Day 6: Eat Your Young - Hozier
Honey, I wanna race you to the table
If you hesitate, the getting is gone
I won't lie, if there's something to be gained
There's money to be made, whatever's still to come
When I tell you this man is Irish, you better believe it because this song references a piece of satirical writing by Johnathon Swift very heavily.
A Modest Proposal is a writing in response to the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852) that suggested if there is no other way for the Irish to survive, it would be better for them to eat their young than let them live in such a terrible world. There are six ways suggested to eat their young. It was meant to be an inflammatory piece and bring people's attention to the horror of the hunger and desperation they lived in.
I could ramble on for a while about the history of the Irish Potato Famine, but I'll leave you with this: the song doesn't focus as much on the systemic destruction of a people group, but rather critiques the mindset of those in charge and how they decide to use those with less power and consider the loss of life inevitable and nothing less than the people's faults.
This came out the very week that I finished reading A Modest Proposal so you better believe I played it on repeat until I'd figured out the meaning of each lyric and memorized every chord so that I could recognize it within a few beats of it being played. I had also researched the Irish Potato Famine pretty heavily a few months before the song was released so this really was the cherry on top of a hyper fixation of the year.
We could examine all the lusty undertones of this song, but I wanna talk about the social commentary going on here because I only noticed the lust after the horror.
Get some
Pull up the ladder when the flood comes
Throw enough rope until the legs have swung
Seven new ways that you can eat your young
Come and get some
Skinning the children for a war drum
Putting food on the table selling bombs and guns
It's quicker and easier to eat your young
Like holy shit this is some grotesque imagery
And it all really comes back to the military industrial complex of things where there's war profiteering and the "young" are brought into the military to continue feeding this machine and die in favor of raising a profit.
"Skinning the children for a war drum" -- generally when you skin a creature, you also plan to eat it so continuing on with the cannibalism motif here which feeds into the idea of the military industrial complex literally eating their country's young and using them up until there's nothing recognizable left
"Seven new ways that you can eat your young" -- in A Modest Proposal there are six ways listed to eat their young, now this implies that there's been a new way discovered since then, but also potentially plays into a theme of the seven deadly sins as gluttony, lust, and greed seem to be some of the major elements at play here
"Throw enough rope until the legs have swung" -- plays off the phrase "give them the rope that they'll hang themselves with", which is a fancy way of saying that if something potentially constructive or helpful is given to help those less well off, then they'll find some way to use it to harm themselves which is quite frankly untrue, but is reflective of the mindset carried by those Hozier is critiquing
