I Can Hit A Target Through A Telescope

Being as I am, I was hopelessly unaware of this band called Flobots who have this song called Handlebars. You've probably all heard it, it's the one that's all "I can ride my bike with no handlebars," and "I can keep the rhythm with no metronome," and "I can end the planet in a holocaust," or something like that. I'd heard people singing the first line about the handlebars and I just sort of assumed it was a cheesy nostalgia-heavy song about "wasn't it fun when we were kids?" But it's not. Instead it's a post-modern investigation of the dialectic of innocence and experience, an almost freudian examination of how our hubris and self-centeredness doesn't change so much in form, only in degree. It's a self-reflexive dia/monologue on the state of politics and our own complicity in the actions of others and the effects of those actions. Where is the line, the song asks, between power and purity? Between strength and delusion? Between confidence and conquest? Between my life and your death, or a billion deaths?

All in all it's probably the most pointed and devastating critique of modern culture to come out of the rap-rock genre (did I mention it's a rap-rock song? No? Oops.) since 1996 when The Bloodhound Gang released their seminal gutter-rap jeremiad "I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks."