(The) Harvey Danger Database

Humility on Parade

Recorded

Release history

Credits

Alternate versions

Lyrics

This road leads to Rome, that road leads to ruin.1
I’m all up in the madding crowd,2
the general’s been screwing us around.
The land’s no longer arable
(the farmhands all feel terrible)—
A river red with rebel blood to sweep us off our feet
do you remember?

Humility on parade
humility on parade
The welcome was overstayed
Humility on parade
(let it run, let it run, let the river run3)

The remnants of the leisure class will crumble!
Smug bastards will be humbled!
Forcible miscegenation!
No bow ties, no invitations!
Goodbye to all that…4

You gotta look the prisoners in the eyes
a boldness in their stare you might not recognize
as you struggle to recall your names:
family and Christian, family and Christian…
Family and Christian!
Untenable position!
Here comes the inquisition!
(“yeah, it’ll come, it’ll come, it’ll surely come!”)5

I am the mustard on the wedding dress
the weevil in the watercress.
I lost the language, I confess.
Beyond the false horizon lies the rising up6
the rising up.

  1. Cf. the ancient proverb all roads lead to Rome, and the 1978 Ramones album Road to Ruin. ↩

  2. Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel Far from the Madding Crowd, and/or the 1967 film adaptation by John Schlesinger. ↩

  3. The 1989 Carly Simon song “Let the River Run.” ↩

  4. Robert Graves’s autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929) vividly recounts his experience in the trenches during WWI. ↩

  5. It will come, it will come, it will surely come. — Brian Eno, “King’s Lead Hat” (from Before and After Science, 1977). ↩

  6. Beyond the blue horizon lies the rising sun. — “Beyond the Blue Horizon”, a song written by Leo Robin, Richard Whiting, and Franke Harling, and performed by Jeanette MacDonald in the 1930 film Monte Carlo. ↩

Quotes

SCN: “Humility on Parade” was a title for two years before it became a song, originally intended as a commentary on our almost apologetic version of the hit record conquest mentality; again with the time-travel theme, the Civil War as filtered through Before and After Science, always with an eye toward feeling circumspect about the idea of projecting confidence, about confidence itself, and the notion that there’s always someone better and stronger than you projecting that same confidence—exactly my state of mind during our corporate era.10A

ECS: “Humility” was my furthest accomplishment on drums at the time, and it still sounds the most like the drumming I do now.10A

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