And then we'll take it higher

Eddy Grant –– Electric Avenue

Sometime after the uprising kicked off in the United States, I realized that the phrase ‘domestic gladio’ fit perfectly into the part of the song where Eddy Grant sings the words ‘Electric Avenue.’ It was stuck in my head for days on end.

I made a twitter thread posting the lyrics to the song with the domestic gladio line reading and a link to news articles about some of the more suspicious events. Like the militia freak who shot a protester in New Mexico and then made sure the police who arrested him knew his father was a county sheriff. Charges against him were later dropped.

I'm not necessarily saying the American police are operating a domestic gladio program, but their thumbs are definitely on the scales of justice, if you catch my drift. Cointelpro ended when the public found out about it, but I doubt it ever stopped, you know?

Anyway, I always thought the song Electric Avenue was about the adrenaline-filled experience of being back in town with the boys (‘we’re gonna rock down to Electric Avenue/and then we’ll take it higher’), but I looked it up on wikipedia and that’s not the case at all. I guess I was thinking of a different song.

Apparently Electric Avenue is about the 1981 riot in Brixton, South London. A number of black youths died in a fire during a house party. It was thought the fire was a racially motivated arson attack but the police refused to investigate the possibility. A march was organized and met with the usual police violence, but the riot itself didn’t happen until about a month later, after an incident where the police arrested a kid who’d been stabbed and needed medical attention. Interestingly the wikipedia article tries to play this incident off as a big misunderstanding, the cop was actually trying to help the kid and the community was just confused and worrying over nothing. This section also has a lot of [citation needed] tags. That’s what bugs me about wikipedia. It seems democratic because anyone can edit it, but obviously groups like cop unions and public relations firms have a lot more resources to throw at it to disappear scandals or keep an accurate history of an event from emerging. I don’t know.

I forget what my point was. I guess just that it’s fitting that I associated a song about a riot with the uprising even though I didn’t know that’s what it was about.