Magazine / The Correct Use of Soap / 1980
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)
tense, wary, dryly ironic
Magazine's version of the Sly and the Family Stone song strips the original's funk exuberance down to something clipped and anxious, turning a party anthem about self-possession into a small, tense drama of confrontation and survival. The narrator faces down a menacing figure, wrestles free, and repeats a phrase of gratitude that sounds less like celebration than relief at having escaped erasure.
identity and self-possession violence and threat alienation from social gathering survival repetition as ritual
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator recounts a violent near-miss in short, clipped clauses, then addresses an unnamed 'you' with thanks that reads as ambiguous -- gratitude, irony, or both. The voice is detached, almost reporting rather than confessing, which makes its reliability hard to pin down.
What happens
The song opens on a sudden threat -- a devilish figure with a weapon -- and the narrator's instinctive flight. The action escalates into a physical struggle that the narrator wins, coming out on top. This crisis resolves into the recurring thank-you refrain, which then pivots into a second scene: a party the narrator couldn't remain at, crowded with unspoken thoughts. The structure loops back to the bare thank-you at the close, leaving the two scenes -- violence and social awkwardness -- unresolved against each other.
How it's built
The song works in short verse fragments separated by a repeated refrain, mirroring the call-and-response shape of the original without its horn-driven build. Each verse is compressed into two-line bursts of action; the refrain interrupts rather than resolves them, so the song accumulates through repetition instead of narrative development. The final verse shifts scene entirely, and the closing single word acts as a truncated echo of the fuller refrain.
Section by section
Opening verse
“Looking at the devil”
The scene starts in medias res with a direct, almost cartoonish confrontation. The abruptness denies any buildup of dread -- the threat is simply there, and the narrator's fear registers physically before it registers emotionally.
First refrain
The gratitude here lands oddly against what precedes it -- being thanked for selfhood right after a scene of near-annihilation suggests survival itself is what restores identity, as though the self is something that can be lost and regained through crisis.
Second verse
“we begin to wrestle”
The fight is rendered without triumph or violence-for-its-own-sake; winning is stated flatly, almost incidentally, which undercuts any sense of heroism and keeps the tone consistent with the song's overall detachment.
Third verse
The abrupt shift to a social setting recontextualizes everything before it -- the party becomes another site of threat, not from a weapon but from an inability to communicate, suggesting that alienation takes many forms for this narrator, violent and mundane alike.
Closing refrain
The final single word, stripped even of the full phrase, suggests exhaustion or resignation -- gratitude reduced to its barest gesture, as if the narrator no longer has the energy to complete the sentiment.
Craft
- ellipsis / compression
- Events are described in stripped clauses with connectives removed, forcing the listener to infer causality between fear, flight, and struggle.
- refrain as ironic punctuation
- The repeated thank-you, borrowed nearly verbatim from the source song, becomes ambiguous in this new context -- gratitude for survival, or a hollow social nicety, depending on which verse precedes it.
- symbolic antagonist
- The devil figure functions less as a literal character than as a stand-in for any force that threatens to strip the narrator of self-possession.
- juxtaposition of registers
- Placing a life-threatening struggle next to an awkward party scene flattens both into the same deadpan tone, suggesting the narrator experiences social discomfort and physical danger with equal detachment.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a post-punk hollowing-out of the original's celebratory self-affirmation: where Sly Stone's song insists on freedom and joy, Magazine's version filters the same words through violence, flight, and social unease, suggesting that selfhood is fragile and constantly under threat rather than something to be joyfully reclaimed. An alternative reading takes the devil and party scenes as unrelated vignettes loosely stitched together by the borrowed refrain, in which case the song is less a coherent narrative than a mood piece built from disconnected images -- appropriate to Devoto's often oblique, non-narrative lyric style elsewhere in Magazine's catalogue.
Context
This is Magazine's cover of Sly and the Family Stone's 1970 hit of the same title, included on their 1980 album The Correct Use of Soap. Magazine were known for using cover songs to strip pop and funk originals down to something colder and more anxious, consistent with Howard Devoto's post-Buzzcocks turn toward a more art-rock, emotionally guarded sound. I'm not certain of specific recording details or Devoto's stated intentions behind the reinterpretation, so this context is drawn mainly from the band's general reputation rather than direct sourcing.
Listen for
- the contrast between the clipped, almost spoken verses and the more melodic refrain
- how the vocal delivery flattens both the violent and social scenes into the same tone
- the way the guitar and rhythm section replace the original's funk groove with something more clenched and mechanical
- the final isolated repetition of the refrain and how it differs in weight from its earlier appearances
About Magazine
Magazine were a British rock band formed in 1977 in Manchester, England by singer Howard Devoto and guitarist John McGeoch. After leaving the punk rock group Buzzcocks in early 1977, Devoto decided to create a more progressive rock band.
1977 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue