Spooky Action isn’t the sort of band that relies on a brutally inarticulate turn of phrase to make a point, but when the universe hands you something that ridiculous and catchy, why not take it? So it was that a misheard expletive towards a certain human skin tag with tiny hands became a song.
During a rehearsal long ago, Anna overheard a conversation we were having about the current state of American politics. The original words are lost to time, but she repeated back what she thought that she had heard, “I wanna fuck Donald Trump with sandpaper from god.” We looked at each other, and knew immediately that we had a song on our hands. Finishing it, however, was not an immediate process.
I’ve shied away, for the most part, from writing political songs. Mainly because I don’t fancy myself as being very good at it. I find most overtly political songs clunky, and they don’t tend to age very well. But sometimes something so egregious happens that I’m not able to stay silent about it, and my self-consciousness takes a back seat.
A wise man once said that any political expression of less than a thousand words seems like a slogan. Sloganeering doesn’t advance political discourse, and isn’t useful, except in pop music. You don’t see The Federalist Papers printed on a t-shirt, at least not that you could read from across the room, but “fuck Donald Trump with sandpaper from god” fits nicely. And sadly, in this vast psychopathic theme park for junk brains, it’s the sort of thing that tends to stand out. That it happens to be a metaphor is what makes it more than a slogan.
One could be forgiven for thinking that this is an angry song, but it isn’t. It’s wonderfully arrogant, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
