Creepily Prescient!

This post is inspired by OBS's latest post, about watching a documentary about METAL GAWDS Iron Maiden. I was never into Maiden as a high-schooler, entirely due to stupid teenage tribalism... I was a punk, not a metalhead. Foolish, I know, hardcore punk and thrash metal would be virtually indistinguishable to a disinterested listener. My great and good friend J-Co was a big Maiden fan, and he put a couple of their songs on a mixtape he made me (remember when kids did that and it destroyed the recording industry?). Funny, Maiden was pretty much nerd metal, with its references to Coleridge, Frank Herbert, and The Crimean War (hilariously, the linked video was preceded by an ad for Coors Light in Spanish and accompanied by an ad for a Taylor Swift release). Yeah, my Iron Maiden prejudice was pretty much baseless, and could be chalked up to youthful foolishness.

J-Co, being a huge Iron Maiden fan, and an inveterate collector of music, also had not one, but two of Bruce Dickinson's solo albums. Cyclops, a particular song from Bruce's second album, was written about paparazzi, but it could be equally applied to our modern surveillance society:


We all have secret lives
In our secret rooms
Living in our movies
Humming our own tunes

Living life in camera
When the night is closing down
Sliding into darkness
You could be like me

Where are you going?
What are you doing?
Why are you looking
At the camera's eye?

Where are you staying?
Why are you leaving?
We watch you breathing
Through the camera's eye


Blast it, the contractors monitoring the web for the NSA have a right to rock out on the job: