Annotations for Citizen Erased

Lyric: [Instrumental Break]
Annotation:
During this instrumental break, a certain melody is played between 5:15 and 5:43. This same melody is used at the beginning of Resistance.

Lyric: Open-minded
 I’m sure I used to be so free
Annotation:
This is a lament over the loss of purity of thought. Being “open-minded” means to take into account others' perspectives, and having absorbed so much from others, one’s own opinions, thoughts and identity are ultimately lost; the “citizen” is “erased”.

Lyric: They’ll only bring us pain
Annotation:
Reminiscing on the past will have only a negative affect.

Lyric: Wash me away
 Clean your body of me
Annotation:
This verse is an emotional appeal for all the madness in the world to stop, a plea to whomever or whatever is responsible for his decaying moral and physical identity.

Lyric: And the truth’s unwinding
Annotation:
The true feelings, the real thoughts and emotions are repressed because they simply can’t be expressed or communicated. And it’s dying to be heard, to leave the confines of that mind, but it can’t.

Lyric: What shouldn’t be shared
Annotation:
“What shouldn’t be shared” is a double entendre in that 1) It refers to emotionless, loveless sex. “Lie” and “cover up” can also be an interpreted as references to sex. 2) It refers to what we’re “covering up”, our true feelings and thoughts that can never genuinely be conveyed.

Lyric: Break me in
 Teach us to cheat
Annotation:
At birth, a human is a tabula rasa. We’re blank slates at birth, and it’s the outside environment that presses in on us and shape us. To be able to live in this environment, we pick up on things like cheating, lying, and “covering up what shouldn’t be shared”. The word “shouldn’t” in particular is the most important word in the entire song–“shouldn’t” refers to the necessity of social pretense. Humans lack the ability to truly communicate, and thus, devices such as “cheating” and “lying” are our weapons of self-defense. “Break me in” also an indication of the need for acceptance, the search for a place to belong.

Lyric: And I’ve seen all I’ll ever need
Annotation:
In this line, the protagonist is already brainwashed and now that he has no real memories he believes that what he has seen (the fake memories established in his mind) is real, and that he is completely fine with it. This line is better explained in  The Globalist, sequel to Citizen Erased, where we can see the rise and fall of a dictator, the one who erased the memories.

Lyric: And the truth’s unwinding, scraping away
 At my mind, please stop asking me to describe
Annotation:
Whenever you lie, it hurts part of you and those around you. It becomes to hard to lie anymore, and you can no longer cover for anyone.

Lyric: Erase all the memories
Annotation:
Another reference to Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. In the novel, The Party, who are the dictatorship in control of everyone, ‘erase’ people’s memories by changing the records so that they reflect what they want people to see. The majority of the citizens have become so used to accepting records as truth that they no longer choose to believe or remember their own memories. They simply accept whatever The Party tells them as truth.

Lyric: And to lie, and cover up
Annotation:
Citizen Erased is based on George Orwell’s novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. In ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, the protagonist Winston and his co-worker Julia have a dangerous love affair that, if found out, would be severely punished. Therefore, they have to keep their feelings for each other hidden, thus lying and covering up their lives.

Lyric: For one moment
 I wish you’d hold your stage with no feelings at all
Annotation:
1) Matt is making reference to people who change their mind as they blindly follow the crowd, believing what they are told, and not forming their own opinion. 2) Here Matt appeals to the creator, whoever that may be according to his personal beliefs, he is wishing to hold his stage, to be able to manipulate the hands of time, so that his soul is cleansed, cast back to the pure state of infancy.

Lyric: Self-expressed
 Exhausting for all
 To see and to be
 What you want and what you need
Annotation:
Matt is saying here that he is tired of being what others want him to be. That his self-expression should be enough for everyone , without the need to explain yourself to others.

Lyric: Scraping away
 At my mind, please stop asking me to describe
Annotation:
As stated in the song’s description, this whole track is about what it feels like to be questioned. Asking for nit-picky details is related to “scraping away” at one’s mind, trying to get everything that’s available and more in response to one’s questions. Who wants to be thoroughly examined? As Bellemy echoes, here, no one wants to explain themselves, completely.

