Algorithm Pastoral
The Title Track that Never Was
For the newest installment of Death Valley Track Features I present another chapter in what I like to refer to as the “QAnon Quartet”: Algorithm Pastoral.
The QAnon Quartet refers to the songs on Death Valley that most directly address the collective madness that I so often mused on when conceiving this collection. (Algorithm Pastoral, Valhalla, They’re Taking It Over!, Locked Out of Disneyland)
From the moment I finished writing this song until just before I finalized the artwork, Algorithm Pastoral was the working title of the album. It’s a nod to Philip Roth’s brilliant American Pastoral, a novel that delves into the perennial question - what do you do if your kid sucks? I felt the word combination projected a delightfully grotesque scene of the impending doom I was so often reaching to describe.
When it came time to finalize the title of the album, the word “algorithm” had worked itself deeply into the common lexicon and felt too cheeky and on the nose for a work that I take so seriously. Death Valley is a much more allusive way to present the motif. Algorithm Pastoral remains one hell of a song title, though.
Some time ago, a woman who had booked a couple of shows for me and who I found to be very pleasant and lucid, started posting things online that were utterly unhinged. For example, she proclaimed that beneath our city streets lies a complex energy harvesting grid, and that the murder of George Floyd was a psy-op to persuade people of color to flood the streets, where the energy from the melanin in their skin would be harvested and used by members of the deep state to prolong youth.
It’s a plot worthy of post-comeback kid era John Travolta, but an idea that only someone whose capacity to reason has been completely dismantled by chatroom discourse could actually believe, let alone pontificate on.
This was one of many salient concepts presented as privileged enlightenment on her social media pages, and as time slogged along I began to see this type of delusion pop up more and more amongst people who I knew personally and who I believed to be at least somewhat rational.
I hope that one day you repair your relationship with your QAnon uncle.
When your favorite painters vandalize the very world you live in
And your faceless heroes hide the reasons under every stone
And your madness starts to take the shape of everything you've given
Machiavelli's gonna suck the marrow out of every bone
When your golden calf is put out to pasture
Get in line to storm the keep
Are you lonely?
Do you want to rest in peace?
When all your musings on the weather turn to proclamations of sedition
and the ones who bore you have been begging you to come back home
But the people who love you have been blinded to their own perdition
Oh, now you're Christian, that's right
A mercenary healing cripples in the Astrodome
When your golden calf is put out to pasture
Get in line to storm the keep
Are you lonely?
Do you want to rest in peace?
When the brave new world
is headed for the rapture, are you going to spare the sheep?
When you look around, were you the one who wore the fleece?
We live in danger, Baby, and I worry who you're letting your protectors be
When you come around would you know my name?
All this disease and dogma is sure to swallow you no matter who the vector be
Diminished returns when you run those games that you never lose
When the golden calf is put out to pasture, feeding off of your belief
Are you lonely?
Do you want to rest in peace?
When the ones you fought are hanging from the rafters, how are you gonna get to sleep?
When you look down, the web was dangling at your feet
Richard Gowen played drums on this one and Ryan Nasci mixed. Everything else is my fault.