Broken Social Scene / You Forgot It In People
Cause = Time
agitated, incantatory, ambivalent
A dense, image-driven rock track that piles up fragmented, almost surreal accusations and slogans about belief, sex, and belonging until the words function more as texture than statement. It reads less as a coherent narrative than as a collage of anxieties about ideology, faith, and communal identity in the early 2000s indie-rock milieu.
ideological fervor religious ambivalence collective identity vs individuality sexuality and taboo disbelief and alienation
Who's speaking
An accusatory, half-sermonizing narrator addresses a 'you' who stands in for both a lover and a broader cultural or religious authority; the voice is unreliable, shifting between confession and condemnation, suggesting the singer is as implicated in the mania he describes as anyone.
What happens
There isn't a linear story so much as a recurring confrontation: the speaker repeatedly catches an addressee in some kind of moral or spiritual crime, then pivots to describe a crowd swept up in devotion to an unnamed 'cause.' The verses escalate through images of surveillance, false hope, and religious hunger, while the choruses zoom out to indict a mass of people desperate to belong to something bigger than themselves. By the final chorus the verbs shift from loving and dreaming the cause to needing and wanting it violently, suggesting escalation from faith to obsession.
How it's built
The song alternates verse and chorus in a fairly conventional pop-rock shape, but the chorus lyrics mutate slightly each time it repeats, swapping verbs like love, dream, free, and fuck in relation to 'the cause.' This subtle rewriting acts as the song's engine of intensification rather than a bridge or key change, so the sense of escalation comes from language rather than musical architecture.
Section by section
Opening verse
“You've got fornication crimes”
The narrator opens in an accusatory, almost legalistic register, framing intimacy or desire as a punishable offense. Pairing this with a mention of televised hope suggests a suspicion that public displays of faith or virtue are performances rather than truths.
First chorus
The chant-like structure introduces the song's central abstraction, 'the cause,' and immediately complicates it by rhyming reverence with base desire, implying that ideological devotion and sexual desire are entangled or even indistinguishable.
Second verse
“I've been alone since '89”
A rare moment of specific autobiographical grounding cuts through the surreal imagery, hinting at a long personal isolation that underlies the narrator's cynicism toward collective belief. The surrounding lines about disguise and biological cycles reinforce a sense of bodies and identities being obscured or performed.
Bridge-like middle section
Here the speaker expresses ambivalence directly, admitting attraction to what's being described while confessing skepticism, which destabilizes the earlier moral certainty of the verses and casts the whole song as an argument the narrator is having with himself.
Final chorus
“They all need to fuck the cause”
The last iteration escalates the earlier chorus's language to its most aggressive form, closing the song on obsession rather than aspiration, and suggesting that whatever unifying belief the crowd sought has curdled into something compulsive and self-destructive.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'they all want' / 'they all need' construction in every chorus builds a chant-like momentum that mimics the mass psychology it describes.
- non-sequitur imagery
- Lines jump between unrelated concrete images (television, tricycles, menstruation, pistols) without clear logical connectors, creating a disorienting collage that resists paraphrase and forces the listener to feel rather than parse meaning.
- synecdoche
- The recurring 'cause' stands in for any totalizing belief system, romantic obsession, or ideology, letting the song stay ambiguous about whether it's targeting religion, nationalism, love, or fandom.
- parallelism with variation
- The chorus repeats its skeletal syntax but swaps individual verbs, using small substitutions to show a slow moral slide from aspiration to compulsion.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats 'the cause' as a stand-in for any totalizing belief-system, religious, political, romantic, or artistic, that people chase to escape isolation, with the song tracking how devotion curdles into compulsion. A credible alternative reading is more literal: this is about religious hypocrisy and sexual repression specifically, with 'the cause' meaning organized faith, and the surreal images (tricycles, menstruation, pistols) functioning as satire of church culture's discomfort with the body. Both readings can coexist since the lyric deliberately resists a single referent.
Context
You Forgot It In People (2002) was recorded by a large, shifting collective of Toronto musicians and is known for layered, collage-like arrangements; this lyric's fragmented, almost stream-of-consciousness quality fits that album's broader aesthetic of texture over narrative clarity. I don't have reliable information about the specific writing circumstances or intended meaning behind this song, so this reading is drawn from the text itself.
Listen for
- how the chorus's key verb shifts slightly each repetition, tightening the sense of escalation
- the tension between confessional first-person lines and the accusatory 'you' address
- the way clinical or bodily imagery (menstruation, disguise, blood) interrupts more abstract religious language
- the moment the narrator admits ambivalence rather than certainty, breaking the sermon-like tone
- the closing chorus's harsher verb choice compared to the opening one
About Broken Social Scene
Broken Social Scene is a Canadian indie rock band and musical collective including as few as six and as many as nineteen members, formed by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning in 1999. Alongside Drew and Canning, the other core members of the band are Justin Peroff (drums), Andrew Whiteman (guitar) and Charles Spearin (guitar).
1999 - present / Canada
Full biography and catalogue