God Damn

Album: The Stage (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • The second single from The Stage finds M. Shadows singing about the downward spiral of American politics. He warns the people that they are "damned" as they are unable to see they are enslaved by the "Big Brother" system.
  • The Stage is a concept album with the majority of the songs revolving around the subject of artificial intelligence. Asked by Rolling Stone what got him interested in the topic, M Shadows replied:

    "Someone sent me an article on AI that was written by Tim Urban on the website Wait but Why – that was kind of where I stuck my toes in the puddle, and I said, 'OK, I've gotta learn about this!' I felt like this is one of those things that our generation is going to have to answer for, eventually, and I just wanted to educate myself on it. So I decided to read a lot of articles – I was going through a lot of Sam Harris stuff, and hearing some podcasts that he had done about artificial intelligence and what it could mean. I started seeing different opinions, from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking.

    The more I read about, the deeper down this rabbit hole I got, I thought, 'You know what? I really want to talk about this!' It's something that's going to be an issue in the future, for our kids and our kids' kids; and if we have a voice that can be screamed from the top of a mountain, I wanted this to be one of those things where we can maybe educate our fans a little bit – or maybe inspire them to educate themselves. I talked to the other guys [in the band], and we all started talking and thinking about these big questions. We were like, 'Man, this is the record! We're going to put out a piece of art, and it has to be about this, because this is really speaking to us right now!'"
  • Directed by Anders Rostad and filmed in a Los Angeles warehouse, the song's music video combines raucous concert footage with high-tech special effects inspired by the album's focus on scientific and science-fiction themes. The clip was shot in early 2017 with help from some of the band's diehard fans.

    "There's a bunch of ideas that were thrown into the mixing bowl there," M. Shadows told Billboard magazine, "but the main idea was to get fans involved and make sure the kids knew this is a song full of energy first and foremost - 'hey, this is a record we can wrap our heads around. It's cool live stuff. It's a rockin' song' - but at the same time, we wanted the technological hint in there, so as the video progresses you start seeing things glitching out and all of a sudden the world turns digital. And by the end, there's a little nod to the lyrics; you see an eyeball kind of in there as an Easter egg, which is kind of big brother watching what we do the whole time as the humans turn into a digital world."

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