The Final Gentlemen

from 2016: A Strange Odyssey by Jack Mythos

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about

This track is a stream of consciousness from the perspective of Mr Harrington, protagonist of the novella The Final Gentleman.

For those unfamiliar, the novella concerns the novelist Mr Harrington who upon finding himself unable to write another book, finds his whole life unravelling from the seams: his nice car has suddenly rusted, his lifelong friends no-longer remember him and his family have vanished from existence.

The first section of the song covers simply that opening while the first drum change up leads into the middle point of the novella where Mr Harrington first finds that every single place he visits is worse than he remembers but these inhabitants remember him. He then discovers that his only old friend who still remembers him has been involved inside this business and he finally finds his way onto 'his former newspaper of employment where he finds himself headfirst with a machine who has the answer he doesn't want to hear.

The final segment of the song concerns Harrington learning (spoilers) that he's actually a robot and that his previous memories were implanted artificially so as to give him a literary influence and his happy surroundings were also hallucinatory. After confronting and destroying the machine that created he leaves the building only for his delusions to magically return.

I created this song out of a desire to homage one of my favourite authors Clifford D Simak and this story in particular always resonated me due to my own feelings of ostracism and paranoid theories about my existence. I also wanted to make a song with drum change ups in place of a hook and this felt like the perfect subject matter to do so being a free-form narrative piece.

lyrics

On that day I wrote my final sentence
(Hence) my sunny day reached its final second
I slit my wrists to expose a flesh-hood lost
Wires beneath this fraudulent cloth
Addict me to this small talk (via) ones and zeros
This window overlooks another window
A phantom in this playground of (false) memories
The light surrounds my burning effigy
Rain clouds gather and metropolis rusts
Skeletons beneath banisters turn to dust
Then fade into non-existence
Decayed and I found realism as fiction
I Grandfather claused myself into agony
As happy memories unthawed to apathy
This sunny day simply exists in prose
A binary symphony tragically composed
Because I'm desperate to see sunlight
Slowly I forsake this hollow paradise

The door opens to snakes crawling within wireframes
My friends have been swallowed into higher plains
(In) What was once an eternal (breathtaking) November
I walk over decaying textures
Heavenly worlds stagnate at December
But hell's exactly how I remembered
My heart still beats to a metronome
This man of steel (ironically) finds Earth alone
This is life; an empty room of enemies
This is death; consumed by empty memories
My strings fit like a warm blanket
As everyone's expressions inform blankness
Lies built bricks swallowing the pavement
(Now) I resmith my following into vagrants
To unveil astroturf where the sun vanished
I found the black hole where hope collapses
Because I've been harvested to feed sunlight
I move to splinter this hollow paradise

Clockwork people in cardboard cities
Considered repetition to cause lucidity
I walk into this office of stillborn dreams
Found myself martyred by an ill-informed regime
I'm told truth is the final illusion
Also mortality is a primal delusion
I'm awakened to the numbness and confusion
I've forsaken for seclusion
To be inhuman enjoying the tables flip
Prayer machine drowning babel fish
To social Darwinist regimes, I'm a satanist
I broke my wings but my fascist saviour stitched (together)
The panorama is restored
I'm again the (bastards) favoured whore
I found heaven in plain sight via machinery
Is it worse drowning in pleasant scenery?
Because I've been destroyed via sunlight
Slowly I retreat to this hollow paradise

credits

from 2016: A Strange Odyssey, released July 29, 2016

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Jack Mythos Margate, UK

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