Artist:
Fugazi. Album:
Steady Diet of Nothing.
These are our demands: We want control of our bodies. Decisions will now be ours. You can carry out your
noble actions, we will carry our noble scars. Reclamation. No one here is asking, no one here is asking, but
there is a question of trust. You will do what looks good to you on paper, we will do what we must. Return,
return, return. Carry my body.
My interpretation: This song is about abortion rights. In addition, it is extremely critical of the politicians making the decisions regarding abortion, as can be seen in the line, "there is a question of trust." The trust about which the song speaks is the trust of things private to the public sphere; that is to say that childbirth is regarded as an intimate thing in this society and that the songwriter regards it as being too intimate a decision to relegate to an institution whose trustworthiness is suspect, mainly due to the basic "public steamrolling the individual" conflict upon which most (if not all) punk rock is essentially built. In addition, the writer regards the motivations of the policy makers as suspect, as seen in the lines, "You will carry out your noble actions," and "You will do what looks good to you on paper." In both cases, the immediate contrast in meaning with the next clause ("we will carry our noble scars" and "we will do what we must," respectively) is rammed home by the similarities in phrasing such that the overly image-conscious politicians are contrasted with the necessarily pragmatic constituency and are depicted as disingenuous to say the least. At least, that's what I think.