Choosing Your Masters

Song Meaning

The lyrics for "Choosing Your Masters" plunge the listener into a furious rant against 90s pop culture, specifically targeting MTV and the bands it championed. The speaker is utterly disgusted by what they see on television. This isn't just a casual dislike; it's a visceral, almost violent rejection of popular taste. The central tension here is the speaker's belief that bad musical taste directly correlates with a lack of civic competence. They mock the idea of "MTV viewers, the worlds biggest losers, to vote?" and later suggest fans of certain bands "should be lumped together with convicted felons." This hyperbolic linking of cultural preference to political disenfranchisement fuels the song's confrontational edge. The craft relies heavily on specific, often derogatory, name-dropping and extreme imagery. Bands like Seven Mary Three, Silverchair, Stone Temple Pilots, Blind Melon, and Hole are invoked as shorthand for cultural decay. The line "It's like I got Clockwork Orange things on my eyelids" vividly conveys a sense of forced, torturous consumption of media the speaker despises, while "A layer of shit spreads across the land" offers a blunt, visceral metaphor for perceived cultural decline. What makes these lyrics effective is their unvarnished, almost unhinged passion. The repeated demand, "This idea's wrong / In fact, there ought to be a law," escalates the speaker's outrage, making their elitist disdain both shocking and darkly humorous. The final, ambiguous command, "Don't choose your masters," serves as a provocative capstone, leaving the listener to ponder whether it's a warning against blind consumption or an ironic jab at the speaker's own prescriptive rant.