Prowl Great Cain[1][2]
Lyrics
Gather jewels from graveyards,
when I get home bury them again
Wonder if you'll ever get the chance[3]
to ask me why I turned you in
I saved my own skin but I live to fight,
I live to fight another day
Still remember how brave you were
when they came to take you away
And I feel guilty
but I can't feel ashamed
Prowl through empty fields, great Cain[4]
Thought I'd seen the ghost up on the
boulevard, between the broken bits
It's hard to tell gifts of the spirit
from clever counterfeits.[5]
Sleepwalk through my days and mark
the hours until these dark times fade
Like a caterpillar crawling
out along the surface of the blade[6]
And I feel guilty
but I can't feel ashamed
Prowl through empty fields, great Cain
Rummage through the gutted
storehouse now
And lick the sweat from my brow
Saw the trucks roll out this morning,
not sure when they're
coming back again
Feel the prickings of my conscience
in my chest every now and then
Sometimes a great wave
of forgetfulness
rises up and blesses me
And other times the sickness howls
and I despair of any remedy
And I feel guilty
but I can't feel ashamed
Prowl through empty fields, great Cain
Banter
- You know how when you live in Cambodia in 1976 and the situation's very bleak – because the government isn’t just bad, but genuinely evil – and there comes a point where it's you or somebody else and you wish you were the kind of person who could say, 'Better- better I should go to the terrible place than sell out somebody who's not guilty.' And you wish it really hard, that you were that person. But you are not. You know how that happens sometimes? (2011-03-28)
- This is a song about betrayal. A lot of songs about betrayal are about betrayal and redemption. Not this one. (2011-04-08)
- A few of [All Eternals Deck's] titles have a direct, object relation...but 'Prowl Great Cain', you sort of have to figure it out. And I had that phrase for a long time and there were a couple of songs that tried to be 'Prowl Great Cain' and I was like 'What's it really about? What is the Cain figure who I want who has betrayed his brother?' And then I got it, you know, and then I put it in Cambodia in '79. (2011-05-11)
- This is a song about a guy who gets out of prison. I'm with you, free all the prisoners. But especially this guy. (2012-01-31)
- Like so many songs, this is a song about a guy who catches sight of somebody who once tortured him in a secret prison. He has some feelings about that and chooses to share those feelings in song. (2022-04-28)
Live Performances
Footnotes
1. Prowl Great Cain is part of the informal series of Biblical references. (Credit: Annotated TMG)↩
2. This song takes place during the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the totalitarian dictatorship which controlled Cambodia from 1975 – 1979. The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, orchestrated the Cambodian genocide, in which 1.5 – 3 million people (approximately 25% of the Cambodian population) are estimated to have been murdered or died as a consequence of Khmer policies. The brutal regime committed numerous acts of torture, mass murder, murder of religious and ethnic minorities, forced labor and relocation, and purges of its ranks, with over 23,745 mass graves having been discovered in the years after the regime's fall in 1979 in the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. Over 1.3 million people are known to have been murdered by the Khmer Rouge, many in mass graves collectively known as the Killing Fields. Other deaths were the result of famine and preventable infectious diseases spread by the Khmer Rouge's extreme and rigid enforcement of self-sufficient agrarianism.
The rise of the Khmer Rouge resulted in part from resentment of the US-backed right-wing dictatorship that ruled Cambodia since its coup in 1970, the widely-opposed Vietnam War, and especially the Cambodian Campaign, in which 500,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia by the United States, killing over 100,000 mostly uninvolved Cambodians. This destabilization and aggression allowed the Khmer Rouge to position itself as a force of anti-imperialism, growing its previously small ranks to a significant force.
Kiernan, Ben (2004). How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975. Second edition. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10262-8 (Credit: Annotated TMG)↩
3. Also sung, "Wonder if you'll ever get the strength / To ask me why I turned you in". — El Rey, Los Angeles, June 23, 2011; Visulite Theatre, January 31, 2012. (Credit: Annotated TMG)↩
4. In the Bible, Cain is the eldest of two sons of Adam and Eve. He kills his brother, Abel, in jealous anger when Abel sacrifices one of his sheep to please God, while Cain's offerings of his crops were rejected. God discovers Cain's murder and curses him to wander and that all his crops will fail, simultaneously marking him so that no others will harm him. Cain leaves to the Land of Nod, east of Eden, where his wife gives birth to Enoch. This story is one of the most famous narratives of a brother betraying a brother. (Credit: Annotated TMG)↩
5. "people talk about the cat who ate the canary but the cat expression of deeper resonance is the one on your cat’s face when it catches a robin and starts carrying it across the yard toward your house. it’s not a satisfied look, it’s a working look: not done yet, still gotta bring the bird inside the house, might eat it, might not, haven’t decided, but yes, if I had time to stop and talk about it, I am pretty happy about this big bird in my mouth, it’s bigger than the finches I’m usually knocking down, right? respect to the finches but look at this bird right here, check it out, I’ve been your cat for five years and you thought my robin years were past me, well guess again, let all the robins beware
that is the look I had on my face when I solved “what am I going to rhyme ‘beyond the broken bits’ with here” on the morning I wrote this song" (tumblr)↩
6. A likely reference to a famous line in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's celebrated film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, set during the Vietnam War. In Apocalypse Now, a platoon of US soldiers is ordered to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a presumed insane former US Special Forces soldier who now lives as the leader of Degar troops inside neighboring Cambodia, where he is worshipped as a god. The events in Apocalypse Now take place in 1970, during the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and so is both temporally and geographically adjacent to the events in this song.
During the briefing of US Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard, the leader of the US Navy assassination patrol, his superior officers play him a partial recording of Kurtz's radio transmissions, which opens with the line:
I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. Its's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor — and surviving.
The second recording is:
But we must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army. And they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie, and we have to be merciful for those who lie. Those nabobs, I hate them. I do hate them.
The scene concludes shortly after the famed line, "Exterminate — with extreme prejudice". (Credit: Annotated TMG)↩