannyno saith:

"Declining tracks" could refer to a type of conveyor belt found on docks, or else to a gravity railway. "Declining tracks" might also refer to railways going down hill economically or in terms of popularity.

^

5. "White crap" is a common self-applied epithet for the Fall in this period, as in "Crap Rap"'s declaration "We are the Fall/ Northern white crap that talks back!" The tag is pronounced as a boast, certainly, in the way that people sometimes take a term of opprobrium and turn it into a mark of pride. However, its use here is probably less of a straightforward reversal of value than it may, on the face of it, seem; MES, despite superficial indications, is not really much of a boaster, at least not in an unequivocal way, and thus the phrase "white crap" should not be heard as shorn of all self-deprecation. Thus, I hear a kind of double reversal here: the phrase denigrates northerners, who in turn denigrate snobs by using it boastully, and this is in turn mocked a bit when MES gets ahold of it. 

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6. Joseph McCarthy was a US senator from Wisconsin whose name became synonymous with political bullying and repressive anti-communist agitation and legislative activity. Although MES seems to verge on James Hetfield territory with this lyric, it should be noted, in all fairness, that if we take "reincarnate" to be an adjective the line is only slightly ungrammatical. Or, although I think this is less likely, we could hear the sentence as a perfectly grammatical statement in the imperative mood: "McCarthy, reincarnate soon!" This would foreshadow MES's somewhat silly invocations in "Spectre vs. Rector."

Dan:

1977, in "LM: Labour Monthly" (which I can see MES reading or at least come across, possibly, back then), Vol.59, p.320, was this line: "one cannot help but wonder whether there has been a reincarnation of McCarthy after all." Who knows? Maybe MES saw this, and in any case Joseph McCarthy is the kind of guy who attracts a lot of "reincarnation of"-type comments.

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7. The Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) were sometimes called "the 'me' generation." This handle may have been coined by Tom Wolfe, who also called the 1970s "the 'me' decade."  

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8. I don't think there's any such thing as "burrowmen"; I also am far from sure the song says it, although it is in the lyrics book...Dan suggests "boroughmen" as a possible spelling.

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9. Dan points out that Hitler employed, as far as is known, at least one physical double as a decoy. Gustav Weler was killed with a bullet to the forehead at the end of World War Two, and his body was left in the garden of the Reich Chancellery garden, where it was found by the Soviets; apparently, the ruse (temporarily) worked...also see note 9 below. 

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10. Also Sprach Dannyno:

Blood and Sand is a 1941 film starring John Carradine.

Carradine also played Reinhard Heydrich in the 1943 film, Hitler's Madman.

Heydrich famously shot at the reflection of himself in a mirror.

Rikki reports: ""Blood and sand" is also a Mancunian exclamation too, similar to saying "bloody hell" – it doesn't seem to be a common thing but it's something that my mum says if, for example, she ever drops something on the floor.

Totales's Turns has (thanks to Steve):

In the writer
In the fighter
In the mirror
In the 77 shit pile
The doppleganger
The blue sweater..yeah

^

In My Area: Fall Tracks A-Z