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The Annotated Lyrics
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- Win Fall CD 2088 AD
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Arranged By Album
- Live at the Witch Trials
- Dragnet
- Grotesque (After the Gramme)
- Slates
- Hex Enduction Hour
- Room to Live
- Perverted by Language
- The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall
- This Nation's Saving Grace
- Bend Sinister
- The Frenz Experiment
- I Am Kurious, Oranj
- Extricate
- Shift-Work
- Code:Selfish
- The Infotainment Scan
- Middle Class Revolt
- Cerebral Caustic
- Light User Syndrome
- Levitate
- The Marshall Suite
- The Unutterable
- Are You Are Missing Winner
- The Real New Fall LP (Formerly Country on the Click)
- Fall Heads Roll
- Reformation Post TLC
- Imperial Wax Solvent
- Your Future Our Clutter
- Ersatz G.B.
- Re-Mit
- The Remainderer
- Sub-Lingual Tablet
- Wise Ol' Man
- New Facts Emerge
- 2014
- O! ZZTRRK Man
- New Facts Emerge
- Segue
- Ponto
- Smith and Mark
- Afternoon Disco
- Reece Stick
- Home /
- The Annotated Lyrics /
- Last Commands of Xyralothep Via MES
Last Commands of Xyralothep Via MES
Lyrics
Locus (1)
Beware characters connected with car adverts (2)
Real, assumed or imaginary
The vocal testament of M.E.S.
Coming from the little town of Speck Marsden (3)
1. Cash - the eternal fork out
To keep everything normal is well beyond the capacity
All monies will try and escape thee
Beware of thy lazy right hand
This is the focal of M.E.S. locus and Xyralothep (4)
Avoid respectable television and respectable newspapers
They have neither the talent of art
Or the instinctive snout of the media
2. Deploreth thy real god
He mutters incomprehensibly
Still on job one
With alloys
The calibrator (5)
In a cave not yet invented or constructed
This is your vessel M.E.S.
From he to you
This one M.E.S. procured
Mountain's waters blocked by dormant tree
See later on this LP (6)
6. Avoid fat aggressive men and handsome aggressive men (7)
In conflict they disappear overnight with bad backs
7. Cod-science/cod-psychology is to be avoided
But do not make your enig-noise public
As it will bring the wrath of the drude quarters (8)
Notes
1. "Locus" was the original working title of the song, as it appeared on 2003 set lists (thanks to Zack). According to an interview with Ben Pritchard, Dave Milner (who is indeed credited!) originally titled it "Locust," but this is likely to be a case of an interviewer hearing him wrong (see the comments below).
The song is a sort of list of advice, and formally resembles Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata" (see note 7 below).
2. "Touch Sensitive" was used in a Vauxhall automobile commercial, and MES has claimed he wasn't paid.
3. There are three towns in England called Marsden. The one in West Yorkshire is quite close to Manchester. Since the towns are small, "speck" could somewhat plausibly be appended. If so, then this is probably at the same time a somewhat more covert reference to Spencer Marsden (Spec. Marsden), who co-wrote "Mad.Men-Eng.Dog." from The Marshall Suite, and who appeared on an obscure single track called "Fistful of Credits" with MES as "Mildmanjan" (thanks to Fit and Working Again).
4. The name is reminiscent of "Nyarlathotep," otherwise known as "The Crawling Chaos," a sinister deity in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. He is sometimes said to resemble an Egyptian Pharoah, and the suffix "-hotep," which means "to be at peace," is found in numerous ancient Egyptian names. Another example of a lyric substituting an 'X' for an expected letter is "Mike's Love Xexagon," also on The Real New Fall LP.
5. WIlliam Blake's demiurge "Urizen," a wintry sky god who is often interpreted as representing calculating reason in abstraction from the other faculties (particularly the imagination), is portrayed, in Blake's painting "The Ancient of Days," as gripping a compass with which he measures something at his feet. In an illustration from The Book of Urizen, he is depicted in a cave writing in the book of the law, as described by David Erdman in The Illuminated Blake: "He is writing secrets and commandments, but his copy book is enrooting; the closed books in which he is transcribing may be seen as a single coffin lid; the Mosaic tablets at his back (where the proverb-communicating Devil of Marriage 10 has living wings) suggest a double tombstone: are both Testaments stony to Urizen." Caves in Blake, as in Plato's famous fable, often seem to indicate cognitive limitation, although in Blake's case it is imaginative vision that is bloked by the walls rather than, as in the most common reading of Plato, rational understanding.
6. A reference to "Mountain Energei," which wound up being placed earlier on the LP.
7. nil70 submits "This sounds like a nod to Max Ehrmann’s 'Desiderata':
'Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.'"
"Desiderata" is a prose poem Ehrmann, full of advice for living like "Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth." This song is formally quite similar to "Desiderata," then, and could even plausibly be seen to be lampooning it a little, as one would imagine it skews a bit platitudinous for MES's sensibilities...
8. From the Lyrics Parade: "This could be a response to Julian Cope (who refers to himself as the "arch-drude"), who commented on his website: "...you hear that new Fall record and it's just more embittered semi-mystical coded fraudulent ramblings about NOTHING nothing NOTHING." (editor's interpretation, which may well be completely wrong!)"
This actually seems very plausible, considering the "enig-noise" line.
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Comments (41)
"Nor the instinctive snout of the media":
The "nor" needs to be changed to "or".
https://sites.google.com/site/reformationposttpm/fall-tracks/last-commands-of-xyralothep-via-m-e-s
Again, the Fall Gigography has scans of no less than three setlists from 2003 on which the song is called "Locus." The group continued to call the song "Locus" on setlists and in at least one interview even after Country on the Click's tracklisting (containing the song's full, official title) was released c. March 2003.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fistful+of+credits+MES+mildmanjan
https://www.discogs.com/Mildmanjan-Mark-E-Smith-My-Mate-Mark-Fistful-Of-Credits-Skin-Deep/release/748385
This sounds like a nod to Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata”
“Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit”
...is the mantra of passive aggression
'media tabloid mob'
mutters mutterly?
bad backs? not sore elbows?
druids and cope as a last line? not very general advice.
I guess it depends on how many people Cope generally slams
...with his 'wrath of the druids' special move,.. kablam.
The line sits there wanting, to be distinguished from respectable media in someway.
Mutters incomprehensibly is tautological, same meaning twice.
I can't see or hear bad backs, it seems prosaic considering the drama surrounding it.
'more embittered semi-mystical coded fraudulent ramblings about NOTHING nothing NOTHING'
Wow, this sounds a lot like attitudes round these parts... wait, is this secret Cope funded sabotage site??
He might actually be that jealous and petty minded, not sure Mark would downgrade his little soliloquy for that prick's sake.
https://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/albumofthemonth/the%20boredoms-vision-creation-new-sun
At least one third party site took the "nothing etc" comment to be about "The Real New Fall LP", which of course would be impossible since the album was released a couple of years after Cope's comments.
But if you read what Cope says, he probably doesn't have a particular (contemporary) Fall album in mind. He's speaking generally and generically.
Anyway, it's chronologically possible that MES could be responding to Cope, since TRNFLP was the first album to appear after Cope's comments were published. Whether MES would bother, a couple of years down the line, is another matter.
A subtle and lovely shift, as he proclaims 'this is your vessel', being then in the third person, throws open the question, who is the author and listener now?
One of my favourites.
At what point does this process emerge from being a badly thought through opinion and blossom into an ugly new fact?
Why would any one not part of this process question this uniform repetition?
Yep, he's definitely a shameless prick, of the highest druid order. He wrote a 'book' too:
Julian has said “I demand of the reader to the point where they don’t know what’s real and what’s not real.” I think we do know Julian, clearly it's all a crock of shit. Note that this has to be the feeblest attempt to be like Mark E Smith ever. What a c##t.
pretty sure these are wrong: incomprehensibly/bad backs/drude
'As it will bring the wrath of its ....' clear sibilance
If you hear the 'ts' it would mean drudes are a quarter of the public.
From my experience, lord of the rings fantasists are about as much part of the public as gypsies, besides, no one would ever describe 'drudes' as a quarter of the public.
This is worse than calling Bo Diddley a fatty,
At what point does this process emerge from being a badly thought through opinion and blossom into an ugly new fact? "
We're not the source of that, we're the recipients and haven't sorted it all out yet. I don't know if that's better or worse.
They have neither the talent of art
Or the instinctive snout of the media
Is
They have neither the *talons* of art
Or the instinctive snout of the media
...doesn't strike anyone as an obviously incomplete sentence?
Paul, I do hear him saying something after "media" but I can't tell what it is
"To keep everything normal is well beyond the capacity" is also an obviously incomplete sentence
I can't hear "tabloid mob," I am listening to the COTC version where the vocal is more prominent and still can't make it out
Can anyone else here anything distinct after "media"?
I'm not 100% on 'Mob', it really tails off... but it's the best fit for me. I guess it refers to the way tabloid journalists have an unthinking, or pack-like sense for juicy stories.
It does sound a little inverted, but if 'the capacity' is like 'the full amount', it would read ~ beyond the amount that can be forked out.
Zarathustra is a character telling parables in this bible parody. Ubermensch and all that.
He's like an ancient prophet speaking through Nietzsche. Much like Mark's Xyralothep in that sense.
It's most obviously like the ten commandments,
but the single line aphorism thing is found throughout Nietzsche's work.
Locus is the title of a science fiction/fantasy magazine, founded in 1968.
Perhaps that has some relevance...
Marsden FC ( The Cuckoos) in West Yorkshire play their home matches at the Fall Lane ground.