"Here Comes The Flood" Pregnant Songs for BushWorld

Posted by anonyMoses on September 14, 2005 12:22 AM

Exposure Robert Fripp Music from E.G. RecordsRelease date: 31 August, 1990

Katrina, as a storm, has passed. Ophelia sits spinning off my coast. Ophelia drowned, right?

Again, Peter Gabriel's, "Here Comes the Flood" floods my mind. A pregnant song. A prescient song. A song that has warned those with ears to hear about the dire results of a ludibund and flippant attitude toward our effect on the natural world, and its harsh rebuke.

I'm too old to rehash an examination of the lyrics of a song that has been around since the 70s, and which has already been analysed quite enough thank you, which I guess either shows the innocuous ineffectiveness of such an activity, or else that the examiners are perhaps a little farther behind the scenes than they might have wished upon themselves, in more ego-laden moments of their evanescent lives.

Mister Gabriel must have been shaking his head even longer than his monkey (or was that shock? But of course!) as he watches the essobees fasten the hoodwinks ever snugly. More ugly still the nightmares unfurling.

More pregnant and prescient still is Robert Fripp's version of the song, with Gabriel on piano and voice, while Robert Frippertronicizes the sonic atmospheres enveloping it. Fripp wisely includes the words of the Gurdjieff scholar/student and mystic, JG Bennett, who talks about the coming floods in great world cities, due to what is euphomistically called "climate change".