I wrote the “Not My Problem, I’ll Be Dead” EP over a period of nine months, starting with “Have a Good One” in January 2022. It gradually dawned on me that I was writing the opposite of my 2020 album “Apologize to the Future.” I wanted to tell the other side of that album’s story, the side I know best, having lived it.
“Apologize to the Future” starts from the question “how will future generations regard us?” and it’s told from the point of view of the victims, meaning young people, and especially people who haven’t been born yet. Spoiler alert: They will bitterly resent us for causing the climate catastrophe and condemning them to Hell on Earth. Luckily our graves will be too far underwater to spit on.
In contrast, “Not My Problem, I’ll Be Dead” starts from the question “how do present generations regard the future?” and it’s told from the point of view of the perpetrators. Yes, that means us. Another spoiler: Future generations are screwed, because we’re much too busy partying and shopping and updating our profiles to worry about them. The planet’s in trouble but we’re having a lovely time!
“Baby Batter Bingo” is influenced by the writings of French economist Thomas Piketty, and I hope he gets to hear it. Its protagonist brags about winning the genetic lottery and consuming champagne and caviar by the boatload in a new Gilded Age. For the uninitiated, “baby batter” is American slang for semen. “There’s no such thing as the common good” is associated with Ayn Rand, “Who’s gonna stop me?” is from self-obsessed Serbian artist Marina Abramović, and “The little people” refers to Leona Helmsley, who infamously said “Only the little people pay taxes” before being sent to prison for tax evasion.
“We played hardball, and you lost” is what the police said to Rodney King after giving him the savage beating that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The chorus “I’m tired of winning” mocks Donald Trump‘s 2016 campaign promise “We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.” The neoliberal slogan “A rising tide lifts all boats” is juxtaposed with “Cake gonna slide down their throats,” echoing the apocryphal “Let them eat cake" that epitomized aristocratic arrogance in pre-revolutionary France.
The title track was inspired by my father, who has ended many discussions of climate change with the words “not my problem, I’ll be dead.” Last Christmas I gave him a T-shirt emblazoned with King Louis XV’s timeless quote “Après moi, le deluge” and I’m sure he wears it proudly.
“Have a Good One” is a caricature of smugness and entitlement. It also lampoons astrology, which I despise because it’s disempowering and based on a cosmology that was proved false in the early 16th century. The refrain “The heart wants what it wants” is associated with Woody Allen’s paraphilia, but was originally penned by Emily Dickinson.
I wrote “Awesome on Mars” in a taxi on the way from Vienna airport to a hotel. Such is DJ life. The song was inspired by Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for colonizing Mars. He was the world’s richest person at the time, and since the rich love ostentatious displays of wealth, I pictured him replicating Las Vegas on Mars, complete with a miniature Eiffel Tower. Of course there’d be a statue of him in the spaceport. “Cruise the strip in electric hover cars” satirizes both technological utopianism and Musk’s car company.
The “Not My Problem, I’ll Be Dead” EP seethes with brutal parody and has been compared to the work of 16th-century French iconoclast François Rabelais. Like “Apologize to the Future” it’s vocal-heavy and mostly in rhyme, but it’s more up-tempo and dancefloor friendly. Though all tracks are in complex polymeter as usual, they have predominant time signatures, with “Baby Batter Bingo” in 4/4 and 3/4, “Not My Problem, I’ll Be Dead” in 17/4, “Have a Good One” in 5/4, and “Awesome on Mars” in 35/4.
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