Fast Paced Pessimistic Protest Lamentation

In 2007, the Dollyrots wrote a fast paced song highlighting what had gone wrong with the world (and particularly the U.S.) in recent years.  The Dollyrots weren't fans of George W. Bush.  In fact, when he got elected as president, they dropped their goals of job security, and began to treasure the moment, putting their focus on music.

Not to sympathize with the Bush administration, but I don't think that we can pin all issues listed in "Emergency S.O.S."  to one person, but distrust in the president is firmly implied.  Rapidly sung by Kelly Ogden, the lyric cover many major issues that had been coming to a head.  Global warming, poverty, acts' of terror & destruction, the spread of E. coli, and corporate greed were mentioned.  Adding onto this, and perhaps in response to these growing problems are more issues that got raised in this song such as heightened surveillance, and the color coded warning scale that we unfortunately grew accustomed to.  As wars, blights, and natural disasters are occurring, there's growing pressure bearing down on people.  Metaphorically (and like R.E.M in "It's the End of the World and We Know It"), the songwriter is huddled in a shelter during what could be compared to apocalyptic prophecies.  She reaches out to tap the emergency message "S-O-S".

Honestly, the first times that I listened to this song (like when I heard R.E.M.'s aforementioned piece), the singing was generally too fast for me to grasp the meaning.  For that short time, "seatbelts" and "Star Wars" sounded like random additions to the lyrics.  Like when the guys from REM emphasize Leonard Bernstein's name.  Approaching the end of the Obama administration, I can only hope that the Dollyrots will no longer feel the desperate need for an emergency rescue.


And yes, that's a white bunny with a gas mask on the album cover.  Even if there's song a bout a disastrous state of the world, the Dollyrots maintain a general happy and effervescent weirdness in most of their songs and iconography.  Bunnies on the t-shirts, bunnies on the album covers.  One of the things that I love most about the what the Dollyrots do is that they deviate from the dark and hard-living archetypes that we primarily expect from genres such as punk.  It's like the scene from 2007's New X-Men #47 when Pixie left the broody Wolverine comically hallucinating as he yelled (with claws out) "$#%^ING UNICORNS!".