SLOPPY - fortresses crumble at their foundations

Details

Description

Sloppy – A Satirical Folk Shanty for the Fortress Age

Sloppy is my song — melody, lyrics, and arrangement — built around a conceit that English folk music has long understood: hide the knife in the smile. Sarcastic humour is the sugar coating here, but underneath it lies a sharp critique of isolationism, nationalism, and the “keep out” mentality. By taking real-world rhetoric — the sort of slogans shouted from podiums and plastered on campaign buses — and setting them to a rousing, communal chorus, the song forces listeners to join in before they realise exactly what they’re singing.

The chorus is the weapon:

“Bar the gates and block the ports / Let’s turn our countries into forts / Don’t let those foreign weirdoes in / We do not want their foreign skin.”

It’s repeated five times across the song, each time separated by a verse that twists the knife — from warnings about shrinking gene pools, to a pointed jab at MPs, to a final verse urging that exclusion be left “at the gate” before we step into the muck we’ve created.

The Unfolding Scenes

The images conjured are visual and immediate — MPs in gumboots poking at ooze, barricaded ports, echo chambers of fear. The verses take us from abstract policy talk into absurd consequence: inbreeding depression, reduced adaptability, and a nation so insulated it trips over itself. The satire works because it is rooted in truth — a restricted gene pool is bad, for reasons biologists have been explaining for decades. But here, the science is wrapped in sea-salt sarcasm.

Arrangement and Folk Style

The musical setting draws on the English folk harmony tradition and the pulse of a shanty — that communal, call-and-response drive designed to pull ropes and haul sails. It’s a form that demands participation. In this arrangement, male and female voices carry the melody in harmony, with interludes on fiddle and concertina providing a salty lift between verses. The rhythm is stompy and unhurried — think pub floorboards, not concert hall parquet.

English folk music has long been a vehicle for political commentary, from Blackleg Miners warning against strike-breakers, to bawdy street ballads that mocked the great and good. Sloppy stands in that line, updating the tradition with a 21st-century target: the politics of fear.

Why Chorus Songs Work

Chorus songs like this are rousing because they create an instant community. Whether you agree with the words or not, you find yourself singing — and in that moment, you feel the pull of solidarity. Here, that solidarity is deliberately uncomfortable, because it’s built on ugly words. The aim is to make the listener stop, mid-song, and think.

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Lyrics

[CHORUS 1]
Bar the gates and block the ports.
Let’s turn our countries into forts.
Don’t let those foreign weirdoes in.
We do not want their foreign skin.

[VERSE 1]
What consequences, do you think,
would follow, if our gene pools shrink?
Our offspring might all turn to drink.
They MIGHT all get sloppy!

[CHORUS 2] (repeat chorus 1)

[VERSE 3]
You M.P’s sit above the rest.
It’s time you took an I.Q. test.
There’s no escape. There is no rest.
Your grandkids might get sloppy!

[CHORUS 3] (repeat chorus 1)

[VERSE 4]
Such slogans show the hour is late.
Our genes have passed their ‘use by’ date.
Leave exclusion at the gate,
and don’t step in the sloppy!