Lyrics
Lyrics
[Start of Greeting from Mary Bell Township! Section]
Do-wop, ba, do-wop, ba, do-wop, ba, do, ba-ba-ba Do-wop, ba, do-wop, ba, do-wop, ba...
Good morning!
White picket fences, Barbed wire and trenches.
Trick or treat, merry Christmas, Howdy neighbor, thank you Jesus.
Oh, what is he building in that painted lady? A participation trophy wife or blonde, blue-eyed baby?
Wide-eyed and wired, the snap-crackle-pop of the Geiger,
Camouflage billboards for lead-lined Brooks Brothers. You elbow the jukebox and sing “Duck and Cover",
And breed out our incisors, feed on white wine and Pfizer.
It don’t look like survival, b-but buy now or die!
Suburbia!
You’re not alone,
The lights are on,
But no one’s home!
So, welcome home.
Myers-Briggs, OKULTRA!
Takes a village to fake a whole culture!
Your ear to the playground, your eye on the ball, Your head in the gutter, your brains on the wall.
Oh well... Home is where the heart is, You ain’t homeless, but you’re heartless.
It’s the safest on the market, But you still gotta watch where you park it!
So give me your half-life crisis, I can tell that you know where paradise is! Where parasites don’t care what your blood type is, Only pheromones and serotonin decide!
If it's true that a snowflake only matters in a blizzard.
Everyone knows that nobody knows that, Everybody’s all up in my, everybody’s all up in my, Everybody’s all up in my business!
Suburbia!
Where you belong!
The lights are on,
But no one’s home.
So, welcome home!
Ch-ch-chameleon peacocks are talk of the town!
Well, word gets around on hit number stations,
He cums radiation
The dog bites the postman while basement eyes dream, Of a night at the drive-in with an AR-15!
[Start of (Vampire) Culture Section]
I dropped my eyeballs in the bonfire, we fucked on a bed of nails!
I caught Kuru from your sister and died laughing in jail!
Smell those screaming teenage sweetbreads on the 4th of July grill,
Smile and wave, boys, kiss the cook, live laugh and love, please pass the pills!
It’s only culture,
it’s only culture!
It’s only culture, sulfur, smoke, and soot,
You learned to torture house cats like vultures!
You cocked and sucked your lack of empathy, pulled the trigger with your foot to prove you’ve got --
Blood,
didn’t they want your blood?
So why apologize for being blue and cold?
Blood, didn’t they want your blood?
So don’t apologize for being blue and cold!
It’s only culture,
it’s only culture!
It’s only ah, ah, ah, ah! Culture’s not your friend,
Hey, fuck your culture, I ain’t got no culture!
It’s only culture, and it's more afraid of you than you are of it! Go on, drink that blood,
(drink that blood) didn’t they want your blood? (drink that blood)
So why apologize when you turn blue and cold?(drink that blood)
Blood (drink that blood), didn’t they want your blood? (drink that blood)
So don’t apologize for being blue and cold! (drink that blood)
Were you Nabokov to a Salinger?
Jung to Freud or Dass to a Leary?
Were you mother, daughter, subject, and author?
You don’t make the rules, you just write them down and do it by the book you throw around!
[Start of Love Me, Normally Section]
Do you know the difference between blazing trails and slash-and-burn?
Going against the grain and catching splinters?
You pull out your Rorschach like a paint-by-numbers treasure map, The ink upon your jigsaw piece trace you back to your fingerprints!
Well Lot he had his lot in life, Job his job and I guess you'll too, will die, The Lord looked down, said, “Hey, you’re only mortal”!
Giveth and taketh away ‘til things come out a certain way,
Leave you wondering when they might go back to normal!
Leave you wondering why they can’t have just been normal!
My interpretation & opinions
Suburbia Overture is an amazing introduction because of how well it establishes the themes of the whole album, the subjetivity of what it means to be normal
The story takes place in "Marybell township" a sterotipical american suburban town you would often find in propaganda from the 50s yet even before the big reveal that the residents are all maniac vampires with cannibalistic tendecies you can tell something's off, the use of familiar phrases like "trophy wife" or "it takes a village to raise a child" being given an unexpected twist is something that throws you off and to me it makes it feel like there's something hidden they don't want you to find out until eventualy the mask falls off and you encounter the true nature of this place
Something that I find really interesting is the constant allusion to radiation (a geiger counter, device used to detect harmful ionizing radiation, lead which can be used as protection against radiation, Duck and cover the 1951 short film explaining what to do in case of a nuclear bomb) and I have 3 theories of what this could represent, the first one is that it's a pun on nuclear families, families composed by a mother,a father and ther kid(s) A.K.A the most normal kind of families that there is and a classical part of the american dream, the strongest piece of evidence supporting this theory is the line "he cums radiation" which in context would be a really funny way of saying "he's building a nuclear family" the second one is that it's drawing a connection to the 1950s and the constant fear of a fallout due to the fact that by that time the first nuclear weapons were being built and the third one is that radiation is an allegory for the toxicity of the people of the town and just like being in a nuclear wasteland if you stay around them for too long you will start rotting until you suffer a painful death
