Jeff Rosenstock – “Festival Song”

Jeff Rosenstock – “Festival Song”

Jeff Rosenstock has shared a new track, “Festival Song,” that will appear on an upcoming new album that’s due out this fall, the follow-up to the former Bomb The Music Industry! leader’s 2015 solo album We Cool?. “Festival Song” was first sent out to fans who ordered a lawn sign earlier this week, and is now being shared with everyone else. It’s a propulsive and politically-charged track that was written after Rosenstock saw a set at a festival where the act derided surveillance culture and corporations while surrounded by those very institutions. The lyrics serve as a pointed manifesto, and you can read those and listen to the song below.

It feels completely ridiculous that I’m a willing participant, gazing at the purple and pinks in the shadow of a bank-sponsored skyline. “Unite against the establishment!™ (while drones transmit the images to a server farm in the valley for a culture that will eat its own insides.)”

Oh, they wouldn’t be your friend if you weren’t worth something. They wouldn’t be your friend if it wasn’t worth it, if you didn’t have something they could take.

Take a long look at the billboards that smother the air ‘til you can’t ignore ‘em and glamorize department store crust-punk-chic ‘cause Satan’s trending up and it’s Fashion Week but this is not a movement. It’s just careful entertainment for an easy demographic in our sweatshop denim jackets and we’ll wonder, “What just happened?!” when the world becomes Manhattan where the banks steal the apartments just to render them abandoned.

We’re not stupid people but this financial oppression has got everyone believing all that we can do is nothing ‘cause we organize through avenues they lace with advertisements so the ones we try to rage against are still lining their pockets. Oh, they wouldn’t be your friend if you weren’t worth something.

“Festival Song” is out now.

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