Shutdown

Song Notes

In a track by track breakdown of Kablammo! with culturecollide.com, the band had the following to say about the track:

Tim: “Shutdown”. A short, snappy pop punk song which has an undercurrent of political message. For the last few years Mark was involved with Occupy Wall Street and Rick was very heavily involved with the Scottish Independence Movement.

Mark: I was very conscientious about being an alien visitor in the US at the time. I had to stay away from any of the real flash points. The NYPD were being very, very brutal to a lot of the protestors that were there, not even protestors, people who were just there to voice grievances with the current system. They got beat on pretty hard and arrested over and over and over and infiltrated and suppressed. It was demoralising to see it happen. What you think of the land is completely false. Corporate America owns politics over there on both parties. A sad state of affairs is what it is.

Rick: I think for me, what focused my mind was when my daughter was born. It really made me think about what kind of society I want her to grow up in. It makes you question a lot of things, the current political system and the way the less fortunate in our society are treated, which is an absolute disgrace. If something happened to me and she wasn’t able to look after herself I’d like there to be a society that cared about people that were struggling. That’s why I’ve been involved in the Scottish independence. That was more about, not Scottish for a start, but just a chance for part of where I live to create a society along lines that I could tolerate I guess. It hasn’t happened yet but politically it’s awakened a whole generation in Scotland.

Mark: In Staten Island the NYPD, in broad daylight, killed a guy called Eric Garner because he was selling cigarettes on the street. Like four or five of them jumped on him and strangled him to death. There was huge public outcry about this because the cop who had him in an illegal chokehold got away scott free. The day that decision was made thousands of people were in the streets of New York, pissed off and angry. We went and split off into about seven or eight different groups and we dispersed in different directions, so the police didn’t know what to do. If you have one big mass it’s very easy for them to control it and kettle it. So we split off in all directions and went to all different bridges, laid down in front of them and shut the city down at night. There was no traffic coming anywhere. And all the traffic was honking in support.