Echo & the Bunnymen / Crocodiles
Do It Clean
manic, taunting, self-assured yet hollow
A post-punk chant built on almost no semantic content, this song works by repetition and rhythmic insistence rather than narrative. It circles a vague boast about doing something "clean" without ever specifying what "it" is, turning ambiguity itself into the point.
repetition and ritual evasive bravado identity through motion rather than meaning nonsense as performance restlessness
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an unspecified "you," possibly a rival, an audience, or himself; the voice is boastful and slippery, more interested in sound and swagger than disclosure, and reads as unreliable by design rather than by implication of dishonesty.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as a loop: the speaker holds something ambiguous, claims to have handled it well, then the song detours into questions of location and movement before circling back to the same boast in past tense, as if closing the loop on an action that was never actually described.
How it's built
The song is built almost entirely from call-and-response repetition -- verses that mirror each other in present and then past tense, and a chorus that hammers the same four words until they lose denotative meaning and become texture. There's a brief middle section that shifts into disoriented questioning before dissolving into nonsense syllables, functioning as the song's only real structural turn.
Section by section
Opening verse
“what do I do with it”
The speaker introduces a mystery object and immediately admits uncertainty about it, setting up the song's central evasion: whatever "it" is, its content matters less than the gesture of possessing and processing it.
Chorus
The insistence on doing things "clean" functions less as a claim about hygiene or virtue and more as a boast about control or method, repeated until it becomes a kind of self-hypnosis or taunt aimed outward.
Middle section
“where am I going where have I been”
The questions here destabilize the confident tone of the chorus, introducing disorientation about location and time that contrasts with the earlier certainty of "doing it clean."
Nonsense breakdown
“iszy bitzy witzy itzy everywhere”
Language collapses into rhythmic babble, dramatizing the erosion of coherent selfhood or narrative under the pressure of restless movement described in the surrounding lines.
Closing verse
The past-tense repetition of the opening verse closes the loop, implying the ritual has been completed, but without ever revealing what was actually done, leaving the boast permanently unverifiable.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated opening formula about having a quantity of something and not knowing what to do with it drills a rhetorical pattern into the listener before ever supplying content, making the repetition itself the message.
- tense shift
- The verses move from present to past tense with almost identical wording, suggesting a completed ritual or the exhaustion of an action, while the chorus stays fixed in present tense as an unchanging refrain.
- glossolalia / nonsense syllables
- The scat-like outburst in the middle section abandons sense entirely, mimicking the manic energy of the music and signaling that meaning has been deliberately discarded in favor of sound and momentum.
- ambiguous pronoun
- The unspecified object referred to throughout invites projection -- drugs, ideas, feelings, art -- without committing to any single referent, which keeps the song open rather than confessional.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a study in performative confidence: the speaker asserts competence and control over something never named, and the lyric's refusal to specify is the point -- style and repetition stand in for substance. An alternative reading hears the unnamed "it" as drug use, with "clean" playing ironically against expectations of sobriety, though the lyric offers no concrete evidence to confirm this beyond suggestive ambiguity.
Context
This track appears on Echo & the Bunnymen's 1980 debut album, recorded during the post-punk moment in Liverpool when bands were reacting against both punk's rawness and prog's excess by favoring atmosphere, repetition, and minimal lyrical content. I don't have specific documented context about the writing of this particular song, so this reading is based on the text and genre conventions rather than confirmed biographical detail.
Listen for
- the way the chorus phrase loses meaning through sheer repetition
- the shift from present to past tense between verses
- the nonsense-syllable breakdown and how it interacts with the rhythm section
- the tension between confident declarative lines and uncertain questioning lines
- how the music's energy plays against the emptiness of the lyric's content
About Echo & the Bunnymen
Echo & the Bunnymen are an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1978. The original line-up consisted of vocalist Ian McCulloch, guitarist Will Sergeant and bassist Les Pattinson.
1978 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue