Protomartyr / Under Color of Official Right / 2014
Scum, Rise!
sardonic, menacing, eventually deflated
A fever-dream of militarism and civic rot, built from disjointed images of holiday iconography, child soldiers, and mob chants. The song oscillates between a sneering call-to-arms and a slow collapse into fatalism, ending on a numb repetition that drains the earlier bravado of any meaning.
cyclical violence corrupted authority satire of patriotism generational trauma fatalism grotesque Americana
Who's speaking
The voice shifts between a propagandistic rallying figure egging on a crowd and a child-soldier narrator confessing to the violence being done in his name; the listener is left unsure who is speaking at any given moment, which is part of the song's disorientation.
What happens
The song opens with absurd, almost nursery-rhyme imagery -- fathers, Santa figures -- that curdles into language about recruiting boys for war. A chant-like refrain declares that "scum" should rise, framing conquest as civic duty, complete with medals and annexed towns. The perspective then narrows to a child soldier admitting his age and warning that revenge will pass down through family lines. The song's energy drains into a repeated admission of helplessness before the opening chant returns, now hollowed out by everything that's come before.
How it's built
The song resists conventional verse-chorus logic, instead moving through loosely associative images that accumulate like propaganda slogans. The title phrase functions as a recurring chant rather than a traditional chorus, appearing at structurally unpredictable points. The back half abandons the chant altogether for a mantra-like repetition of resignation, which serves as the song's real climax before the chant returns deflated.
Section by section
Opening image
“colors of Santa Claus”
The song begins with a disorienting, almost childlike non-sequitur that associates a benign holiday figure with something being put into or placed low -- an early signal that innocence and violence are going to be fused rather than contrasted.
Recruitment turn
The lyric pivots abruptly from domestic strangeness to the language of mobilization, describing boys being gathered for an unspecified defensive war. The rapid tonal shift suggests how easily civic or familial imagery gets absorbed into militaristic purpose.
Chant refrain
“Another war's our target”
The rallying cry treats conquest as an ongoing project, almost administrative in tone -- medals and annexed towns are listed like line items, satirizing the bureaucratic framing of violence as accomplishment.
Child soldier confession
“we're only seven years old”
The narrator's declared age reframes everything before it: the march toward glory is being carried out by children, and the warning about kin seeking revenge implies the war will simply regenerate itself in the next generation.
Collapse into resignation
“nothing you can do”
The repeated phrase abandons narrative and image altogether, functioning as a kind of linguistic shutdown. Its insistence suggests not calm acceptance but a kind of traumatized stammering, the chant's energy having nowhere left to go.
Closing chant
The return of the rallying cry after the resignation reads as hollow or ironic rather than triumphant -- the same words now carry the weight of everything the song has shown about who actually pays the cost.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated command to rise mimics the rhythm of a rally or chant, building momentum that the song later undercuts.
- incongruous juxtaposition
- Pairing domestic, child-friendly imagery like Santa Claus with recruitment and war language creates a jarring satire of how violence gets dressed up in wholesome national mythology.
- dramatic irony
- A narrator who identifies as a child soldier delivers lines about honor and revenge, exposing the gap between the rhetoric of glory and the reality of who actually fights.
- repetition as collapse
- The late, unbroken repetition of a phrase about helplessness functions less as a lyric and more as a loss of language, dramatizing exhaustion and defeat.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a satire of war rhetoric and civic decay, using Detroit's history of corruption (gestured at by the album's title, which references a legal term for official misconduct) as a backdrop for a more universal indictment of how societies dress up violence in festive, patriotic, or bureaucratic language while sending children to carry it out. An alternative reading could take the title and chant more literally as a populist or even nihilistic incitement -- scum rising against authority -- but the child-soldier verse and the final collapse into helplessness undercut any straightforward celebration of uprising, making the satirical reading stronger.
Context
Protomartyr's early records, including this one, are frequently rooted in Detroit's civic and political decay; the album title itself borrows a legal phrase used in corruption prosecutions, suggesting the band's broader interest in institutional rot. I don't have confirmed biographical detail tying this specific song to a real event, so this context should be read as informed inference rather than established fact.
Listen for
- the abrupt tonal lurch from holiday imagery to war language early in the song
- how the chant's energy changes in register each time it recurs
- the moment the narrator identifies as a child, which recontextualizes the preceding bravado
- the extended repetition near the end and whether it registers as surrender or exhaustion
- any shift in vocal delivery between the chant sections and the more confessional lines
About Protomartyr
Protomartyr is an American post-punk band formed in Detroit, Michigan, in 2010. The band consists of Joe Casey (vocals), Greg Ahee (guitar), Alex Leonard (drums), and Scott Davidson (bass).
2008 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue