It’s been a busy year for Carsie Blanton. Last summer she canceled her fall tour and joined on the Global Sumud Flotilla, bringing food and medical supplies to Palestine and ending up as a political prisoner inside an Israeli jail cell. By this January, she had released an EP with eight songs, written in parts on the Flotilla and in the prison in response to those events.
A mere three months later, she’s teamed up with The Burning Hell in Ireland to write, record, and release a brand-new fourteen-song album. It seems creativity peaks when the world gives you so much to say.
To paraphrase Carsie Blanton’s own description of the album: “Everything is Great” features outrage and the outrageous. It is absurdity as a response to a diabolical but absurd world. The song features singalongs, skits with Muppets, and folk music; through it all, it serves to raise awareness, to educate, and to motivate people to take action and speak truth to power. This album was released before the release of a viral video showing a man setting fire to a warehouse while repeating the phrase “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” But I feel like both that act and mantra go hand in hand with this album.
The album begins with a phone call between Canadian Mathias Kom and American Carsie Blanton, with Mathias asking how things are going in America. Carsie responds with a handful of brilliant observations and cunning lyrics, repeating the lines “Everything is great, and everything is fine” and then discussing things that everyone knows, but nobody wants to talk about. For starters: “Everybody knows the President is insane, but nobody wants to talk about what people do when their President is insane.” Later in the song, Carsie sings of how the government starts World War III, and everyone starting to say Luigi was right, and finally, she sings about living in a death cult. The song has some brilliant and hilarious back and forth in dialogue between lyrics, before Mathias decides he is going to come down and visit his friend and check on her mental health. The truth is that we Americans are not doing alright, whether we admit it or not.
The second song, “Peace and Freedom”, is a poppy singalong track that feels impossible to not join in on. It’s biting, scathing, and beautiful, and we’re all gonna sing it together. The chorus goes:
“We don’t believe in political violence
That ain’t the way we get things done
We don’t believe in political violence
Peace and Freedom for everyone”
After each verse, somebody shouts a number before they sing a statistic tied to that number: The number of attack helicopters; the number of declassified coups the US has funded or initiated; the number of deportations and people in prison; the global population living under sanctions by the US government.
Then, for a lyrical bridge, Carsie shouts “Let’s go, girls!”, and a sing-song bridge begins, listing covert agencies and operations, different bombs and names of American weapons, countries whose governments we’ve overthrown, and foreign politicians we’ve had executed. All of this comes with the excitement of a high school spirit rally in a teen movie. Carsie delivers the final nail in the coffin when a surprise guest comes on for the irony-filled final two lines. It’s none other than Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, with his deadpan quote: “I will say what I’ve said many times before, there is no place in America for political violence of any kind.”
The third song “Stafford Beer” begins with a skit with a Muppet feeling depressed, before busting into a great catchy song with a powerful chorus reminding us that “the purpose of a system is what it does.” Things don’t happen by accident: For instance — as the song explains — you are told a system exists to bring peace to the world, yet it ends up creating wars and funneling billions of dollars of taxpayer money into billion-dollar defense contractors and investors pockets. Therefore, the purpose of that system is to transfer our wealth to the rich defense contractors. By that logic, the purpose of the military isn’t to secure our freedom, it’s to get our poor people to kill other poor people to advance the financial goals of the people that fund our politicians’ re-election campaigns. The purpose of our cell phones isn’t to keep us connected, it’s to collect and sell our data and to give us direct marketing. The purpose of a system is what it does.
Without a doubt, my favorite song on the album is “Price of Eggs”, a beautiful skit about how we address problems in what feels like a song from a musical. The problems being addressed through the song keep getting bigger, and so do the solutions. It starts with writing and calling our representatives, raising awareness on the internet, voting, and going to protests. Then it becomes walking out of work and refusing to return, general strikes, throwing a molotov, bringing out the guillotine, and turning the 1% into the 0%. You can’t go backwards. When one step doesn’t work, you move forward. Now we see the warehouse fire, the shooting of a representative’s house with a letter about policy under the doormat, the shooting of a CEO. The progression is moving forward.
All of Carsie’s songs feel very down to Earth, and while each describes the world as it is, there is never a feeling of hopelessness. The goal of the album is to unite, to let people know that we must come together, and that none of us are alone. That is never more true than on the song “Live, Laugh, Love”, about the reminder that we will win. We can start a new government with a few million of our closest friends, fighting for a world free from capitalism and for the interests of the working class. The song is sung with hope that feels genuine. It’s not enough to fight to destroy systems of oppression; you need to want to replace it with something positive, and this is the perfect reminder.
This album was written with love and intention. Do yourself a favor and take a listen to Everything is Great below.
Written by Gimp Leg
