Car Crash for a Soul

Title: Car Crash For A Soul
Artist: Miss Black America
Album: Track 3, God Bless Miss Black America (Integrity Records, September 2002)
Length: 3:19
Date: June 2001
Music: Miss Black America
Lyrics: Seymour Glass

Miss Black America frontman and vocalist Seymour Glass has this to say on Car Crash For A Soul:

"This was one of those annoying bastard songs that wouldn't be written - we started fucking about with one of Mike's idea's in April 2000, and came up with this trashy thing that was just me screaming abuse about Lars Ulrich being a money-grabbing arsehole (in the wake of the whole Napster thing) - it was called 'Black Collar Worker', but it wasn't very good so we left it for nearly a year. Then one day I was fiddling about and came up with a totally different guitar part for the verse, so Mike re-wrote his bassline, and then me and Gish sat and pissed around until we had the bridge bit sorted (I squealed with delight when he wrote the guitar part, like a little girl). If you listen very carefully with your Baggy hat on, you might notice a drum fill stolen from 'Tremelo Song' by The Charlatans. But then you'd probably be very, very sad. Or, even worse, a drummer.

I wrote the lyrics while I was working in a chicken hatchery in Stanton, which is a 45 minute bike ride from Bury St. Edmunds. It meant I had to get up at quarter to five to get there for quarter to six, and then sit at a conveyor while literally thousands upon thousands of 3-day-old chicks went past, and 20 of us had to pick them up one-by-one, by the wings, discern whether they were male or female and throw them down the appropriate holes, onto another conveyor belt, where they'd be packed off in crates for a happy existence being intensively farmed in tiny cages until somebody made them die. In fact, the 5 minutes they spent on the conveyor would probably be most room to move they'd ever have. They were very sweet, and if you pick one up and give it a gentle squeeze, you can make it poo at an impressive velocity - the girl next to me found it incredibly funny to use them as poo guns to squirt everyone with. Well, alright, I found it incredibly funny too. Trust me, the money was good.

Anyway, I got the title from my friend Fanny's e-mail address (I later found out it was an Idlewild lyric, which is fine by me), and I'd been watching Fight Club loads and then I read the book and between biking an hour-and-a-half round trip each day and playing with 3-day-old chickens' poo, this is what I cummed up with. Enjoy!

The title says it all. This is one of the album's most emotive lyrics and makes Car Crash For A Soul a very powerful song with a strong message and a clear agendum.

I see this track as a thought-provoking denunciation of uncaring soulless corporations that are obsessed with profit-margins, branding and persuading people to spend their paycheques on something they've never wanted. Big business is corrupt and exploits its workers past death - "If they're gonna screw these corpses, they're gonna pay". When Seymour refers to Fight Club, I think he especially means the part when the main character explains "The Formula" - a simple mathematical equation that calculates whether it is financially beneficial to withdraw dangerously faulty cars from production regardless of moral implications. If a small enough percentage of the cars fail and the manufacturer only receives a low number of complaints or lawsuits, it will be cheaper to leave deadly cars on the roads than issue a full-scale recall.

Car Crash For A Soul has quite a simple tune and sounds almost dark and despondent but, after all, it is about something pretty dismal. The first verse is packed with rich and vivid imagery: these companies use plastic and CFCs, cram Asian children into factories sewing Nike trainers fourteen hours a day and mass-produce MDF furniture for junk mail spam catalogue campaigns and sating yuppie IKEA nesting instincts, all in the name of prosperity. They squeeze the last drops out and let the system keep on running to "Let the good times roll". But, one day, the executives' extirpated souls will return to wreak revenge and the world's broken lives will tumble "on over the precipice". Each line has a story to tell, and I completely understand what Seymour means about shopping being "urgent and joyless" - I can't stand being in malls with the lurid fluorescent banners ordering me to buy the latest "fashionable" jacket or boxes of trousers I don't need and people clutching armfuls of bags all around me completely oblivious to what they are buying into. Some of the world's richest people are completely blind to the pain and suffering they cause but, no matter how many car crashes they cause, "Our star is rising" and they are gonna have to pay in the end. Greed is the deadliest sin of all and directly leads to all unhappiness in the world.

Skilled, professional teams have created,
In magnificent sweatshops,
This gold-plated plastic gangster
With a car crash for a soul
Keep the motor running
Let the good times roll
On over the precipice
My life came flat-packed
Inside, it's falling to pieces
But the surface remains intact
At the drive-in with a car crash for a soul
You call this a party?
It feels like a funeral

And we thought we'd died alone
These braindead functions never felt like fun
And now's the time for us to say,
"If we're gonna crash, they're gonna pay"
Yeah, yeah

Tonight we shine so bright
Tonight we kill the light
Our star is rising
Yours is falling

Shopping's just like sex in pornos:
Urgent and joyless
"I'm so modern everything is pointless"
With this smashed-up, burned out car crash for a soul
There's no big "fuck you!"
We just lost all self-control

And we thought we'd died alone
These branded boxes never felt like home
And now's the time for us to say,
"If they're gonna screw these corpses, they're gonna pay"
Yeah, yeah

Tonight we shine so bright
Tonight we kill the light
Our star is rising
Yours is falling

Seymour's introduction from http://missblackamerica.net/