Built-In Bastard Radar

Lyrics

On our final leg of the iTunes Shuffle Opening Tour, we're moving as far away from the previous entry as possible, because there is absolutely no kind of deep, soul-searching emotion on display here. This song is just blisteringly stupid, quite possibly offensively so. Hogarth even admits as much in his sidenotes on the lyrics page, so why the band felt it deserved a place on any Marillion album, even their worst (and marillion.com certainly is), I have no idea.

So the point of this song is this; women? Are attracted to bastards. Yes, all of them, always. There's no attempt to explore the idea any further than that. It may be obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I don't think that really excuses it in any way. Now, I am all for a bit of rampant stupidity in an anthemic rock song from time to time, and Marillion often do this pretty well but a) I have to draw a line somewhere, and it certainly comes well before actually spelling out the actual word in the line "Now doesn't God stand up for B-A-S-T-A-R-D-S", and b) that requires some actual anthemic qualities, and this one falls very far short of the mark. There's no real shout-along chorus (the word spelling-out only occurs once, which prevents it from becoming the "so bad it's good" version of one of those), no catchy hook; really, nothing at all to make it stand out for anything but its moronic lyrics.

It's just a bad, bad song. There's not really much more I can say about it than that.