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The Annotated Lyrics
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Arranged By Album
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- Re-Mit
- The Remainderer
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- 2014
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- Home /
- The Annotated Lyrics /
- Quit iPhone
Quit iPhone
Lyrics
And the letters that you wrote me, oh
Shows
I wish I was
I wish I was at home
I'm home
It was alone
I just couldn't hear the phone
Quit making the foam
My eye muscle is bright
In the light
Of Dis-
Franchise
Why don't you leave it alone?
Why just can't you quit that iPhone?
iPhone?
Why don't you just quit iPhone?
Just quit your phone, iPhone!
Everywhere,
Oh I don't want to look in people's home
I look at front
Look at back
Here I stand! (2)
Why don't you tell them 'bout styrofoam
Why don't you tell 'bout iPhone
Just quit using your phone
Just quit i-iPhone app
Eye muscle is bright
The lights of dis-enfranchencide
Of dis-enfranchencide
Why don't you leave it alone?
Shout about the back gate and styrofoam
Just leave it far alone!
Stop looking at iPhone!
Stop looking at iPad phone!
All right!
All right!
Don't you see you missed out
Walking away
And shouting about
Your bet
Just can't quit iPhone
Just don't quit iPhone
Give it just conphone
Really just conphone (3)
Pad, why?
Look at people's home
And look at handstand
Don't you see you missed out-sta-sta,
Re-Mit (4)
Just give iPhone
Why don't you give them styrofoam?
Ooo, they all know about tablet and phone,
In God's home
Just quit the WhyPhone
Just quit with phone
Gimme shoes, hey,
Just quit walking the phone,
Alone...
Every just keep licking foam, alone
WhaDooDipk!
My eye muscle is bright as I stare into the morn
And I see the citadel of media city shining bright (5)
Notes
1. Thanks to Thop Daverty from the Fall Online Forum for transcribing. He admits uncetainty about much of this, and I can scarcely do better...The lyrics occupy a twilit zone between words and scatting. The effect is transfixing in a particular way that one can only imagine Mark E. Smith pulling off: that mixture of humor, rage, message, anti-message, sense, and nonsense which has been, in one form or another, the signature of Fall music for four decades.
2. This phrase is of course associated with Martin Luther, who according to tradition (but probably not in fact) declared "Here I stand, I can do no other!" when called before the Diet of Worms and asked to recant. The allusion to Luther seems appropriate--I imagine the genesis of this song to have gone something like this: "Why don't we do 'Sir William Wray' again, but as a protest song?" (see note 4 below) Not that "Quit iPhone" is quite a protest song, except maybe in a very loose sense--if we personify the idea of a protest song, it can almost be thought of as a reflection of Phil Ochs in a funhouse mirror, or, to continue with the Protestant connection, seen through a glass darkly. Surely there is an annoyance with iPhones expressed here--whether as personal nuisance or social phenomenon, we never get quite squared away enough to say--but the song doesn't really have a message any more than any other Fall song if we look at it closely. The iPhone theme is more of a motif then a thesis; I almost wanted to say it is a pigment on the canvas, but this may be a little too weak....
3. That's what I hear, anyway, and I am thinking of "con-phone" as a portmanteau of conform and phone. That may be a little corny and, if I am hearing it wrong, I suppose the corniness is mine. But it is in keeping with the general lyrical approach here, in which many of the words teeter between two or three foci--one or two words, and a scat vocable. MES tips all the way over in to scatting by the last line, so this seems to me to be a feature of the song rather than a failure of transcribing chops on my part...
4. "Sta-Sa-Za" I take to be pure scatting, I don't hear anything here that seems to convey a sense. Re-Mit should perhaps be italicized as above, or perhaps should just be spelled "remit"--I split the difference. The first option is appealing if we hear this as an oblique tip of the cap to the "anti-lyrics" of "Sir William Wray," but this could be an over-interpretation.
5. According to Zack, "MediaCity, as in MediaCityUK which was built on the former site of the Manchester Docks where MES famously once worked."
Comments (13)
"Don't you see you missed out-ah-ah...Re-mit" at 3:00 min.
"Do they all know about tablet and phone, in God's home?" 3:15 min or so instead of typewrite/bomb.
You're certainly right about "tablet" at 3:15. I still hear "bomb," kind of, but yours makes more sense so I changed that too.
Married, 2 Kids, is the one I expect you have in mind, of course.
Potentially Cowboy George too.
Perhaps even Cyber insekt
https://web.archive.org/web/20190816070919/https://www.qthemusic.com/articles/mark-e-smiths-final-q-interview