Wiki
On "Smith + Cross", billy begins reflecting on the current state of society since the triangle trade. While most were crushed to later learn that their ancestors had contributed to the continuation and growth of slavery. Others turned the irony into a joke, using laughter as a coping mechanism to guard against their anxiety. The separate reactions hint at the inability of black society to unite over its history and tackle the issues of the past.
There’s a lot of parallels you can strike between this and the current state of racism in society too.
Billy could be telling us that modern day society has learned nothing from the triangle trade of the past. Despite the injustice that’s been placed on black individuals globally, we constantly see a pattern of black-on-black violence. Instead of uniting to tackle our issues, we continue to tear each other down.
Still haunted by our past, we’re dooming ourselves to repeat history once again.
billy closes the album’s final verse with imagery of him looking at Africans in a museum. The African dioramas in some museums have literal glass eyes which is why billy mentioned it here.
This line also has a deeper significance. It relates to the idea of dehumanzsing Africans which had been brought up throughout the album, like on “Sauvage,” which explored the idea of Africans being ‘savage.’
Historically, Africans have been the subject of mass exploitation, defended by the act of dehumanizing them. Africans weren’t viewed as humans in the past and that allowed for them to be exploited. And now in modern times, African culture being shown off in museums, placing them on some above-human pedestal, all of it with the intention of exploiting them.
billy spoke on the curse of generational wealth in the previous song and here he uses the term generational trauma. These lines sum up how while others generate generational wealth, the disadvantaged only get generational trauma, and billy is one of those people.
Sugar, molasses, and rum represents the triangle trade that fueled chattel slavery. Sugar was harvested and made into molasses by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, shipped to New England for production into rum which was then shipped to Africa to help purchase more enslaved people kidnapped and taken to the Caribbean. This is the economics of the triangular trade behind the “generational trauma” described elsewhere in the song.
Track descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
