If you’ve been around me for the last few months, I’ve pressured you to pick up some Flotbots.  A few months ago I started listening to their 2008 release, Fight with Tools, after encountering Handlebars through Pandora.  They knew how to cast a mean flow and their songs were a mix of vision and resistance.  In “There is a War Going on for your Mind” we are warned that  “cover girl cutouts throw up pop-up ads infecting victims with silicone shrapnel… now it’s raining pornography, lovers take shelter.”  We are then warned, through the use of irony, that might does not make right, except that we use it to make ourselves righteous.   It is this combination of social responsibility and morals that so intrigued me, all within a musical shell that I so adore.[1]

Their morals and vision seems may stem from Christ when they speak of feeling “like they do about the Son of Man,” a “freedom fighter bleeding on a cross for you,” and “redemption from another dimension.”  But, it is not an evangelistic band, if you know what I mean.  Their positions seem to flow from the Son, but they aren’t trying to convince you to follow the Son, if you know that I mean. 

flobots1cd_lgFight with Tools moves the listener from the realization that everything is marred and corrupt to seeing the strings that control the system to tales of resistance to a vision of rising together and doing what is possible to redeem the corrupt and the marred.  In “We are Winning” a vision of a better society is painted, one where

rival gangsters sit down to plan an after-school program
a religious fanatic posts footage of an interfaith service project
a group of teenage boys watches a video of a father playing catch with his son
an adult film star paints thumbnail portraits of elderly couples, fully clothed and smiling
a record executive records a demo of his apology
a policeman makes reverse 911 calls instructing residents to take to the streets
a patriot reports for duty
she’s wearing an orange jumpsuit and holding a picket sign
she’s ashamed of her birthplace
but retreat is not an option

The inversion of the perversion is pregnant with possibility.   And it is possibility, not condemnation which truly spurs us on to craft a better. [2]

So, after chewing up Fight with Tools and then chewing its cud, I moved on to Survival Story.  I have not listened to it enough, but my song of the moment is certainly “Airplane Mode.” 

 

More Flobots music on iLike

 

It is classic Flobots.  They call forth from the deep many of the problems that plague us.  As the listener moves down further and further into frustration and despair, they switch gears, rhyming:

Anything we can mess up we can fix up

Sword to plowshare
Soiled from beneath the trash
Prisoner to Gramsci
Rose from the concrete
Cripwalk to a conscious beat
Hip-hop is a compost heap
Gangsters to gardeners
Rivals into partners
Fanatics to reformers
Felons into farmers
Inmates to fathers of innercity scholars
Poptart to salad
Teens into college 		Centerfold models to artists
Police abuse to catharsis
Street sergeants into peace departments
Thousand dollar bills to green for all markets
Backlots to blacktops and cashcrops for have nots
Metal into scrap shops
Jobs for the cast-offs
Crackspots into earthships for urban astronauts
Reservation into reservoir
Of wisdom we used to know
Use the whole animal
Landfill to future home

So the smile’s not wasted

They won’t let us stop at despair.  They implore us to move ourselves and our society forward.  Retreat is not an option.  Let’s build this into the way we see the world.  Let’s take this with us as we press God’s vision into the dirty muck that has been our plan independent of his. 

Also, buy their music.

Notes:
  1. Yeah, I don’t know how to talk about music.  How to categorize…. [↩]
  2. I did mean to do that.  Fill in the blank, stretch yourself.  Be; do. [↩]
Scridb filter