Day 22: a song that moves you forward.
Love this song. It’s short (hi John!), currently topical again, and it has a sense of humor to it. If you look at the verses, they pull no punches:
Have you visited the quagmire?
Have you swam in the shit?
The party conventions and the real politic
The faces always different, the rhetoric the same
But we swallow it all, and we see nothing change
Nothing has changed
And then the chorus pays off:
This is just a punk rock song
Written for the people who can see something’s wrong
Like workers in a factory we do our share
But there’s so many other fuckin’ robots out there
And this is just a punk rock song
The world is going to hell in a handbasket, we as concerned individuals may bust our asses trying to make something of it, but hey, whatyagonnado? And this is just a punk rock song that ain’t gonna change the world either.
I also love how in the video singer Greg Graffin looks just like your dad (ymmv) trying to be cool, rocking out in his red dad-sweater. This becomes even more apparent when you look at a couple of live versions back to back. (1996, 1998, 2002, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2017)