Artist’s Brief (2/9/26)

Gun is a unity song birthed from anger at watching my people and country get fucked by a small but very particular few of criminals, pedophiles, and bigots. They’ve told us that laws only apply if you’re like them and share their values, and otherwise your life is forfeit at their discretion, and that really pisses me off. Then I got to thinking about all the things they’ve done to hurt and dehumanize people, destroy equality, and actively endanger their own country and the wider world, all while they get richer and progressively more inhuman with each day. Now they’re trying to fuck with elections and make it so they can continue betraying this country and its people uncontested while we rot under their filth. 

So how far is too far? How many more Alex Pretti’s, violated-13-year-olds, and ape memes do we collectively allow? It doesn’t seem like lawmakers have any actual ability to control this chaos, and the people of the country are very vocally and physically demonstrating their disapproval daily in cities across the country, all the while being labeled as terrorists by the people actively terrorizing. The red hats have even started to publicly justify pedophilia to make it easier to live with their sin and their shitty brains. It’s a wild time y’all! 

But back to that question..how far is too far and why are we, collectively as a people, allowing them any more chances? What if we all banded together to solve the problems out there actively making everyone’s lives shittier? I don’t have any sort of answer for how to do this, but I think it’s the time to be asking that question and organizing in whatever ways we can. If laws don’t apply to them, and the laws that apply to us can just be changed to suit their needs, then this feels like a strongly weighted game where we’re all about to get real real fucked.

Thinking on all of this, I’ve been overwhelmed with how violent our world has become (even outside of humanity’s general proclivity towards it) and how conditioned towards violence we’ve become as a people. At the same time, it seems peace and any language associated with it has become a lost language that’s no longer heard widely. So what if instead we speak in a language of violence and use that to demand peace, to speak up for those in need, and to demand a home that is safe and a government that is working for its people instead of exploiting them? 

I don’t like violence, I don’t support it (unless its in actual defense of self or those endangered), and I refuse to harm another living being within the realm of my control. I also don’t think that peace is a fully dead language, but I do think that the people who we expect to work towards peace in our interest are deaf to its concepts and have no interest in seeking it. They also sure seem to hate it when a language they love using, [the language of] violence, is used against them. It’s ok for them to shoot us and text about how fun it is to do so, but the moment a voice is critical of them of their actions, it dangerously gets labeled  ‘leftist’ sentiment and, likely, a radical act of domestic terrorism–or they just add you to an NICE watch List and fuck with your flights. 

They’ve weaponized language in a very insidious way to stoke fear, create anger and distrust, and to dilute ‘the truth’ into just another possible fake news narrative. Truth doesn’t matter if everything is a narrative someone’s selling you. It especially doesn’t matter at the point when they start to control all of the narratives and make theirs the only remaining voice of ‘truth.’

But we have the same tools they do. Tools they choose to use as weapons against their dissenters and citizens–words and ideas. Both given to us by  ‘god,’ evolution, and biology, and both foundational freedoms protected by the Constitution of this land that we came to as illegal immigrants and murdered the general population to take and then poison, rape, and pillage.

All I’m saying is it seems fair to treat them the way they treat us and hold them to their own language and slogans. If they want to use slogans like ‘One of Ours, All of Yours’–a vengeful threat that hints at genocidal retribution–shouldn’t they be held to the same slogan and idea? Assuming the Ours here of course means legal, rights minding, American citizens. The trouble though is also what happens when the ‘Ours’ means only people who share their views and interests and the ‘Yours’ becomes anyone other?

But yea, roughly all of the above is some of the thinking that inspired this song and performance. Nothing here endorses the use of actual violence. Rather, the song explores an idea that we should start creating thoughts and ideas towards protecting self, home, and neighbors. We do collectively need an answer though to what happens when violence is used against us by the people who are supposed to be protecting us, and we need to collectively find a way to end that violence as quickly as we can.

Thanks for reading. I may post more here as I dive deeper into the album, but hopefully this serves as food for thought or commiseration for some of you. 

Fuck I🔥C🔥E  

Let’s work together to make fascist ideals feel unwelcome and collectively demand they get their hands off our fucking people

Stay safe. Protect your own. Together, we can solve our troubles…

-CL