# Superhuman > **One-line reading.** *Superhuman* converts a named wound — Roy's perfectionism — into a marching, collective Protector: it mistakes relentless stamina for awakening and tries to go *over* the human condition by force rather than *through* it by integration. An entire anthem screams "SUPERHUMAN," the bridge quietly admits "all we are is human," and then it goes right back to screaming. The honesty doesn't stick — which is the whole point. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *Subject to Flooding* (2018, Atlantic) — **track 6 of 13** > **Written by** Jeff Bhasker, Matt Pauling & Roy English · **Album production** incl. S1, Matt Pauling, Linus; mixed by Jeff Ellis; mastered by Chris Gehringer > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official audio (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2okBC6oxZ7o) One of the album's *oldest* seeds. Per Roy's own account of the record, "Superhuman" began with **Jeff Bhasker in Venice, California in 2012**, got worked on in **Haiti with Michael Brun**, and "really came together with **Linus in Lake Arrowhead**" — a six-year journey that explains the Bhasker writing credit and marks this as one of the earliest ideas on a 2018 album. Roy himself calls it a "deep cut": when a fan named it in their top-three Jagwar Twin songs, he lit up — *"even the superhuman deep cut!"* An artist delighted that someone reached past the singles for the album track nobody streams. ## At a glance - **Era / release** — *Subject to Flooding*, 2018 (Atlantic redistribution shows 2019 in Apple metadata). Track 6, directly after its own 22-second interlude. - **In one line** — human limitation reaching, collectively and by force, toward inner divinity — and never quite arriving. - **Who speaks** — [[Roy]], but dissolved into a roaring, faceless **"we"**: the Protector gone from solo guard to marching army. No [[Sir Lucius]] yet — this is 2018, pre-mask — but the consequence-blind force the persona later refines is rehearsed here. - **Key symbols** — the **lion** (not yet slain) · the **march / drill** ("left, right, left") · the **open roof / no ceiling** · **blood on the knees** · the **battlecry**. See [[Concepts/The Protector]] · [[Move To You]] · [[Welcome to the Circus]]. ## The song, mapped A verse-driven anthem built to peak — until a bridge pulls the floor out. Its shape *is* its argument: mobilize, drill, advance, concede the truth, override it, and let the grind get the last word. Following the song's own sequence: | Section | In the song | What it does | |---|---|---| | **Verse 1 — the mustering** | *"They can't knock us down, we're back on the road"* · *"blood on our knees, workin' the overtime"* · *"we paid our dues, get ready to fight"* | Assembles the roaring, martial, bodily-labor "we." Every line is shadowed by a call-and-response *(No)* — a crowd contradicting the very possibility of defeat in real time. | | **Pre-chorus — the drill** | *"Scream out the battlecry / Left, right, left, it goes, we sing"* · *"we don't stop never… 'cause we gotta be"* | The cadence that *mechanizes* the collective. Note the tell buried in it: **"gotta be,"** never *are.* | | **Chorus — the mantra** | *"Superhuman, superhuman, superhuman / And we gon' fight 'til it's through 'cause we're…"* | The word itself is the hook, chanted three times. Relentless repetition as reprogramming craft — the album's "freedom in the repetition" doctrine put to work. | | **Verse 2 — the advance & the boundary** | *"we're coming for you"* · *"ain't got no ceiling up on the roof"* · *"ain't gonna be no face in the crowd"* · *"raise up your voices, screaming it loud"* | Turns outward — mobilizing an audience while, in the same breath, *protesting* the anonymity its own "we" enacts. | | **Pre-chorus (variant) — the debt restated** | *"You don't get nothing for free"* (swapped in for verse 1's *"let's give 'em something to see"*), then the identical *"left, right, left…"* | Same march, reframed as **transactional cost** — the price of the fight. | | **Bridge — the fracture** | *"All we are, all we are is human / But I'll try, try, try, try to be [Superhuman]"* | **The hinge.** The march drops, the collective "we" collapses to a solitary "I," the concession *(is human)* is instantly overridden by grinding will *(I'll try).* The single most load-bearing move in the song: it exposes itself as aspiration, not arrival. | | **Final chorus + tag** | the "Superhuman" mantra returns; *"fight 'til it's through"* repeats an extra time to close | The will reasserts after the bridge's glimpse of *human.* The grind gets the last word — which is exactly why the reading below says the bridge *can't hold.* | **The net move:** the song stages HUMAN-vs-SUPERHUMAN as a gap it never closes. It performs the perfectionism it's about — reaching *over* the human by force rather than *through* it by integration. > [!note]- The 22-second thesis that comes first — the Chaplin interlude > Track 6 doesn't start cold. It's preceded by **[[Superhuman (Interlude)]]** (track 5, ~0:22): a verbatim sample of **Charlie Chaplin's closing speech from *The Great Dictator*** (1940), credited in the composer field to Chaplin himself. The sampled lines are thematically exact — *"the power to create machines / the power to create happiness,"* and *"the kingdom of God is within man… not in one man, nor a group of men, but in all men."* So a borrowed 1940 voice names the human's two powers, and the divinity-within doctrine, *right before* the full song sends humanity reaching — collectively — for exactly that superhuman power. A standing open question: is the interlude a straight setup, an ironic frame, or the song's actual thesis? The pairing is the album's cleanest 5→6 hinge, and the two are genuinely separate works, not one track. (The relay travels forward, too: Roy re-voices that same "kingdom within" speech as his *own* lyric in [[I Like to Party]] four years later — sampled in 2018, sung in 2022.) ## What it means A few claims that cut across the whole song. **The Protector, marching.** This is [[Concepts/The Protector]] in its martial, collective mode. The isolated trauma of the album's earlier tracks gets converted into a mechanized front: the vulnerable solo voice gives way to a roaring "we," and the cadence *"left, right, left"* standardizes movement into a rigid binary that locks the tender self inside a moving tank. Armoring, not healing. **One wound, three faces.** Set against [[Loser]] and [[Good Day]] — both on *this same album* — *Superhuman* completes a trilogy of the same faceless formation in three modes. **Loser** is shame-mode: dissolve into "we're all losers" so shame can't land. **Good Day** is mood-mode: seal the vibe so disturbance can't land. **Superhuman** is martial-mode: armor up as an army. One wound-born operator, three masks, all of it *before* the operator acquires a name and a face. The escalation tell is simple and a little chilling: **the march needs the inadequacy.** If you were already enough, there'd be nothing to fight. **The wound has a name, and it's grounded.** The esoteric readings below are interpretation, but the floor under all of them is Roy's own words. Asked what he was like as a kid, he said: *"Was the perfect child all the time… I wanted to be perfect, and it was psychotic, and I still struggle with perfectionism to be honest."* Present tense — a live, ongoing wound, and the closest thing to a joke attached to this song, because he diagnoses his childhood as clinically absurd in the same breath he admits it never left. The chain runs: perfectionism (the wound) → the perfect-child persona (the mask that buries the authentic child) → people-pleasing (managing perception to be approved of, which, as his interviewer put it and he agreed, "is really just manipulating people to like you") → the constructed self that hides the genuine one. *Superhuman* is the **collective** form of the perfect-child compulsion: the army as mass persona, performing more-than-human adequacy because "merely human," at the level of the wound, feels like not enough. **Why the bridge can't hold.** Roy opened this album with *Loser* precisely so listeners would feel *"good enough just as they are… it's us, we, not me, and we are all Losers."* *Loser* says **enough.** *Superhuman* says **become more.** They're a thesis–antithesis pair on the same record. The bridge glimpses the *Loser* truth — *"all we are is human"* — and recoils from it, because at the wound, "human" registers as insufficiency. That recoil is the drama. **The counterfeit "we."** Read closely, the solidarity is staged. *"Ain't got no ceiling up on the roof"* sounds like freedom but scans as *inflation* — not ascent, but exit from any structured frame into a boundless grind. Because the army *"don't stop never,"* it locks into a closed loop, mistaking horizontal, tour-grind endurance for vertical breakthrough. And the collective *looks* relational while erasing the individual — *"left, right"* makes everyone an interchangeable unit — which is exactly why *"ain't gonna be no face in the crowd"* is such a loaded line: it's the song's own protest against the flattening its "we" is busy enacting. **But the commander sings *with* the crowd.** One detail keeps *Superhuman* on the Roy pole and off the future Lucius pole. It's command-cadenced — *"left, right, left"* — yet **we-voiced**: *"it goes, we sing,"* *"raise up your voices."* The commander sings *with* the crowd, not *at* it. That's the opposite of Lucius's later "scream and shout," where command reduces the crowd to noise. Here the martial form is bent toward communion — a wound reaching for togetherness, not a mastermind reducing an audience to volume. **The wrong vector — over, not through.** The song wants the right thing by the wrong route. Roy works inside Alice Bailey's *The Labours of Hercules*, a book he has named publicly. Bailey's line is that *"the path of liberation leads through the midst of the world of illusion."* *Superhuman* wants to go **over** it — *"ain't got no ceiling,"* transcend by force — rather than down-and-through by integration. That mismatch is, finally, why the bridge's *human* can't hold: you can't climb out of the human condition; you can only walk through it. ## Characters - **[[Roy]]** — in a mobilized collective register: the Protector gone from solo guard to army, the vulnerable solo voice converted into a roaring "we" and a moving formation. - **The Army / the "we"** — the song's actual protagonist: a faceless mobilized formation with a drill cadence. Read it as a **mass persona** — the perfect-child compulsion gone collective, relational-looking and individual-erasing at once. - **[[Sir Lucius]]** — *not yet present.* This is a pre-Lucius song. But *Superhuman* is one of the three pre-mask Protector faces (with [[Loser]] and [[Good Day]]) from which Lucius later crystallizes. ## Artifacts **SUGGESTION OF APEX** · `SUGGESTION OF APEX` — This guide's own Superhuman essay reads its 'ain't got no ceiling up on the roof / don't stop never' imagery as horizontal endurance mistaken for vertical breakthrough — a closed loop that never reaches a rea… → [[Artifacts - Drawings and Sketches|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x5d0e1e4a5a5d089ed56b0e86bea02e9a3c81f99d201403794224f4c5325aee4d..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x5d0e1e4a5a5d089ed56b0e86bea02e9a3c81f99d201403794224f4c5325aee4d..jpg" width="200"></a> **JAGWAR TWIN TROJAN HORSE PROGRAM** · `RIGHT SHOULDER OF A HORSE` — The ♂ Mars glyph and drawn sword place Cinnamon at the Geburah/Mars (Severity, martial contraction) pole that the Superhuman essay reads the song as embodying — the untempered, armored, combat register. → [[Artifacts - Drawings and Sketches|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x906809c415dae59822a6d11f9bfedd9e421e1ae8ad6dcd6a34e42b13f0891b9d..png"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x906809c415dae59822a6d11f9bfedd9e421e1ae8ad6dcd6a34e42b13f0891b9d..png" width="200"></a> ## Symbols - **The lion** — via Bailey, the Nemean lion: the coordinated, devastating *personality* (mind, emotion, and vitality fused into one wild force). In *Superhuman* it's the lion **not yet slain** — the goal is to master it by wearing its skin, not to overpower it. The song's central symbol. (See Advanced reading below.) - **The march / drill ("left, right, left")** — the mechanizing cadence: a rigid binary that standardizes movement and locks the tender self inside a moving tank. - **The ceiling / roof ("no ceiling up on the roof")** — the open-top / boundlessness motif: reads as freedom, scans as inflation. Part of a cross-era roof/ceiling series — *"wave 'em to the ceiling"* ([[Hell Of A Night]]) → *"no ceiling up on the roof"* (here) → *"tear the roof off of my house"* ([[Bounce]], 2026). (See [[Concepts/The House and the Vessel|The House & the Vessel]].) - **Blood (on the knees)** — *"blood on our knees, workin' the overtime"*: blood as the **cost of the fight.** This is a verbatim-family repeat of *"blood on they knees"* from the album's own opener [[Long Time Coming]] (tracks 1 and 6) — where the opener sets solidarity, *Superhuman* escalates it to cost. - **The battlecry** — *"scream out the battlecry,"* *"raise up your voices"*: the spectacle-manufacturing voice. ## Connected songs - **[[Superhuman (Interlude)]]** — track 5; the ~22-second verbatim Chaplin sample that immediately precedes and frames it. The album's 5→6 hinge. - **[[Loser]]** — track 3; the Protector in shame-mode. Roy's *"good enough as we are"* thesis is the **direct counter** to *Superhuman*'s "try to be more." Thesis and antithesis on one album. - **[[Good Day]]** — track 4; the Protector in mood-mode. Same formation, escalating. - **[[Move To You]]** — track 7; the **structural inverse**, one track later: orientation by the heart (the Thread), not ascent by force. Roy's stated favorite on the album, and where he first names the Circle aloud — *Superhuman*'s answer sits right next to it. - **[[Welcome to the Circus]]** — where the spectacle *Superhuman* manufactures later gets *captured*: the army performing superhuman-ness produces the very illusion the Circus runs on. - **[[Long Time Coming]]** — track 1; shares the verbatim *"blood on (their/our) knees"* image; its crowd is already singing. - **[[Online]]** — the catalogue-progression sibling (2022): *Superhuman* "still trusts collective activation"; *Online* "already knows the architecture is recursive." *Superhuman* is the last-trust pole, before the system is seen *as* system. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the Leo labour: the lion not yet slain > The framework is licensed: Roy named Bailey's *The Labours of Hercules* publicly (IG Live). In Bailey's **Leo** labour (Labour V), Hercules masters the Nemean lion not by destroying it but by slaying its **independence** and wearing its skin — mastery through *integration*, the personality subordinated to the soul. The lion is the coordinated personality itself: mind, emotion, and life-force fused into one devastating, untamed force. Read against that, *Superhuman* is the lion at the pre-Leo posture — the personality marching as one (*"left, right"*), mistaking its own wild strength for the destination. *"Try to be superhuman"* is the ego trying to become **more lion**, before the turn that would tame it. The lion's skin, once worn as a mantle (Leo through Capricorn, in the Lucis Trust reading), *is* the Protector integrated — which is precisely the stage this song hasn't reached. Open question in this guide: is *Superhuman* a *specific* pre-Leo labour, or the aspirant's general pre-labour posture? Held open. > [!note]- Advanced reading — Geburah severed from Chesed, and the feminine who tames the lion > In a Tree-of-Life frame, *Superhuman* reads as **Geburah** (Severity, Mars, martial contraction) severed from **Chesed** (Mercy) — combat, debt-paying, and endless labor that skip **Tiferet**, the heart-center (Roy's seat), thickening armor instead of opening in love. The **STRENGTH** tarot card renders the correction the song lacks: Geburah *tempered* by Chesed — the lion mastered through calm, not force. *Superhuman* is the untempered pole. One resonance worth flagging, not asserting: in the Strength image the taming figure is traditionally **feminine**, which is a possible route from *Superhuman*'s martial pole to the Mary / Shekinah / "la conquistadora" feminine-conqueror thread that surfaces later in the catalogue (see [[No. 1 Champion (la Conquistadora)|#1 Champion]]). Resonance, not a claim. > [!note]- Advanced reading — Bailey's glamour: the army that *manufactures* the illusion > Bailey: *"the glamour of the world blinds humanity to reality."* Her related epigraphs, which Roy curates publicly, sharpen it — *"Illusion is the first product of the mind when it is divorced from the soul"*; *"the world is today the victim of illusion, propaganda, and mass suggestion."* Against that, *Superhuman*'s spectacle — *"let's give 'em something to see,"* *"raise up your voices, screaming it loud"* — does something more than operate *inside* illusion: the army performing superhuman-ness **produces** glamour in Bailey's exact sense. It manufactures the very spectacle the Circus later runs on. (An open question: whether the specific "glamour blinds humanity" post is tagged by Roy to [[Welcome to the Circus]] — currently unconfirmed.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — the mechanical "we": Gurdjieff, the Gnostic grid, the consonantal march > Three convergent resonances on the same cadence, all interpretive: > - **Gurdjieff.** *"Left, right, left, it goes"* is the sound of human machines moving under external stimulus — collective sleep, the "many I's" marching under command. The "we" believes it has *will* but is merely reacting to friction; *"but I'll try…"* is the sleeping man's illusion that he can *do* through ordinary exertion. (Gurdjieff is Roy's single most-named public influence.) > - **Gnostic.** The song reads as the anthem of those fully integrated into the archonic system: internal suffering converted into public spectacle, survival renamed as a "superhuman" spiritual state. > - **Linguistic.** *"Left, right, left"* scans as the **consonantal** cadence of the project's angle/breath grammar — structure without vowel, without breath. *"All we are is human"* is the vowel almost cracking through before the grind reasserts. ## Lyrics ``` They can't knock us down, we're back on the road Can't knock us down (No) You hear this sound, get ready to roll You hear this sound (No) We got some blood on our knees, workin' the overtime Some win, some lose out here on the line Some win, some lose (No) We paid our dues, get ready to fight We paid our dues (No) Let's give 'em something to see Scream out the battlecry Left, right, left, it goes, we sing Left, right, left, it goes And we don't stop never, no 'Cause we gotta be Superhuman, superhuman, superhuman And we gon' fight 'til it's through 'cause we're Superhuman, superhuman, superhuman Yeah, we gon' fight 'til it's through 'cause we're superhuman We're kicking our feet, we're coming for you Kicking our feet (No) Ain't got no ceiling up on the roof Ain't got no ceiling (No) We'll give you just what you need We're gonna get you right Ain't gonna be no face in the crowd Ain't gonna be (No) Raise up your voices, screaming it loud Raise up your voices, oh You don't get nothing for free Scream out the battlecry Left, right, left, it goes, we sing Left, right, left, it goes And we don't stop never, no 'Cause we gotta be Superhuman, superhuman, superhuman And we gon' fight 'til it's through 'cause we're Superhuman, superhuman, superhuman Yeah, we gon' fight 'til it's through 'cause we're superhuman All we are, all we are is human All we are, all we are is human (We sing) All we are, all we are is human (Yeah) But I'll try, try, try, try to be Superhuman, superhuman, superhuman And we gon' fight 'til it's through 'cause we're Superhuman, superhuman, superhuman Yeah, we gon' fight 'til it's through 'cause we're superhuman Yeah, we gon' fight 'til it's through 'cause we're superhuman ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (Roy's own words, released music, public posts, verified metadata).** Release and tracklisting (track 6 of 13 on *Subject to Flooding*, 2018; Atlantic; Apple metadata shows a 2019 redistribution). The **writing credit** — Jeff Bhasker, Matt Pauling & Roy English (Apple composer field + Lyrics-tab "Written By," verified 2026). The **recording origin** (Venice 2012 with Bhasker → Haiti with Michael Brun → Lake Arrowhead with Linus), per Roy's public interviews. The **perfectionism** and **people-pleasing** quotes, from Roy's Mirror Sessions conversation with Briana Cuoco — the single most load-bearing external anchor here, and the same episode that holds his "not a real boy… never going to dance again" Ballerina-Boy origin. Roy naming **Bailey's *The Labours of Hercules*** publicly, and the Bailey illusion/glamour epigraphs he curates. Roy's **"even the superhuman deep cut!"** self-classification (public Discord, 2025), and his **genre-exploration** framing naming *Superhuman* among the album's deliberately disparate "trials." The **interlude** as a verbatim Chaplin *Great Dictator* sample (Apple lyrics + composer credit). The **"blood on our knees"** repeat from [[Long Time Coming]]. - **Strong readings.** The marching Protector; the three-mode trilogy with [[Loser]] and [[Good Day]]; the counterfeit "we" and the horizonless loop; the bridge as the exhaustion of the "I"; *Superhuman* as the collective form of the perfect-child compulsion; the *Loser* collision; the lion-not-yet-slain / wrong-vector reading off Bailey; the commander-sings-*with*-the-crowd distinction from Lucius. Grounded in the material, but interpretive — and labeled as such. - **Resonance (framework, never authorial intent).** The Kabbalistic Geburah-severed-from-Chesed reading and the Strength-card / feminine-conqueror route; the Gurdjieffian, Gnostic, and linguistic readings of the march; the "glamour" reading of the spectacle. The system *permits* these; it does not assert Roy intends them. - **The honest counter-reading.** *Superhuman* is also, simply, a stadium-scale endurance anthem, and the esoteric scaffolding is a stack of interpretation layered over genuinely grounded material. The floor under the whole page is the perfectionism quote — Roy's own words. If the plain "perfectionism / martial Protector" reading accounts for the song as well as the esoteric apparatus does, the apparatus is decorative — and we keep that falsifier on the table. - **A note on the structural irony.** Read straight, the song is nearly a deadpan joke on itself: three "SUPERHUMAN"s a chorus, a bridge that admits *"all we are is human,"* and a tag that goes right back to screaming — the honesty stated once and then buried under the grind. That's not a gag Roy planted; it's the shape of the wound. *Superhuman* is a martial endurance anthem, not a comedy — the comedy elsewhere on the album (*Good Day*'s "I don't ski but I look fresh") is the deliberate kind. Here the irony *is* the diagnosis. ## Read next - [[Superhuman (Interlude)]] — the 22-second Chaplin thesis that comes first. - [[Loser]] — the counter-thesis: *enough,* against *become more.* - [[Move To You]] — the structural inverse, one track later: the heart, not the march. - [[Concepts/The Protector]] — the wound-born operator this song wears as an army. - [[Welcome to the Circus]] — where the spectacle finally gets captured.