Works & Archives
This was a quick one that came out well. I know pretty much everyone in the west has had this pounded into their heads over the past 40 years, but I’m not certain if we’ve known the lyrics. Particularly at the end there, just receive it.
by Eden Bloom
Written December 2023
Recorded on MLK Day, Jan 20 2025
from Without a Book
Maybe it was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King that messed this up for me. I love myself in what I hope is a healthy way, but I see nothing in myself that gives me a sense of supremacy. Maybe that message that deep down we’re all the same sunk in and damaged my ability to think that somehow I’m more special or more deserving than anybody. Maybe his dream damaged me.
Maybe it was watching all the children I was supposed to hate playing hand in hand with kids who looked like me on public TV. Sanford and Son, Good Times and The Jeffersons are a part of the story. Maybe it was seeing the rise of Black folk on my TV in the seventies that did this to me. Maybe it was Roots. 7 years old, watching a man who looked like me commanding extreme damage be done on a Black guy who then ended up in reading rainbow, then Geordi from Star Trek TNG. Maybe stuff like that seeded the evils in my mind that now look a lot like critical race theory.
Maybe it was Paul and Stevie singing about black and white piano keys, remember? “Ebony and ivory, living in perfect harmony.” Maybe that so badly damaged my psyche that now I want to open borders and give all your stuff away to people in need.
Maybe it was learning how to read.
I don’t know what got me to fall for it, justice, equity, standing up and working for what is pretty much black, white and right.
Maybe it was those ‘tribal beats’ that rattled my brains…… I know Apollonia on the banks of Minnetonka got me thinking a little differently. Maybe it was those European guys with empathy and synthesizers like Depeche Mode that messed me up to the point that I have zero desire to kill anybody. “People are people so why should it be you and I should get along so awfully.”
Maybe it was the Detroit Institute of Arts, or maybe the zoo, public institutions notably too, that got me thinking about “other” people and “other” places in a respectful way. I know a subpoena should be sent for the idea that “You’ve gotta have art” and that we can become living breathing social commentary. These ideas, these institutions radicalized me.
Maybe it was David Carradine and fake Kung Fu or the white women doing yoga at 5 am on the basement TV, that got me thinking “other” cultures might be holding some of the healing I was seeking, and needing.
Maybe it was Field Commander Cohen, the Shulgins, the Leary psychedelic revival in the 90s. Maybe they got me feeling the tree bark against my palms, grains of sand falling through my hands, got me thinking wrong about connections between all things and that to cause others pain was gonna happen, but wrong.
Maybe it was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King that messed this up for me.
© Eden Bloom 2025
https://linktr.ee/edenbloom2023
Thursday, Nov 14, 2024 – Vichy Detroit – He awoke with a start. He hadn’t been sleeping well for the past few weeks. It wasn’t the result of the elections, it was the series of arsons on the block weeks before.
He hadn’t really been the same since the first fire. Jump-scared from a deep sleep by the house across the street engulfed in flames. The waves visibly altering space, like some fever dream scene, as though waking inside the burning eye of a mythical big bad guy. Heat waved oranges, reds, yellows and blackness fills the screen.
A chunk of me is back there, transfixed by the swirls. The rest of me awakes with a start. It’s the middle of November. The buildings that caught fire are gone or being worked on, cleaned up, made ready for what’s next.
The fallout from the election has found finger pointing instead of organizing and seeking solidarity. The disinformation worked, is working, will work in the oligarchs favor. You can track and analyze their progress by the changes they make to the sky – or you can keep looking down here.
The, “who could contest him?” white, write-in incumbent Emergency Manager announced he won’t run for Mayor again. Surrounded by his people, the light shown down upon him, he smiles, shrugs as he does, and says he’ll find ‘common ground’ with the fascists to do as much damage in 13 months as possible. It’s 7:33 am.
Been carrying this song with me since it came out. The Wolfgang Press have always been in my top 10, but the older I get the higher they rise. This is my second TWP cover. Way back in the beginning of this experiment I did ‘Cut the Tree’ • Eden Bloom – Cut the Tree (The Wolfga…
Here’s a visualizer I put together with footage of the Time Machine installation. • Eden Bloom – Hammer the Halo Visualiz…
These covers, (wonder how many I’ve done now?) some of them have characters/energies that seem inherent and are hard to shake. This one wants to drive. This is a draft and a more technical, less emotional, take because it always falls off the rails when I give it all over to the narrator. There is also an aspect to my strumming that I’m not able to manifest in the technical version. It’ll come round as I’m planning to document the evolution of this one here. My ableton is jacked up so I’ve not been able to multitrack this one.
Video: Visual Spell, walking the quarters from ‘Time Machine’ Installation (2019, Detroit) by Eden Bloom. Video production and editing by Eden Bloom Notes: Video of the Time Machines installation from 2019 over the most recent cover song. The land the Time Machine installation was built on was once Detroit Eastside General Hospital and is very ‘hot’ in the energetic realm.
Of course, I own nothing here but the audacity to sing a song I adore and make professionals cringe. Lol. Thanks for looking, subscribe and all that. @EdenBloom2023 🙏🏻 #80smusic#acousticcover#thewolfgangpress#twp#halo#hammer#4ad#4adrecords#coversong#covermusic
Been a minute…Still imperfect per usual, but maybe a little more collected with distance. “Just You” – 0:41 – James Marshall, Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch (as based on a J.M. Interview Q/A that I’ll try to find again.) “Fantasy” – 2:59 – Aldo Nova • Aldo Nova – Fantasy “Into the night” – 7:28 – Julee Cruise, Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. This is a sketch. I own nothing but the notion of putting these together. Forget all that you see…