# Great Time to Be Human > **One-line reading.** The album's toxic-positivity anthem: [[Sir Lucius]] stages human history as a children's sing-along, the verses telling nursery-rhyme fables of grief and violence while the refrain papers every one of them over with rainbows and forced gratitude. The cruelty is in the cheer. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *[[Lucius Lullaby (album)|Lucius Lullaby]]* (2026, Big Loud Rock) — **track 3 of 15** · 3:23 > **First released** as a standalone single, **April 14, 2023** (out in the UK the same day) — three years before the album absorbed it as track 3. > **Written by** Roy English, Ryan Spraker, Tom Peyton, Sean Van Vleet & Josh Dun — **five writers, the most-collaborative track on the record** · **Produced by** Roy English (Prod/Mix) & Ryan Spraker (Prod/Rec) · mastered by Dale Becker. > **Vocals** credited to *"sir lucius"* **and** *"ROY"* — the dual character-voice device. > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com/search?q=Jagwar%20Twin%20Great%20Time%20to%20Be%20Human) · [streaming](https://open.spotify.com/search/Jagwar%20Twin%20Great%20Time%20to%20Be%20Human) > **▶ Listen:** [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQGUpTZlJU) ![[GTTBH.jpeg|340]] *The 2023 single art: a retro-futurist parade-day utopia, rainbow and all.* This is one of the oldest songs the album owns and, arguably, its clearest thesis statement in miniature. It arrives early in *Lucius Lullaby* as the [[Happy Face]] mask scaled from a single face to an entire species — a whole civilization agreeing to grin. It sits between the song that *confesses* the lie and the song that *instructs* the mask, and shows the mask become a group activity. ## At a glance - **Era / release** — First a **single** (April 14, 2023, out in the UK the same day), the centerpiece of Roy's spring-2023 US tour with Transviolet; then **reissued as track 3** of *[[Lucius Lullaby (album)|Lucius Lullaby]]* (2026). The 2023 framing was purely humanist; the album is where it grows fangs. - **In one line** — A happy chorus that *is* the dark thing: grotesque bedtime fables answered, every time, by rainbows and *"what a great time to be human!"* - **Who speaks** — Both [[Roy]] and [[Sir Lucius]] are on the credit. The best reading is Lucius staging Roy's lament as a children's spectacle: the content knows it's horrifying, the form refuses to stop smiling. [[The Crowd]] appears as the synchronized sing-along the whole song is built to trap. - **Key symbols** — [[Concepts/The Empty Mirror]] · [[Concepts/Inversion]] (the dog/god flip) · [[The Mask]] · [[Concepts/The Circus]] · [[Concepts/The Algorithm]] ## The song, mapped It would be easy to call this a dark song with a happy chorus. It is exactly the reverse. The engine runs the same four moves on repeat: *state a cheerful frame, narrate an atrocity in nursery-rhyme meter, fire a children's-show reaction-button at the wrong emotional beat, and answer all of it with the same rainbows-and-bliss refrain.* Read as a **diptych** — a boy's fable, then a girl's — each answered by the identical chorus. Here it is, move by move. | Beat | In the song | What it does | |---|---|---| | **Cold open** | *"What a great time to be human!"* | The title-hook stated flat, before any story — the caption arrives *before* the horror it will caption. | | **Boy, part 1** | *"There once was a boy who lost his own Mother / loved him to death and smothered his brother (oops!)"* | Grief and fratricide in a bedtime cadence; the kids in the street *"danced to destroy (yay!)."* Ecstatic ruin, buttoned by cartoon cues. | *(Two readings of that line are live: the plainest grammar makes the **Mother** the one who loved him to death and smothered his brother; the boy as the smotherer is the second reading, and the Cain/Abel shape depends on it.)* | **Boy, part 2** | *"the boy became Man then ran to his Lover / she cast a spell to bring back his Mother"* | Maturation *into repetition* — adult love conscripted to re-animate the dead parent. Then the preacher *"banged a gong,"* and the hinge line lands: *"the crooks and believers all sing the same song."* | | **Refrain** | *"rainbows, butterflies / what is all this? / Shanghai Summertime / follow your bliss / everything on the earth keeps blooming / what a great time to be human!"* | The erasure. Not grief — anesthesia. Fired straight after fratricide and back again after every wound. (A short *"Hey hey hey / what a great time to be human!"* tag also recurs.) | *(or after the smothering, on the other reading of the line)* | **Girl, part 1** | *"here once was a girl who drank from The Fountain / she left her youth halfway up The Mountain"* | Youth lost, sought, and *punished*: she goes back for it, *"Someone was there,"* and *"they had her committed and shaved off her hair."* Institutional violence. | | **Girl, part 2** | *"they threw her a party with diamonds and spoons / but They were bloodsuckers with crocodile shoes (boo hoo)"* | Predator-consumers, death worn as status — and a much more specific set of objects than it first appears (see *The crocodile shoes*, below) — and then the album's sharpest image, the dog/god botched creation (below). | | **Coda** | *"Shanghai Summertime / Goodbye / what a great time to be human!"* | The lone exit-word — *"Goodbye"* — appears once and is instantly swallowed back into the hook. Even leaving is reabsorbed. | Two structural notes worth flagging. First, the fables are **parallel in form but asymmetric in fate**: the *boy matures into repetition* (the mother-wound repeated through the Lover), the *girl is dispossessed* (her youth stolen, then punished for wanting it back). Masculine becoming as repeated trauma; feminine becoming as theft and punishment. The diptych quietly catalogues a set of *failed systems* — kinship and religion in the boy's half (Mother, brother, Lover, preacher), then youth, medicine, and creation in the girl's (the Fountain, the Mountain, the institution, the Chemist, the god). Second, those proper nouns are not transcription noise — **Mother, Man, Lover, The Fountain, The Mountain, Someone, They, The Chemist** are capitalized as official text (verified in-hand against Apple Music). They're *stations*, not people. The song is a miniature anthropology. ## What it means A few claims that cut across the whole pageant: - **The refrain is the violence.** The cruelty isn't in the events — a brother smothered, a girl committed and shaved, bloodsuckers in crocodile shoes. It's in the smile forced over them. The ideology insists you stay grateful *while it shows you the wreckage.* Everything else in the song serves this one inversion. - **The album's masking arc runs through it.** [[Lucius Lullaby]] *confesses* the lie (*"it's all just a lie"*); [[Happy Face]] *instructs* the mask (put it on); this song shows the mask become a **group activity** — the [[Happy Face]] scaled from one face to a whole species agreeing to grin. - **"The crooks and believers all sing the same song."** Crooks and believers are supposed to be opposites; the whole moral order depends on the difference, and the spectacle dissolves it. Under the cheer, the liar and the faithful function identically, because what matters is not what you *mean* but that you're singing along. This one line is the seed of this guide's whole [[Concepts/Communion vs Spectacle]] distinction (more below) — the single sharpest place that concept touches the ground anywhere in the catalogue. - **Growth is not healing.** *"Everything keeps blooming"* whether you heal or not — life continues regardless of suffering, beautiful and brutally indifferent. And when the lone exit finally appears (*"Goodbye"*), the chorus swallows it back into the hook. You can read that swallowing two ways — as *"Goodbye"* being a real exit the pageant then reabsorbs, or as proof there was never an exit to begin with — and the song won't decide for you. Either way, the cheer gets the last word. - **Nobody in particular is cheering — so everybody is.** A mechanical count of the lyric returns *I = 0, you = 2*: the song has no first-person "I"-engine at all, a collective/ironic voice with no one behind it (the sharp contrast being the album's "I"-driven tracks like [[No. 1 Champion (la Conquistadora)]]). The absent "I" is the point. The cheer belongs to no one and to everyone. (More in *Advanced reading*.) ## The crocodile shoes One line in the girl's half is carrying more than it looks. *"They threw her a party with diamonds and spoons / but They were bloodsuckers with crocodile shoes (boo hoo)."* Read broadly, that's predator and consumer fused into one figure — an industry that profits from a wounded body and then throws the wound a party. That reading holds, and this guide made it for a long time. But the images are far more specific than a broad reading needs them to be, and it's worth noticing how rare they are. *Committed*, *shaved*, *diamonds*, *spoons*, *bloodsuckers*, *crocodile shoes* — each of those appears **exactly once in the entire Jagwar Twin catalogue.** All of them are here, in three consecutive lines, and none of them turn up in any other song. Set them beside the story Hollywood tells about **Marilyn Monroe** — who is a real and deliberate presence in this catalogue, not a coincidence a reader stumbled into — and they stop looking generic. The committal is the famous one: she was held in a locked psychiatric ward in 1961. The diamonds are the number she is most remembered for singing. The spoons belong to the pills. And the crocodile shoes belong to one of the most durable rumours in the whole legend — that when Joe DiMaggio arrived to get her out and the hospital refused to release her, he bought her way out with a bag of cash and his own custom crocodile shoes, taken off his feet and handed over. The detail that makes it land is **where the shoes end up.** In the rumour they leave DiMaggio's feet and finish on the feet of the people who had her locked in. That is exactly where the song puts them: the same capitalized *They* who *"had her committed"* are the ones wearing them one line later. It isn't the phrase that matches — it's the transfer. One thing worth being clear about, because it changes how you read the rest: **this is her.** Monroe is part of the canon of this work — Roy named her outright in August 2026 (*"I was talking to a tree at Marilyn Monroe's house"*), and she has been present in the visual material far longer than that, since one panel of the 2021 *I'm 33* board is a view out of a window of a building she lived in. The girl of this fable is not a generic destroyed woman who happens to rhyme with a famous one. She is the reference. That said, the *rumour* remains a rumour: the rescue was real, the shoes-as-ransom almost certainly embroidery. That doesn't weaken the reading — this catalogue works in *circulating* myth rather than tidy history, and an image the culture keeps repeating is exactly the kind of material it picks up — but it does mean the thing being sung about is the legend as it circulates, not a documentary record. The verse is also a **composite rather than a portrait**, and that turns out to be the interesting part rather than a flaw. *"Shaved off her hair"* isn't a Monroe detail. Read one way it isn't biography at all: **shaving the head is the old image for stripping a person's power** — Samson and Delilah, the Nazirite vow whose strength lives in the uncut hair — which is precisely what the line is describing an institution doing. Read another way it belongs to a different woman on the same road: **Britney Spears**, the shaved head in 2007 and a conservatorship that had her *committed* by legal instrument, with the widely-repeated claim that she and Monroe are distant cousins circulating alongside it. Britney supplies the hair; Monroe supplies the shoes, the diamonds, the spoons. A fable is *supposed* to run more than one life through one girl. And the one Monroe who really was institutionalized for years was her mother — which folds the committal back toward this song's own mother-wound rather than away from it. What stays a reading rather than a fact is the *mapping* — which image belongs to which woman, and how much of the verse is portrait versus composite. The reference is solid; the line-by-line assignment is interpretation, and it's offered as such. So it answers something the song had left open — whether the girl of the fable is anyone in particular. She is. And the fable is doing what the whole album does: taking a real destroyed person and running her through a nursery rhyme with a smile stapled over the top. Which is what makes the refrain land the way it does. ***What a great time to be human* is not being sung over an invented girl.** ## The new shoes The boy's half has its own person in it, and for a long time this guide read past him. The verse is built from words the rest of the catalogue never uses — *Mother*, *smothered*, *brother*, *shouted*, *joy*, *shoes*, *Lover*, *cast*, *preacher*, *banged*, *gong*, *crooks*, twelve of them, each in this song and nowhere else across forty-seven lyrics — so it is not a stock nursery rhyme; it is unusually made. What it is made of is a sequence: a boy who loses his Mother, a brother smothered, new shoes and dancing to destroy, a Lover who casts a spell to bring the Mother back, a preacher, a gong, and crooks and believers singing along together. Set that beside the story the culture tells about **Elvis Presley** and it stops looking generic. The lost mother is Gladys Love Presley, the bond he never got over. The brother is Jesse Garon, his stillborn twin. The shoes are the ones the whole world knows him by, and the dancing was called destructive by the people who banned it. The gospel formation is real, the preacher and the gong are the two churches of his life, and the crowd that sang with him held believers and exploiters in the same breath. Later he went looking for the mother he'd lost in the women he loved and in spiritual teachers, most publicly Daya Mata of the Self-Realization Fellowship. The verse reads as that life, run through a nursery rhyme with a smile stapled over the top. Two things keep this honest. **It is a composite, not a portrait** — the fable is cut from more than one body, and Elvis is the one it is cut from most. The oldest shape underneath it is the Oedipus story's grammar, a Mother and a Lover and a wound in the feet, and Elvis's life happens to run that grammar; the two are not rivals, one is the pattern and the other the person. And **routing the Mother's return through a spiritual teacher costs something**: the lyric gives the spell to the *Lover*, and Daya Mata was not the lover, so the reading asks one line to hold two people. That is the kind of compression these fables allow, but it should be said out loud rather than smoothed. And the shoes move here too, as they do in the girl's half. *"New shoes on their feet they danced to destroy"* — the shoes are on the street children, not the boy. The blue suede shoes were Carl Perkins's before they were Elvis's, and Perkins wrote them after watching a man value his shoes above the woman he was dancing with; the object was already outranking the person before Elvis put it on. In both halves of the song a human story ends up as equipment worn by other people. What is grounded is the sequence and the public myth. What is a reading is the match, offered as a strong one, and the catalogue keeps no statement from Roy naming Elvis, so how deliberate any of it was stays open — this is one of the album's few songs with five writers on it. But the two fables now answer each other exactly: a destroyed woman and a destroyed man, one per verse, each a real person made into a station. ***What a great time to be human* is not being sung over invented people.** ## The god made by mistake The album's whole mirror-logic condensed into a joke: *"she went to The Chemist to make her a dog / but he was dyslexic, so he made a god / god, god, god (woof!)."* She asks for a **dog** — a companion, something humble to be loved *by* — and the broken maker hands her a **god** instead. And he does it *by error*, a typo, a dyslexic's slip. Divinity manufactured without understanding. The cleanest way to say what got swapped: **she didn't ask to be a dog, she asked to be loved — and what she got was worship.** That's the whole trade in six words. Worship isn't a larger love or a colder one; it's a different substance, and it's the one thing that can never travel back to the person it's aimed at. You can be worshipped by millions and receive nothing. Which is why this couplet lands so hard against the girl of the fable, and against anyone else in this catalogue who wanted to be known and got an audience instead. The genius is the *"(woof!)."* The made-god still **barks**. The dog is trapped inside the god, and the reversal collapses in both directions at once — dog becomes god, and god is exposed as dog. It's a perfect emblem of the album's counterfeit divinity, the maker without wisdom: kin to [[Sir Lucius|Lucius]] as false light, to [[City of Angels]]'s false immortality, to Lucius counterfeiting [[Mary]]. A people that misreads its own need for creaturely love and builds an idol instead. It is also, unmistakably, the funniest line on the record — which is exactly why it lands. A god-making cosmology delivered as a spelling mistake, and the whole theology folded into one syllable of barking. ## Characters - **[[Sir Lucius]]** — the grinning emcee staging the pageant; co-credited vocalist (*"sir lucius"*). In the theatrical [[The Interview|Roy v Lucius]] series he yells this song's dog/god line at a bound Roy, offering it as *"a little something for you — a gift"* that he *"took a few liberties with."* The relentless positivity is his register — but *don't flatten the song to pure Lucius* (it's too grief-conscious for that; see below). (Housekeeping: his yelled lines aren't synced to the playing track, and the *"another song about ME"* he says right after belongs to [[No. 1 Champion (la Conquistadora)]], not this one.) - **[[Roy]]** — the lament *inside* the grin; the grief the form refuses to let stop the smile. Co-credited vocalist (*"ROY"*), and — at author level — credited separately again as writer, producer, and player. The song is the argument between the two of them, performed as a sing-along. - **[[Mary]]** — present only as her *counterfeit*. The spell-casting Lover is the album's false feminine, the partner asked to resurrect the past rather than restore the man to wholeness — the counterfeit that re-animates the wound where Mary would heal it. (Mary is not literally in the text.) - **[[The Crowd]]** — the many voices forced into the one song; not awakened, synchronized. The sing-along the whole song is built to trap. - **[[The Prop Room#The Chemist|The Chemist]]** — the maker-without-wisdom who makes a god by error; a capitalized station, readable as failed alchemist, scientist, [[Concepts/The Sacred Truths/Gnosticism - The World as Trap|Demiurge]], and producer all at once (which mask stays open). - **The boy and the girl** — the two fable-protagonists, best read as Everyman *stations*. The boy now has a person in him too — the verse reads through Elvis (see *The new shoes*), with a possible Cain/Abel shadow underneath (fratricide in the opening breath, on one of the line's two readings); the girl a fountain-of-youth / institutionalized-woman shape (both held as framework; see below). *(on one of the line's two readings; the plainer grammar gives the smothering to the Mother)* ## Artifacts **THE EMPTY ROOM** · `RAINBOW BRIDGE` — "Rainbows, butterflies / What is all this?" is the released catalog's one rainbow lyric, and the song's essay already routes its forced cheer through Roy's Empty-Mirror "seeing nothing"; the artifact pairs t… → [[Artifacts - Concept Images and Emblems|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xa53f8677e36ba5ad03dbefe1ee2baa69151a39fa947f876b0e4af598a7c56397..png"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xa53f8677e36ba5ad03dbefe1ee2baa69151a39fa947f876b0e4af598a7c56397..png" width="200"></a> **B1034** · `B1035` — The man in the black triangle-patch snapback with plug gauges and a full-color sleeve closely matches Josh Dun of Twenty One Pilots [~], who is a credited co-writer and drummer on this track, so the photo wo… → [[Artifacts - Ciphers and Code-Series|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x44f08985c82bb57ba15243d9a872ac96d582fdeb21a0117da5797749e7c73f2b..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x44f08985c82bb57ba15243d9a872ac96d582fdeb21a0117da5797749e7c73f2b..jpg" width="200"></a> **LITTLE LUNA EXPLAINING NFTS** · `EXPLAINING NFTS` — little luna is a documented background vocalist on this track (captured credits), and the memo's wonder at the new era ("how exciting is that?") matches the song's titular it's-a-great-time-to-be-alive register. → [[Artifacts - Family, Friends and Moments|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <video src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xdaa5986dfa957f4d504265bd2a0f4e768070f1d25aa7b26fd6b7b8be848d7eca..mp4" poster="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xdaa5986dfa957f4d504265bd2a0f4e768070f1d25aa7b26fd6b7b8be848d7eca..jpg" width="240" controls preload="none"></video> **O** · `THE VALUE OF NOTHING` — The catalog glosses this code with The Empty Mirror, and the Great Time to Be Human essay's section "The empty mirror, and the laugh track" grounds that emblem in the song: Roy's Empty Mirror tattoo means "l… → [[Artifacts - Concept Images and Emblems|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x538115b37f8d235538a6c63b12248a39c79a813ad927a7d2a7e7595457de89a9..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x538115b37f8d235538a6c63b12248a39c79a813ad927a7d2a7e7595457de89a9..jpg" width="200"></a> **THOUGHT FORMS** · `THOUGHT FORMS` — The dog-god Reversal line 'she went to The Chemist to make her a dog / but he was dyslexic so he made a god' literalizes 'It is Man that anthropomorphises his gods' by having a human accidentally manufacture… → [[Artifacts - Drawings and Sketches|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x8a936464fa52919815c00076e8546d7155141ee192aeb2f2b3d2078e334090ea..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x8a936464fa52919815c00076e8546d7155141ee192aeb2f2b3d2078e334090ea..jpg" width="200"></a> **LUNA_COACHELLA 2015** · `BELIEVE IN YOUR FRIENDS DREAMS` — Per this guide's Lucius Lullaby collaborators documentation, little luna, the friend pictured, sings background vocals on this track, extending the artifact's believe-in-your-friends thread into the released… → [[Artifacts - Family, Friends and Moments|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x604fedcb1e620c6f6027cecf3598deb665abf9b3e31e8476de75266a80f021f0..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x604fedcb1e620c6f6027cecf3598deb665abf9b3e31e8476de75266a80f021f0..jpg" width="200"></a> ## Symbols - **[[Concepts/The Empty Mirror]]** — the operation of the whole song. Roy wears a tattoo by that name (*"looking at yourself and seeing nothing"*), and this is that operation set to music: the cheer reflects back only the *desire* — rainbows, bliss — while the *reality* of the fables goes entirely un-reflected. Look into the song's smile and see nothing of what just happened. - **[[Concepts/Inversion]]** — the dog/god reversal made literal; god becomes dog and dog becomes god in the same breath. This guide's Reversal operation put on stage (kin to *Rorrim Ehtni*, the mirror-writing). - **[[The Mask]]** — [[Happy Face]] scaled to a civilization; the species-wide grin. - **[[Concepts/The Circus]]** — the machine the whole pageant runs inside; the 2026 visualizer stages the song there and puts a *"PROPERTY OF B.M.R.C."* rocket launcher on screen — [[Concepts/The Circus|BMRC]] being the industry-Babylon that manufactures both the show *and* the ordnance. - **[[Concepts/The Algorithm]]** — the ad-libs as emotional-flattening buttons; the ironic pop surface as algorithmically optimized (more in *Advanced reading*). ## Connected songs - **[[Happy Face]]** — the **direct parent**: the mask, before it became a group activity; scaled from a face to a civilization. - **[[Lucius Lullaby]]** — the lie-over-horror thread: that song confesses *"it's all just a lie,"* this one *performs* the lie as cheer. - **[[City of Angels]]** — the same-song thread; *"everyone looks just like you"* moved from the visual register into the moral one (*"the crooks and believers all sing the same song"*). Both are counterfeit-communion kin, and both false-divinity kin (dog/god ↔ *"live forever… godlike"*). - **[[Concepts/Communion vs Spectacle]]** — seeded directly here, in the hinge line; this song is its clearest anchor. - **[[Moths to the Flame]]** — the album's later turn to the crowd flying into the flame; the synchronized crowd named again, running the same cheerful-horror engine (cruelty as natural order). - **[[Welcome to the Circus]]** — names the engine (*"the algorithm, baby"*); the Circus thesis this song's spectacle runs inside. Both carry the BMRC broadcast-brand. - **[[Bad Feeling (Oompa Loompa)]]** — a soured-childhood sibling (Oompa-Loompa interpolation) that also shares Josh Dun on drums. The instructive contrast: where *Great Time* forces horror *through* a smile, *Bad Feeling* is the smile that can't suppress the dread underneath. - **[[Bananas]]** · **[[Not Your Homie]]** — the album's other soured-childhood forms (the playground id-chant *"Go Bananas"*; the weaponized ring-around-the-rosie, *"ashes, ashes, we all fall down"*). This is the *"there once was a…"* fable in that same set. *Bananas* also shares Ryan Spraker as co-writer. - **[[Loser]]** · **[[The Circle]]** — earlier poles: *Loser*'s children's-choir *"all human underneath the masks"* is the precursor to the species-wide grin; *The Circle* is the communion doctrine this song forces the counter-case against. - **[[I Like to Party]]** — the cake-before-the-Circus, force-feeding mechanism; the sedated, regressed crowd, cross-album; the same dual-register ironic-pop move. Michael Morgan grouped the two as a marketing cohort (below). - **[[The Watchers]]** — the contested-authorship, *"whose song is this?"* engine that rhymes with both the dog/god maker-without-wisdom and the Roy/Lucius dual credit. - **[[Pay Attention (feat. little luna)]]** — connected through the recurring real collaborator [little luna](https://www.instagram.com/littleluna/), on background vocals here. ## Advanced reading > [!note]- Communion vs Spectacle — why the hinge line matters *(tap to open)* > The catalogue otherwise treats collective singing as *sacred* — the [[The Circle|Circle]], the crowd singing it back. This song forces the counter-case, which this guide holds as [[Concepts/Communion vs Spectacle]]: **communion is many distinct voices singing the truth together; spectacle is many voices forced into the same song.** The crowd here is not awakened. It is synchronized. *A unison is not a communion.* As a Lucius-voiced track it stages the **commanded/harvested echo** — the crowd made to sing one song — against the Roy-voiced version where the crowd sings *with*. Read in a Babel key it darkens further: a crowd taught to sing one song is the Babel crowd (*"one language and the same words"*), whose scriptural fate is collapse — *"the crooks and believers all sing the same song"* is that forced unison stated in a lyric. This stands on the public material alone. It is the single highest-value in-lyric anchor for the whole sing-back thread in the corpus. > [!note]- The dog/god line as failed alchemy and the Demiurgic typo *(tap to open)* > Read through this guide's [[Concepts/Inversion]] operation, the dog/god flip is the same machinery as *Rorrim Ehtni* (mirror-writing) and the Empty Mirror — a reversal that runs both ways at once. As **failed alchemy**, it's elevation with no soul in it: the Chemist performs the great work of making and produces a botched result *because he doesn't understand what he's making.* In a Gnostic key (see [[Concepts/The Sacred Truths/Gnosticism - The World as Trap]]) it's the **Demiurge as a clerical error** — the ignorant lower maker who mistakes himself for the source, here reduced to a dyslexic's slip. Framing god-making as a *typo* mocks the whole idea of divine intention; this song is one of this guide's named instances of it. Held honestly, though: the dog/god *text* is grounded, the Demiurge reading is a framework correspondence. dog↔god is among the oldest reversals in English, and *"dyslexic, so he made a god"* is first of all a wordplay gag — building a botched-Creator cosmology on it is real, but the weight the reading carries outruns the line. Mark it and hold it lightly. > [!note]- The ad-libs, "Shanghai Summertime," and the anesthetic surface *(tap to open)* > The ad-libs enforce the whole design. *"Oops! / yay! / boo hoo / woof!"* are children's-show emotional cues fired at exactly the wrong moments — a brother is smothered and the song says *oops*; kids dance to destroy and it says *yay*; bloodsuckers turn up in crocodile shoes and it says *boo hoo*. They're reaction-buttons, the sound of horror being processed into content, and content needing applause. Call it the algorithm laughing at the boy who lost his mother — the ironic pop-affect surface as algorithmically optimized. As **framework correspondences** (not claims about intent): *"follow your bliss"* is Joseph Campbell soured into bumper-sticker anesthesia — the target is bliss-as-slogan, not Campbell — part of the album's method of borrowing familiar phrases and turning them (cf. *"put on a happy face,"* *"all your dreams are coming true"*); and *"Shanghai Summertime"* reads as *shanghaied*, a sunny image hiding coercion (kidnapped aboard a ship), rhyming with the album's captivity logic (*"you gotta serve somebody,"* the [[The Interview|EP6]] kidnapping). It could be only exotic scenery — the spectacle operation is identical either way. > [!note]- The visualizers — a 2023 one, and the 2026 comic tour de force *(tap to open)* > There are, it seems, **two** official visualizers. The first went up the day the single dropped — Roy's 4/14/2023 release post says *"Watch the Visualizer now on YouTube!"* — so the song had an official 2023 video three years before the album absorbed it. The one analyzed below is the **2026, LL-era** visualizer (credited *"Jagwar Twin, sir lucius,"* dated to Roy's birthday via a *"Happy birthday El Roy"* comment), choreographed to specific lines. Whether these are two distinct videos with distinct staging, or the same footage re-released, isn't settled here — worth flagging so a reader doesn't assume the barefoot/spoon-scepter staging goes all the way back to 2023. > > And it's a comic tour de force. Lucius removes black boots and red socks before *"new shoes on their feet they danced to destroy"* and remains **barefoot** through the line. The sequence still strips away the consumer-uniform the lyric indicts and can carry a Moses / *"take off your shoes, holy ground"* resonance, but the removal is not synchronized to that lyric. He shoulders the *"PROPERTY OF B.M.R.C."* rocket launcher and **waves goodbye to camera** on the sunny *"Shanghai Summertime"* chorus — the cheerful apocalypse, with BMRC revealed as the weapons-and-war brand. And on the sarcastic *"what a great time to be human"* refrain he brandishes a **spoon as a scepter** and strikes a **gong** — the sacred rung with a kitchen utensil. (Recurring LL-visualizer props are present too: the gong, ice-cream/cigarette, the Anonymous Club hat.) [[Concepts/The Circus|BMRC]] now appears twice-over across the catalogue — as the Circus's production house (*"Produced In Cooperation With B.M.R.C,"* [[Welcome to the Circus]]) and as this rocket brand — the industry-Babylon that makes both the show and the ordnance. No confirmed expansion of the initials; held open. > [!note]- Placement, phase, and the pronoun-evacuated voice *(tap to open)* > Track 3 is the **first non-Lucius-titled slot** on the album — the opening third otherwise being Lucius's own territory ([[The Circle (Lucius Version)]], [[Lucius Lullaby]], [[Welcome to the Circus]]). The record opens *inside* Lucius's turf, then hands off here. It opens the album's long middle movement (tracks 3–12), the stretch where the [[Concepts/The Circus|Circus]] operates at full power. It sits in the record's [[Concepts/Nigredo|nigredo]] — the blackening, the loop with the exit closed — which is where most of the album lives (active systems here: Spectacle, Algorithm, Consumption; active symbols: Mirror, Mask). And it is **pronoun-evacuated**: a mechanical count returns *I = 0, you = 2*, no first-person "I"-engine at all, in sharp contrast to the "I"-driven tracks like [[No. 1 Champion (la Conquistadora)]]. The absent "I" is the point — nobody in particular is cheering, so *everybody* is. See [[Concepts/Pronoun Audit (I-You)]]. > [!note]- Cain/Abel — the boy-fable as an un-reconciled twin *(tap to open)* > A structural parallel, not a claim Roy has made: the boy who *"smothered his brother"* flags as a possible **Cain/Abel** figure — fratricide in the opening breath. It matters because the album's core question is whether the twin split (Roy and Lucius) reconciles. [[Concepts/Jacob and Esau]] are the twins who *reintegrate* — they embrace and weep. Cain and Abel are the twins who *don't* — murder, exile, the mark. Lucius-as-Esau (reconcilable, the hopeful arc) versus Lucius-as-Cain (separation as a permanent condition) are two prognoses for the album's open integration question, and this fratricidal little fable quietly puts the darker one on the table. It survives elsewhere in this guide only as this aside; the falsifier is simple — no Roy statement invokes Cain, structural parallel only. *(There are two live readings of the line: the plainer grammar makes the Mother the one who smothered his brother, and the Cain/Abel shape depends on the other one.)* > [!note]- The collaborators — Josh Dun and a favorite band made flesh *(tap to open)* > The five-writer credit lists *"Josh Dunn,"* which reads as **Josh Dun**, drummer of Twenty One Pilots — a band Roy has called, in a public interview, his *"favorite band ever"* (*"I love their new album… I think that they're genius"*). (Two housekeeping questions stay open on the credits: how the five-way split is actually apportioned in the ASCAP/BMI registries, and whether streaming platforms carry a *"feat. sir lucius"* tag or leave the character-billing to the credits alone.) Dun plays the drum kit here and again on [[Bad Feeling (Oompa Loompa)]], turning a named favorite into a two-track physical presence on the record — and the two of them **played the song live together in Columbus** in May 2023, after Dun had cut the studio drums. Background vocals include **little luna**, the same featured collaborator from *33*'s [[Pay Attention (feat. little luna)]] — a recurring real person, not a cipher — alongside Julian Bell, Charlotte Egner, Reagan Egner, Tom Peyton, and Sean Van Vleet. Roy English himself plays **melodica and keyboards** on it — the reedy toy-organ wheeze that gives the track its nursery-carousel air; Ryan Spraker rounds it out (bass, keys, programming, background vocals); Jeff Ellis adds recording; Dale Becker masters, as he does every track on the album. (Loosely held: the Roy/Lucius alter-ego structure rhymes with TØP's own "Blurryface," but that's a resonance, not a source.) ## Lyrics ``` What a great time to be human! There once was a boy who lost his own Mother Loved him to death and smothered his brother (oops!) The kids in the street all shouted with joy (yay!) New shoes on their feet they danced to destroy The boy became Man then ran to his Lover She cast a spell to bring back his Mother They went to the preacher and he banged a gong The crooks and believers all sing the same song Rainbows, butterflies What is all this? Shanghai Summertime Follow your bliss (ooo) Everything on the earth keeps blooming What a great time to be human! Hey hey hey What a great time to be human! Here once was a girl who drank from The Fountain She left her youth halfway up The Mountain She went back to get it but Someone was there They had her committed and shaved off her hair They threw her a party with diamonds and spoons But They were bloodsuckers with crocodile shoes (boo hoo) She went to The Chemist to make her a dog But he was dyslexic so he made a god God / God / God (Woof!) Rainbows, butterflies What is all this? Shanghai Summertime Follow your bliss (ooo) Everything on the earth keeps blooming What a great time to be human! Shanghai Summertime Goodbye What a great time to be human! ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (released music, credits, public posts, public interviews).** The two-phase release history (2023 single → 2026 track 3, 3:23) and the spring-2023 Transviolet tour that the single anchored — it played live for the first time the night it dropped, opening the tour in Orange County; the five-writer credit (the album's most-collaborative track) and the dual *"sir lucius" / "ROY"* vocal billing; Josh Dun on drums (here and on *Bad Feeling*, and live in Columbus), [little luna](https://www.instagram.com/littleluna/) and the rest on background vocals, Spraker producing with Roy; the capitalized archetypal *stations* as official text; the dog/god line in the lyric *and* yelled by Lucius in *[[The Interview]]* (EP7); the album's own *"twisted takes on adolescent musical themes for hands that rock the cradle"* self-billing, of which this nursery fable is a named instance; a 2023 official visualizer linked at the single's 4/14/2023 release (*"Watch the Visualizer now on YouTube!"*) and the separate 2026 visualizer with its barefoot beat, spoon-scepter, gong, and *"PROPERTY OF B.M.R.C."* rocket launcher — whether the two are distinct videos is still open; a *Great Time To Be Human* live acoustic video released November 2023. And, from the business side, the song's real marketing life: on a public Discord, a team member grouped it with *Happy Face*, *Good Time*, *I Like to Party*, and *Life Is Good* as the *"similar feel"* cohort meant to steer *Bad Feeling*'s viral audience — grounding the song's commercial, big-team character from the inside. - **Roy's one direct quote** about the song, from a 2023 feature, is telling for what it *lacks*: *"it's an observation of the human experience. It can be pretty strange, but something about it is so beautiful"* — pure humanism, zero Lucius cosmology, three years before the album reframed it. That same feature makes no mention of Lucius, the Circus, the Algorithm, mirrors, masks, or the mythos at all. He tied the title to the road (*"been seeing all sorts of cool weird stuff in America and that seems fitting"*), used *"what a great time to be human"* as a personal signoff all spring, and deflated the industry-speak about *"promising streams"* with a shrug: *"I don't know what that means… but I'm sure they will lead to the ocean. Or into a moose's mouth."* - **Strong readings.** The refrain-as-violence; crooks-and-believers → [[Concepts/Communion vs Spectacle]]; the failed-systems diptych with its masculine-repetition / feminine-dispossession asymmetry; the spell-casting Lover as false feminine; the preacher's gong as ceremony without transformation; *"bloodsuckers with crocodile shoes"* and *"diamonds and spoons"* as predator-and-consumer at once (read broadly — the industry, the *"new kings,"* but not only them); dog/god as counterfeit creation; the empty-mirror cheer; the ad-libs as algorithmic emotional flattening; *"goodbye"* swallowed by the refrain; Lucius staging Roy's lament rather than the song being pure Lucius. Grounded in the material, but interpretive. - **Framework / resonance (never authorial intent).** The Demiurgic typo (Gnostic); *"follow your bliss"* as soured Campbell; *"Shanghai Summertime"* as *shanghaied*; the nursery-rhyme substrate the album runs across (`#1 Champion`'s *"Mary, Mary,"* *Not Your Homie*'s ring-around-the-rosie, *Bad Feeling*'s Oompa-Loompa, *Lucius Lullaby*'s *"Row, row, row your boat"*); the Cain/Abel twin-frame. - **How we'd be wrong.** The plainer reading is live and worth keeping on the table: a blackly funny dark-comedy exercise in human awfulness — cheerful tune, horrific lyrics, the irony *is* the joke — in the Tom Lehrer / Randy Newman / *"Pumped Up Kicks"* lineage. This matters *especially* here because it's the album's most collaborative track (five writers), the least likely place for deliberate single-author cosmology; the gendered fable-anthropology and dog/god alchemy are at least as plausibly emergent from a writers' room as encoded. The explicit falsifier: a Roy statement framing the song as gallows-humor-for-the-effect would demote the Communion-vs-Spectacle thesis from the song's center to an overlay. Hold both. ## Read next - [[Happy Face]] — the mask, before it became a group activity. - [[Concepts/Communion vs Spectacle]] — the concept this song plants. - [[Lucius Lullaby (album)|Lucius Lullaby]] — the album that reissued it, and the arc it opens. - [[Sir Lucius]] — the grinning emcee, and why he isn't only grinning. - [[Concepts/Inversion]] — the dog/god flip, generalized.