Not just Springsteen: Roger Taylor also protests

In the wake of Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis” – the song with which the Boss attacked ICE (and climbed the charts), Roger Taylor surprise release”Chumps” (literally “Idiots”), a new protest song towards the international political and social climate of recent times.

On the dark and melancholy “Chumps,” Taylor sings in a dejected, accusatory tone. The text leaves no room for interpretation: the protagonist is “a man without morality, without quality”, a “calamity” and an “empty shell, devoid of any trace of sanity”: no names are mentioned, but if Taylor were to reveal that he is Donald Trump, it would not be surprising.

Taylor plays a lot with rhymes: “treachery” and “lechery” (betrayal and lust), “pomposity” and “atrocities” (pomposity and atrocity). The tone of protest is further underlined by the video of the song: a significant, eloquent black screen.

The Queen drummer has never hidden his own pay attention to politics and contemporary society in general, constant presences in his solo production. Already in 2019 he published “Gangsters Are Running This World”, an indictment against the elites in power. In 1994, the album “Happiness?” contained two highly polemical songs: “Dear Mr. Murdoch”, a direct criticism of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and “Nazis 1994”, a denunciation against the growing spread of neo-Nazism. In 2011 he updated “Dear Mr. Murdoch” following the wiretapping scandal that engulfed the tabloid “News of the World.”

Finally, in 1998, on the album “Electric Fire” he recorded a cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero”, one of the most famous protest anthems in the history of rock.

THE LYRICS OF “CHUMPS”

A man without morality,
without quality,
a superficial man.

A man without empathy,
no trace of sympathy,
an inexperienced man.

A man without humanity,
of infinite vanity,
a bloated man.

A calamity, a catastrophe caused by a single man.
No trace of sanity, an empty shell.

We’re drowning in your self-esteem,
we’re drowning in your lies,
we drown in your pomposity,
in your atrocities,
we drown.

A man of vanity without truth,
of countless fantasies,
a worthless man.

A man, of greed and betrayal
Of senseless lust
No kind of man

You men, without morality
Your popularity, an endless mystery