Oh yes, right up my street this one, to round off the year in style. A protest song about the New World Order, the Great Reset and all the other nonsense that goes with it.
How many times have I asked this year, “what happened to the protest song?” There used to be hundreds of them but now they are a protected species themselves.
I’d given up the ghost to be honest but then along comes Terje Gravdal, who writes out of the wonderfully named and isolated small town of Odda, for which Bergen is the nearest city.
There’s nothing Odda about Terje even if he bills himself as a ‘Viking Cowboy’, a combination I’m struggling to get a handle on. He’s very much an outdoors sort of guy, at one with animals and the natural world and he works with children with special needs (in addition to his own six kids).
He’s a bit of a social observer and other songs he has released this year include ‘Give us a Selfie’, about that weird obsession that some of us have to photograph ourselves with the same device we spend almost all our time staring into, and ‘The Gambler’, about “the inside trade done by top politicians and their close relations”.
I wonder if he had anyone particular in mind. I get the impression he is a hunter on the quiet and he’s just bid (en) ing his time before he makes a kill.
There’s also a song called ‘Industrial Workers’ which he says is “recognition of all of the members of the I.W. who made the life we live today possible.”
Now I guess he’s referring there to what I know as the I.W.W., the Industrial Workers of the World, the early 20th century trade union movement which fought tooth and nail for workers rights in the USA.
If I’m correct about that it leads on to a coincidence because as readers might know I have written about one of the leading lights in the I.W.W. movement in the US, Joe Hill, the organiser and songwriter originally out of Gävle in Sweden as Joel Emmanuel Hägglund. Odda is close to the same E16 route which terminates in Bergen and which does so at the other end of its Scandinavian journey in Gävle.
Anyway, to this song, ‘Get in Line’, which is about how the New World Order and The Great Reset are supposed to save us from ‘disasters.’
His lyrics are cutting, take no prisoners and cut across many of today’s issues from an alternative standpoint. Here is a selection (not necessarily in order):
“They’ll give you virus salvation, control and isolation, get in line, get in line”
“They’ll give you green salvation, rules and regulation, get in line, get in line”
“They’ll give you income salvation, tax and high inflation”
“They’ll give you conflict salvation, loss and devastation”
“You lose, they win, cash out, trash in”
“Sit down, stand up, go left, do right”
“Please listen, please shout, breathe in, breed out,
Jeez, there’s so much going on here I don’t know where to start. Terje embraces, or seems to, the pandemic, vaccinations and lockdowns; climate change, environmental constraints and the 15-minute city; higher taxes to pay for it all; and the perpetuation of conflict and the violation of human rights that go with it to ensure profits for industry. And he doesn’t pull any punches.
It’s like an updated version of Zager and Evans’ ‘In the year 2525 (exordium and terminus)’, with everything coming to a head in 2024 instead, exactly 40 years after (Orwell’s) 1984. The number 40 generally symbolises a period of testing, trial or probation in the Bible. It can also mean or symbolise a generation of man. (Are we getting too deep now?)
The only salvation, to use his own word, is the fight back by the masses that is hinted at in the last two verses but I’ll leave it to you to sort that out for yourselves.
It’s a call to arms (not literally) every bit as powerful as Joe Hill’s ‘The Rebel Girl’ or ‘Preacher and the Slave’.
And all set to a catchy piece of Americana.
I’m sure there are plenty of alternative online news channels in the US that would love to give some publicity to this song, the likes of those hosted by Bongino, Johnson, Hannity, Beck, Carlson, Ingraham, Levin, Owens, Shapiro, Walsh and Wheeler, if only because it is so different from traditional political output.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/terjegravdalmusic
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