"Brutal" by The Mekons

The lyrics to one of my favorite songs by The Mekons, from the band's 1991 album The Curse of the Mekons. It is maybe a blueprint for good political songwriting. If only you could hear Sally Timm's celestial deadpan wrapping itself around this song's gorgeous and spooky melody:

Brutal
The Mekons

Here comes McDrug

The english love for China tea
Brought deficit to the economy
What could we sell back?
Send in the army to deal some smack

Drugs and guns and slavery
Live together in perfect harmony
Where the poppy grew
The soil is dead

The East India Company scum
Flooding China with opium
The soil all washed away
Flooding Bangladesh today

Here comes McDrug

Drugs have long been the currency
Of the Central Intelligence Agency
U.S.A. and E.E.C.
A long dull story of corruption

Now a clown steps over the Berlin Wall
With a burning cross and pills to go
His Perestroika dependency will
Sit in your gut like a golf ball

Noiseless rocks as clear as ice
Nursed at home with loving pride
Crystal goblets of sherbet
Heaped up, flaked up, rosewater snow

Needles washed up from the sea
On a beach in Californ-i-ay
Help me get me through the day
Here comes McDrug

Needle searches for a new enemy
Locks onto targets in the big city
That was built on the profits
From the opium trade

Here comes McDrug

The duffer rests in a Fenland graveyard
On his way to Alderman Roberts
He's got the tinctures in his bag
To take away our daily hurts