It's a Tribal Thing! Libretto: A Musical Satire in Three Acts

By Foursquare Neighborhood Band

"Live! From a basement in America’s favorite ungovernably-diverse, low-income neighborhood," the imaginary Foursquare Neighborhood Band in fictional Rustville, Illinois presents a three-act musical satire entitled, "It’s a Tribal Thing!"

As America goes broke and bonkers, the band reviews how we got ourselves into this fine mess; and then unveils a plan – the American Safe Zones Affirmative Action Program – for a peaceful, Czechoslovakian-style Velvet Divorce to get us out.

The book contains the back-story, lyrics, and dialogue for the three-act musical satire so that you can follow along with the audio recording (audio files are not included.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387892921

Book preview

It's a Tribal Thing! Libretto

It's a Tribal Thing! Libretto

A Musical Satire in Three Acts

First Edition

Written and Performed by

Foursquare Neighborhood Band

FoursquareNeighborhoodBand.com

Copyright © 2022 by Foursquare Neighborhood Band / Foursquare Neighborhood Music

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-387-89292-1

OEBPS/images/image0001.png

All Songs ASCAP

To listen to the musical satire while you read the Libretto:

Streaming audio of the musical It's a Tribal Thing! is available at your favorite streaming services. Downloads of the audio of the musical are available for purchase at your favorite online audio stores and at FoursquareNeighborhoodBand.com (Assuming they don't ban us from our own website.)

All characters in the musical satire It’s a Tribal Thing! are fictional. Any resemblance to actual individuals – living, dead, or undead – is purely coincidental.

The town of Rustville, in Random County, Illinois, is also imaginary. Try looking for it on a map. If you find it, that means you've now crossed over into...

The Twilight Zone.

Doo-dee-doo-doo!

Doo-dee-doo-doo!

Doo-dee-doo-doo!

THE UNEXPECTED BIRTH OF THE TRIBAL THING

The birth of The Tribal Thing was entirely unexpected. We didn't think we had it in us.

Its conception was unplanned; its gestation, protracted; its emergence, shocking.

How could a creature so deeply, deeply disturbing come from such nice, normal people?

It's a Tribal Thing! started as a song, evolved into a multi-year research project, and finally became a three-act, race-realist, dissident musical satire.

What direction will the beast lumber off in next?

When we started writing It's a Tribal Thing!, we hadn't written a song in fourteen years. At the time, we didn't think that we'd ever write another song. We thought our songwriting well had run dry. And we certainly didn't think that we would write a three-act musical.

But songs happen.

Our first attempt at songwriting was between 1968 and 1973. We wrote about a dozen songs during our central Illinois college bar band years.

In 1973, we bought a four-channel, reel-to-reel tape recorder: a brand-new, state-of-the-consumer-art TEAC 3340 with Simul-Sync.

To our profound disappointment, we learned that the technology was much better at recording our songs than we were at composing them.

On playback through the TEAC, our songs were like thin, flavorless gruel served lukewarm in an exquisitely-designed Japanese porcelain bowl. All of those many hours of meticulous Asian craftsmanship were wasted on our meager songwriting talent.

Our songs were not the worst songs ever written. They had a rock steady beat; they had musically-rational chord progressions; they had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the recording quality was great: smooth, analog tape saturation.

But the songs were wishy-washy. They weren't memorable. At least, we can't remember them. And if we can't remember them, then how would anybody else remember them? Or why would they want to? (And the evidence in the tapes is long gone, fortunately.)

Then real life intervened, and we had a decade-long dry spell.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(A Decade Passing)

We started writing again in 1984. We wrote a couple dozen songs: rock, country, R&B. We wrote the lyrics using Volkswriter on an IBM PC with dual floppy drives, and recorded some tunes on a TEAC A-450 two-track cassette recorder with Dolby.

We found that our songwriting chops had improved. Some of our songwriting experiments were embarrassing bow-wow's; but half-a-dozen songs were keepers, though still rough around the edges.

To musically illustrate some of the ideas in It's a Tribal Thing!, we employed revised versions of three of the songs written during that 1984-1988 songwriting period:

I'm a Workin' Man (Get to Work!)

Obey the Law

We Who Are About to Die

Then, in 1988, life intervened again, and we stopped writing for another decade.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(Another Decade Passing)

In 1997, digital recording was ramping up. We saw the possibility of recording an album ourselves, so we bought a pair of PC's from Soundchaser that were optimized for audio production. We set up one computer as a dedicated DAW running Cakewalk and Waves, and set up the other one as a dedicated sampler running Unity.

We wrote about 60 songs.

We recorded an album called We Got a Love and had 500 CD's manufactured.

But we really didn't like listening to the record much.

The songs were well-written. The recording was good. It had a clear, present sound.

But it didn't do anything for us.

Why?

We've had twenty years to ponder why that album never worked for us.

Our verdict:

Too clinical. Too digital. Too clean. Too dry. Too sterile. No sense of place. Not enough energy. Not enough chaotic human life in it.

The songs we recorded were selected because they were the least objectionable songs we had written: We Got a Love, Paradise, Straight From the Heart, It Takes Two.

There was no context. It was just: Here's some nice songs that probably won't make you run out of the room screaming.

So we didn't promote it, and immediately began work on a concept album which would contain our most interesting (but much more controversial) songs. It was intended to be a double album, and it had a working title of The Jackal.

Eight of the 60 songs written between 1997 and 2001 wound up on It's a Tribal Thing! None of those eight songs appeared on the album we recorded back then, We Got a Love. But most of the eight would have appeared on The Jackal.

Get Out of Town

Jackal In a Tuxedo

No Deal at All

A Hundred Years of Hell

It Ain’t No Glory Road

When the Walls Come Tumblin’ Down

Living Well Is the Best Revenge

No Hard Feelings

But life happened again, and we stopped working on music. Most of the CD's ended up in a landfill.

Fourteen years passed without any new songs. We thought our songwriting days were over.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(14 Years Passing)

But in 2015, during the boisterous run-up to the 2016 election, we started to get restless. Our observations eventually jelled into the song, I Suspect a Lot.

We pictured a crusty old blues guitarist walking into a gin mill, pulling his guitar out of its battered case, and playing a cynical 12-bar blues:

CRASH

You think it’s gettin’ better?

Ha! This sucker’s goin’ down.

Built by fools and lunatics,

run by thieves and clowns.

You think it’s gettin’ better? Let me tell you,

this sucker’s goin’ down.

If you had half the sense that God gave geese,

you’d jump off the railroad bridge and drown.

We wrote eight verses for I Suspect a Lot, and recorded the five that were the best fit for the song's road-weary, witness-to-too-much-barroom-depravity singer.

We're still not sure what the protagonist means in the third verse:

CRASH

I only got a little,

but then there’s little that I like.

Goodness gracious, sake's alive,

that girl can dance all night.

I only got a little,

but then there’s little that I like.

Some people got even less than me,

but that don’t make it right.

It's ambiguous. Inscrutable. Or maybe he's just drunk. But that's what he sang to us, and he means what he says. It's final. The Gods of Songwriting demand that we have to take it or leave it. Some lines you're allowed to revise; others, you're not allowed to touch.

Songwriting's like that.

And then Black, White, Red (at first, known informally as The Tribal Thing) started to emerge, like some Kurtzian creature rising from a primordial swamp in the Heart of Musical Darkness; and we had been assigned the mission of being its Marlow.

CRASH

Black, White, Red, Yellow, and Brown,

more’n enough blame to go around.

Who started it? Everybody, that’s a fact.

Every tribe fights back when they’re under attack.

Diversity plus proximity

equals war, that’s the tragic math of history.

Nice people in groups can do murderous things.

So watch out!

FULL BAND

It’s a tribal thing!

As the song took shape, we realized the problem we faced wasn't merely the age-old violent conflict between diverse tribal groups; the problem was compounding exponentially because of growing human conflict with Mother Nature.

The song needed the broadly-reviled but ominously-prescient Limits to Growth perspective. We had been working on a song called Mother Nature's Delivering a Margin Call, so we decided instead to compress it into a song-within-a-song bridge for Black, White, Red.

FULL BAND

Mother Nature’s delivering a margin call.

‘Cause the bigger you are, then the harder you fall.

So what once seemed so great now must all be made small.

But we’ve come to the end of this masquerade ball.

We’ve all been robbing Pete to pay interest to Paul.

And the old shopping mall is the next Wailing Wall.

‘Cause our people grew soft but Ma Earth plays hardball.

So there’s not much time left ‘til the big free-for-all.

Who will get to survive, it’s just too close to call.

So let’s now take our bow, it’s our last curtain call.

Cause the bigger you are, then the harder you fall.

Mother Nature’s delivering a margin call.

Mother Nature’s delivering a margin call.

Mother Nature’s delivering a margin call.

A margin call.

A margin call.

A margin call.

After the fourth verse of Black, White, Red, we intended to have a breakdown rap similar to the breakdown in A Hundred Years of Hell, which we had written twenty years earlier. Our plan was to have the rap run for about two minutes, and finish with the refrain for the outro. Then we'd be done with The Tribal Thing.

But as Ol' Bobby Burns wrote: The best laid schemes o' mice an' men. Gang aft a-gley.

The Tribal Thing had other plans for us.

We experimented with various tempos for the rap section. 89 bpm was a little too hurried for our vocalists, but 87 bpm dragged. So at 88 bpm, we started the rap with:

CRASH

The American Empire is breaking down.

SUNNY

Look around.

PICKER

It’s startin’ to look like Shantytown.

It led us to:

MR. KEYES

People claim our strength is our diversity,

but it’s really one source of our present disharmony.

PICKER

Let's review the history.

But The Tribal Thing wouldn't stop at two minutes. It wanted to excavate further down into the rabbit hole. So we chased after it:

CRASH

Our founding fathers didn’t worship diversity.

They believed commonalities were the key

to long-term peace and prosperity

in the home of the brave and the land of the free.

BOOMER

John Jay, the Supreme Court’s first Chief Justice,

believed that our nation’s political compass

was our common ancestry and our common religion,

our common language and our common traditions.

PICKER

The age-old elements of tribal nationhood

where common bonds are widely understood.

MR. KEYES

By respecting the natural lines of tribal division

they hoped to reduce violent tribal collisions.

CRASH

The bloody chaos of different religions,

different languages, different traditions

would make self-government an impossibility

and authoritarian rule a necessity.

PICKER

Diversity had torn the Old World apart

but the New World would provide a fresh new start.

BOOMER

One tribe from sea-to-shining-sea

would eliminate inter-tribal rivalry.

MR. KEYES

It would be one tribe for better or for worse.

CRASH

For some a blessing.

SUNNY

For others, a curse.

In January of 2019, we watched as the news media maligned the 'Covington Kids' for their alleged racist behavior at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

We wondered what it's like to be a juvenile White kid confronted by a person-of-color in his sixties pounding a drum in your White person face; and then, for the crime of JBW (Just Being White), get branded as a racist by the MSM.

What exactly are White kids supposed to do when they're being accused of being racists?

Particularly when being accused of racism by people-of-color, when – as we were to subsequently learn with mathematical precision – the average person-of-color in America is six times more likely to violently assault a White person than the average White person is to assault a person-of-color.

We wrote:

BOOMER

As the sneering vibrant diversity

confronts a young White and menacingly

makes 'em plead:

The White kid could burst out singing to a cheerful reggae beat:

No, no! No, no, I'm not a racist!

While his buddies laugh,

Not me!

and start dancing and clapping and singing along:

No, no, I'm not a racist!

No, no! No, no, I'm