Caitlin Johnstone

New Song Demo: “Alien”

I made a demo for a song I wrote; if any musicians out there feel like covering it you can do so for free and make any changes you like. It’s called “Alien”. Lyrics: I am an alien A stranger in a strange land My skin blisters in the sun The air rejects my lungs…

Caitlin Johnstone
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I made a demo for a song I wrote; if any musicians out there feel like covering it you can do so for free and make any changes you like. It’s called “Alien”.

Lyrics:

I am an alien
A stranger in a strange land
My skin blisters in the sun
The air rejects my lungs

Everything about me screams
“I’M NOT FROM HERE!”
And yet, here I am.
A stranger in a strange land

Such is life
I’m rich in material things
But poor in culture
I yearn for connection

I yearn to connect to the land
But I’m born of the ghost people
I’m born of the ghost people
I’m born of the ghost people

My culture is sitcoms
And Amazon
And the Brady Brunch
And the birthday song

My culture is Coke Is It
And Lord Hear Our Prayers
And Milli Vanilli
And the twisted thoughts of stunted billionaires

I can name more stars in the Marvel universe
Than I know in the sky
There are more pokemon I can tell apart
Than plants I can identify

I yearn to say “Here try this”
While proffering you a cup
“My pops used to make this for me,
this’ll fix you right up.”

I yearn to say  “this is how we do things here”
Or “this is what this weather means”
Or “this bark is good for toothache”
Or “Just lie with me
and listen to the land”

Just lie with me
and listen to the land
Just lie with me

My culture is full of lies
My culture is made of lies
My culture is lies cooked up
By ad execs
In suits made by slaves

My culture was strategized
My culture was bastardized
My culture was militarized
In the parlor rooms
Of monarchs, popes, and liars

My culture was spun
Out of lies
By lobby groups
And think tanks
And lawyers protecting their clients
And middlemen chaining up the things that shine

And scavenger men
Looking for scavenger means
To predate on vulnerable people
My culture is a vulture
My culture is a vulture

I yearn to say “this is how we do things here”
Or “this is what this weather means”
Or “this bark is good for a toothache”
Or “Just lie with me
and listen to the land”

Just lie with me
and listen to the land

Just lie with me
Just lie with me
They lied to me
But you can just lie with me
And be free
And we’ll
Listen to the land

__________________________

__________________________

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30 responses to “New Song Demo: “Alien””

  1. Stephan Borau Avatar
    Stephan Borau

    A wonderful spoken word piece. They lied to me, come lie to me.
    You have so much to offer, Caitlin.

  2. Benjamin Avatar
    Benjamin

    Good poetry! though overloaded with blaming—and where does that leave you?

  3. Em Avatar
    Em

    To any Addressee lording over the land:

    Ninety-three percent of the Israeli land area is owned by the state, allocated by the Israel Land Authority and the Jewish National Fund. The remaining 7% of the land is either privately owned or under the protection of religious authorities?

    In other words, Israel is the only landlord whose intent it is, is to destroy any form of communalist sharing of the entirety of the land of palestine, and treating the indigenous occupants as mere tenants on private property; at the whim of the owners.

    We’ve only just barely begun to scratch the surface, of being anywhere near capable of fully and comprehensively defining the subjective contents of what our own life on earth consists of, yet suddenly we are being told to be more concerned with looking for and identifying the Alien enemy.

    We are the them, in the only universe we, at this late stage of our less conscious metamorphosis, can only dream of being privy to.

    So, what do we do? We dream of what isn’t, rather than attempt to live better, to the full extent of all of our combined awareness potentials; in the self-made cesspool that is called life on Earth, at this moment in space time.

    We exist, as someone once put it – about ‘others’ countries’ – living in the sh_thole country, yet the swamp within which he was constantly and narcissistically ranting against, is now, as unhindered as it ever was, to continue to poison us all, to an ever greater degree, against each other!

  4. Roger Hoffmann Avatar
    Roger Hoffmann

    One other comment – about landlords and rent. I understand what you’re saying here, but feel it is a bit sweeping in its judgment. Or, perhaps it should be taken to its logical conclusion: that no one should own or possess any property, including a house and garden. (That’s certainly a state worth contemplating, though I don’t see it happening in any reasonably foreseeable future.)

    In any case, I saved and bought a home to live in while I was working – many years back. I figured I’d live and possibly die there. Eventually I married, and 20 years or so later, a career decision by my wife necessitated our moving. We rented a home near her office for a few years while keeping our eyes out for a “permanent” home, renting out our home to a pair of sisters who were a perfect match for the place. They keep chickens and ducks and bees and garden intensively on the plot which I had prepared. The rent we charged was even at the outset below market and effectively just offset the rent we were now paying for our smaller house; and because I could, I have kept it the same for all these years. Meanwhile, property taxes and insurance costs have soared, and between those and maintenance costs, there is very little gain. In any case, any gain is only a small offset to the new costs we incurred for our own housing.

    Yet we are happy that the house, to which I always hoped to return when my wife retires, is providing two wonderful people with affordable housing and making them happy, while at least paying for the costs of maintaining the old place. And the tenants are apparently just as happy.

    This one example may be somewhat of an aberration from the norm, and I’m well aware that there are people who actively invest in real estate for the primary purpose of generating wealth. I take no issue with the need to address the inequities in such conditions.

    1. Roger Hoffmann Avatar
      Roger Hoffmann

      Apologies… this was a misplaced comment…

  5. Roger Hoffmann Avatar
    Roger Hoffmann

    Thanks for sharing this, sister. Wonderfully written, and as others have said, it expresses what many of us feel and think. Heinlein’s novel spoke to me as well and decades ago I had to consciously decide that even if being a stranger in a strange land is painful and constantly challenging, I’d have to somehow adapt…to live and continue to deepen consciousness no matter how alienated from my trash culture i might be; if only to help others (awaken or cope).

    One bit of divergence here: Having in the early 70s myself (with another) directly observed a UFO that could not be explained by any existing (then or now) known technology, and having a few years later working in the radio communications room of a police department one evening, listening in to the excited (and too real to be staged) radio reports of the patrol officers about what they were seeing, I am at least open to – and accepting of the possibility if not likelihood that they are attributable to alien origins.
    After reading and listening to the reports of Lue Elizondo, the former director for AATIP, and various aviators and naval officers who’ve reported such encounters, what strikes me is the similarity in reports to what I & others personally observed.

    Also, while at any point along the way one could say that it’s POSSIBLE that we were witnessing a secret and/or experimental human technology, it seems now implausible that if it were, say, a government program, or experimental commercial development, that it would remain secret and undeployed commercially or militarily for fifty years – more if we start looking back into the earliest reported sightings.

    I don’t want to get carried away by this… at this point, all we can agree on is that the subject(s) are unknown. But I will say that I can’t believe that the basis for any of it is governmental psy-ops or has any military/political origins. That explanation fails. And as it is illogical to conclude that Earth, even as precious and rare a jewel as it seems, is the only place in an incomprehensibly vast universe where Life has evolved, and, given what we’ve already begun to understand (or get glimpses of) in quantum / astrophysics, then we should almost expect that at some point, there’d be some such “alien” encounters.

  6. Jack Oliver Avatar
    Jack Oliver

    Very good Caitlin

    I am a 7th generation Australian with an Aboriginal great – great grandmother from the Wiradjuri tribe.

    Are you driving near Shepperton or Seymour ?

  7. John Y. Jones Avatar
    John Y. Jones

    Thank you for the poem – a strong message indeed, Caitlin! These hollow building blocks in our countries that become more and more absurd and anti-life.

    I have asked for research on what it does to people, cultures and civilisations that we are founded on omnipresent COMMERCIALS that, by definition, are LIES. How can we pursue truth and solidarity and respect for other humans, when a founding phenomenon is based on avoiding truth? How long can humanity survive when we base our existence on such a fake scaffolding? I can never forget the outgoing CEO of IBM, Louis Gerstner who, to BBC in 2002, hailed the signs of democracy in “improved consumer choice”.

  8. grimm Avatar
    grimm

    Someone send this to Killer Mike. I would but I’m busy. Thanks team.

  9. TD Avatar
    TD

    Your song brought me to tears. It says everything I feel but struggle to articulate.

    Living in this fucked up world is painful and isolating, and I find it hard not to slide into falling in line with the propaganda program of learned helplessness that is being inflicted upon us.

    Life is exhausting. Fighting or even resisting the system is exhausting and overwhelming, and finding a way to live outside the system is all but impossible these days. (At least for us mere plebs – those with money seem to be able to do what they like.)

    Thank you for continuing the fight in all the ways you do, Caitlyn.

  10. Paul Douglas Rackemann Avatar
    Paul Douglas Rackemann

    Don’t be so depressed, Caitlin. I don’t really know what it is like for someone born in a city, because I wasn’t. I can understand the idea of Aborigines feeling a bond to their land. Farmers do, too. But even tribesmen and farmers use some kind of technology. You have to make the best you can of what you have, even if it’s only a desk.

    1. Ian Perkins Avatar
      Ian Perkins

      Technology isn’t the cause of alienation.
      Most of us are alienated from the means of production (including technology), which are owned by capital, and from the fruits of our labour (including technology), which are not ours. Capital buys our lives with wages and salaries, making our lives alien to us, and requires that we purchase the goods produced by our alienated labour, making our own creativity equally alien.
      Alienation will be with us until we control our lives and labour, which requires going beyond capitalism.

      1. Paul Douglas Rackemann Avatar
        Paul Douglas Rackemann

        That is what Karl Marx said. People aren’t all the same. I am sure a lot of men over time have taken a pride in dirty, dangerous work, and in skilled work, as long as they are well paid for it. They don’t have to own the product to feel that.
        The world isn’t made up of nice dreams. Things wouldn’t be wonderful if you could just do away with those evil capitalists. We are at least partly responsible for our own failings and disappointments. There wouldn’t be any good things at all without private property. I am not saying that the present system is good, but I think that Keynesian economics is what is wrong with it, not private ownership of property. And once you have private ownership of property, inevitably you have inequality.

  11. Emmett Avatar
    Emmett

    Bravo Caitlin – I love your Fearless ‘Take no Prisoners’ attitude keep up yoir exceptional work we have your back

  12. Josh Avatar
    Josh

    Not bad.

  13. Roundball Shaman Avatar
    Roundball Shaman

    There’s nothing more unsettling than becoming and feeling like an Alien in your own home world. This is the modern state of the people of the World in our current era.
    .
    Some of this we did to ourselves. Most of it was done to us by others. Many, many others. And for a long time.
    .
    One day, we lived in a World we knew and sort-of understood and then we woke up another day and we recognized little around us and we seemed to understand even less of it. And we wondered how it ever all got so wrong.
    .
    We’ve sampled ‘solutions’ to our dilemma from those outside of ourselves. And they don’t work except to further alienate us from our True Home State of Being. So if the answers won’t be found on the outside, we know where to look next. And where we never should have stopped looking.
    .
    Some of us will reclaim the Mythical Mystical Home Feeling that we always instinctively crave to inhabit. Others will allow themselves to be further transported away from their True Selves and any sense of happiness and peace and fulfillment. They will keep looking in the wrong direction and listening to the wrong people and traveling down the wrong road which takes them deeper into the Land of Alienation and personal disorientation and misery.
    .
    Is it really so hard to find our way home again? No, it is not. We just need to stop listening to liars and deceivers and thieves and soul vampires that feed off our pain and sadness and anger and disorientation.
    .
    No, it’s not hard to Go Home Again. How could it be when we always carry it with us. And always will.

  14. Pascal Avatar
    Pascal

    And yet what do we know when the wind blows east
    And multicolored lizards in their hobnail boots
    Travel on the train of time
    Towards the end of the universe
    Where dumbfounded rabbits
    Hanging from the lower branches of a zebra crossing
    Are planting the seeds of wisdom
    Into the purse of a Christmas tree
    While the waves of a clueless night
    Hitting the snowy slopes of tomorrow
    Ring the bells of an ever-growing desire for truth
    On the path to nowhere?
    What do we know when a circle of light lands on the beach
    And brings the news that all we thought we knew
    Has been irretrievably lost in the plastic rainbow
    Of what we were forever bound to ignore?

  15. Howard Switzer Avatar
    Howard Switzer

    Listen to the Land, yes, good job!!

  16. Linda Jean Doucett Avatar
    Linda Jean Doucett

    Bang On Miss Caitlin
    Love it!

  17. KCDFREE Avatar
    KCDFREE

    Caitlin; Being a musician you are amazing such a gifted writer and artist!!Thanks for keeping the morning focus.Love You!

  18. Jim Leonard Avatar
    Jim Leonard

    Thank you for your kindness. It is refreshing and true.

  19. Keith Avatar
    Keith

    Catlin,
    –
    Damn that poem is good. Iwish I could do that,
    –
    I wonder how smart Aliens really are. Maybe aliens would vote for Trump? Perhaps humans are not uniquely stupid and the rest of the galaxy shares our stain.

    Would they be as smart as a 700 year old man? To answer that read ‘Parsimony’ here, https://chasingthesquirrel.com/. My website. The same one under my name.
    –
    ‘Just lie with me
    Just lie with me
    They lied to me
    But you can just lie with me
    And be free
    And we’ll
    Listen to the land’
    –
    Nice, very nice.

  20. Peter Bates Avatar
    Peter Bates

    Cute poem. But I do think you’re getting a bit distracted by this alien diversion thing. Maybe a few journalists are making a lot of noise about “aliens,” but the average person is still trying to make sense of health care deficiencies and making ends meet.

    1. Caitlin Johnstone Avatar
      Caitlin Johnstone

      Not that kind of alien.

  21. Normand Drolet Avatar
    Normand Drolet

    Thank you Caitlin Johnstone. Thank you.

  22. Some One Avatar
    Some One

    “I [can] predict the future”: There will come a time when the “intelligence” shared by them (aliens/extraterrestrials) will be clear, as altruistic messages. No one, then, will wonder if the coordinated communications are just continuing Psy-Ops of earthly fashions/technologies/goals.
    https://seaclearly.com/2021/06/04/ufos-and-world-stages-a-christian-perspective

    1. Howard Switzer Avatar
      Howard Switzer

      LOL Jodie might have closed with this from Alan Watts: “We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.”

  23. Carol Law Avatar
    Carol Law

    You are truly a Renaissance woman. I’ll bet you knit, quilt, and play an instrument too. Maybe soon you’ll find a cure for Alzheimer’s. Seriously. You are amazing.

  24. Ian Perkins Avatar
    Ian Perkins

    Great! I hope someone musical can make something of it.
    I did do a double-take on the scavegers looking to predate. I usually encounter the word in the sense of someone who finds useful stuff that’s been thrown away, like pikers or dumpster-divers, here, people who wander the streets with a sack or a crude wheeled barrow collecting stuff for recycling, or in India, who collect shit from homes or clean out the sewers. All more predated on than predating!

    1. Ian Perkins Avatar
      Ian Perkins

      Oh! To me, a piker keeps eyes wide open for useful or valuable stuff that’s otherwise going to waste, often with scant regard for the legalities and an expansive concept of going to waste. Turns out it means something different to many English people, and something yet again to Ozzies and yet again to USians.

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