Lyrics
You don't see rabbits being walked down the street
And you don't see many cats on leads
Dogs pet dogs dogs rapacious wet dogs
Owner of dogs slow-witted dog owner
Owner of rabid dog saving fare for tunnel 1
Euro-dream of civil, civil liberation for dogs 2
Society secret society
Inevitable nightmare of drift dog pet dogs street bullshit
Dog shit baby bit ass-lick dog mirror
Dead tiger shot and checked out by dog
Big tea-chest fucker dog
Black collar sends East German refugee back switch and crap pathetic 3
Of earth like lousy dog role model for infidel doghouse continent
Mutt citadel dog eye mirror hypnotic school slaver and learn
Rot from dog on grass and over nervous delicate dog
Detracts light from indiscrepant non- dog-lover
Dog pet dog come home to ya
Come home we'll talk shit to ya
Dog the pet owner owner blistered hanging there death dog
Plato of the human example and copier dogmaster pet mourner
Dog is life
Commentary
< Post in progress >
“Dog is Life”, which is a poem rather than a song lyric as such, was paired with Jerusalem as a single track on the album I Am Kurious Oranj (1988), and on those grounds the original doomby.com Annotated Fall treated them together. However, they are separately indexed on the live I Am As Pure As Oranj (2000), and I am choosing to handle them separately here.
The title is probably a play on the Christian slogan, “God is Life”. There’s also the Charlie Chaplin film, A Dog’s Life (Dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1918), and the famous slogan of the UK’s National Canine Defence League (known as the Dog’s Trust since 2003): “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas”, which was created in 1978 (see: https://www.dogstrust.org.uk/about-us/who-we-are/our-story).
Footnotes
- Construction of the Channel Tunnel (an undersea rail tunnel between England and France, sometimes nicknamed the “Chunnel”) commenced in 1988, finally opening in 1994. In the late 1980s, parts of the media enjoyed airing horror stories about what the innovation might bring, including the fear that it would let rabies into the UK.
See for example the Daily Mail article, “Stray dogs are rabies ‘time-bomb’”, 6 October 1987, p.13:
Up to a million stray dogs roaming Britain’s streets are ‘rabies time-bombs’ which could plunge the country into catastrophe, animal experts warned yesterday.
Increased traffic between Britain and Europe – helped by the Channel Tunnel – means there is bound to be an outbreak of the deadly disease, says the RSPCA.
The grim prediction came as the society launched a campaign against Government plans to scrap dog licenses. ↩︎ - Licenses for dog owners were abolished in 1987. ↩︎
- A reference to Berlin Wall guard dogs, see: https://ddrguarddogs.com/border-patrol-dogs/ ↩︎
Sources / Links
- The Annotated Fall: “Dog is Life/Jerusalem” [Archived]
- Ford, Simon (2003). Hip Priest: the story of Mark E Smith and The Fall. London: Quartet Books.
- Mackay, Tommy (2018). 40 Odd Years of The Fall. Place of publication unknown: Greg Moodie.
- Pringle, Steve (2022). You Must Get Them All: The Fall on Record. [paperback edition]. Pontefract: Route Publishing Ltd. [Online store]
- Smith, Mark E. (1985). The Fall Lyrik & Texte Von Mark E. Smith. In Deutsch & Englisch. With Drawings by Brix. Berlin: The Lough Press. [AKA The Orange Book. Available online in The Internet Archive]
- Smith, Mark E. (2008). vII. The Lough Press & AMarquisManipulationProductions. [AKA the Blue Lyrics Book]
- Smith Start, Brix (2016). The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise. London: Faber & Faber. [Text available online in archive.org]
- The Track Record: “Dog is Life”
- Wolstencroft, Simon (2014). You Can Drum But You Can’t Hide: a memoir. Trowbridge: Strata Books. (2nd edition published by Route Publishing, 2017).
Nice. But it’s ‘learn lot from dog’, surely?