# Superhuman (Interlude) > **One-line reading.** Twenty-two seconds of borrowed voice: Roy doesn't *write* the album's opening statement about machines and human power — he lifts Charlie Chaplin's 1940 speech whole and sets it down like a needle drop, so a clown's anti-fascist cry becomes the doorway to everything the catalogue later worries about. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *Subject to Flooding* (2018) — **track 5 of 13** · ~0:22, spoken > **Composers** (Apple Music): Charles Chaplin · Jeff Bhasker · Matthew Pauling · Roy English > **Sampled source:** Charlie Chaplin, *The Great Dictator* (1940), closing speech — verbatim > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official audio (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtLIq1A-hAo) ## At a glance - **Era / release** — *Subject to Flooding*, Roy English's debut as Jagwar Twin, first released September 2018 and re-released by Atlantic the following April. This is the shortest thing on the record and the least "written" — which turns out to be the whole point. - **In one line** — a verbatim sample of Chaplin's *Great Dictator* speech, dropped in as a 22-second setup that hands directly into the full [[Superhuman]] (track 6). - **Who speaks** — nobody in the cast. Not [[Roy]], not [[Sir Lucius]], not [[Mary]], not the Crowd. The voice is Chaplin's, sampled — an inherited voice slotted into the sequence. What's *Roy's* here is the choosing. - **Key symbols** — [[The Prop Room#The Machine|The Machine]] (named here, remarkably, as a *human gift*) · the clown (via Chaplin — the clown who wakes the crowd instead of herding it) · the kingdom within · [[The Prop Room#The Flood|The Flood]] (the album it's drowning inside). The one thing to hold onto before anything else: this is a **relay, not a statement.** Roy did not compose these words. He reached into the entire archive of recorded human speech and pulled out *this* — a 1940 humanist plea — to open his album's argument about machines. The meaning lives in the act of selection. Everything below follows from that. ## The song, mapped There are no verses, no chorus, no melody — so the "structure" here is Chaplin's rhetoric, not Jagwar Twin's. The sampled text (verified line-for-line against Apple Music) runs as four short rhetorical moves. Reading it by its own architecture: | Move | In the speech | What the beat does | |---|---|---| | **1 — The sacred, decentralized** | *"The kingdom of God is within man / not in one man / nor a group of men / but in all men"* | Locates divinity *inside* — then, crucially, refuses to concentrate it. Not one, not a few: **all.** | | **2 — The twin powers** | *"You, the people, have the power — the power to create machines, the power to create happiness"* | Hands agency to the collective and names two creative capacities **side by side**: machines *and* happiness, as if they were the same kind of gift. | | **3 — What the power is *for*** | *"To make this life free and beautiful / to make this life a wonderful adventure"* | Escalates from power to purpose — freedom, beauty, adventure. Not just *you can*, but *here's what it's for.* | | **4 — The call** | *"Let us use that power — let us all unite"* | Turns statement into imperative. Ends on collective action, mid-reach. | The shape is **inward-to-outward and statement-to-imperative**: the sacred is interior → it's distributed to everyone → the people hold twin powers → those powers are *for* a free and beautiful life → therefore, unite. Then it stops, and hands you to the full [[Superhuman]] — where the reaching turns strained and human: *"all we are is human / but I'll try to be superhuman."* The interlude names the divine power; the next track shows a person trying to grab it by force. ## What it means A few claims that cut across the whole 22 seconds: - **The machine is not the enemy.** *"The power to create machines"* sits directly beside *"the power to create happiness"* — both framed as human creative capacity, gifts of "the people," not fallen forces. This is the album's clearest, most grounded statement of a theme the catalogue chews on for the next eight years, and it's worth stating plainly because so much of the later work *looks* anti-technology: the villain was never the machine. It's the severing — the machine cut loose from the heart and handed to optimization. Here, before any of that severing gets dramatized, the human pole is stated clean. See [[Concepts/Machine vs Human]]. - **It reads as prophecy by accident.** Chaplin meant *"the power to create machines"* as anti-fascist, anti-industrial-war humanism. In 2018-and-after it can't help colliding with everything the later catalogue fears — algorithms, platforms, database identity, engineered attention, AI. Humanity holds the power both to *free* consciousness and to *build the machinery that traps it*, and the interlude states the hopeful pole first, before the trap is even visible. - **A clown speaks against the machine — years before the Circus captures the clown.** Chaplin is one of the most recognizable clown figures who ever lived, and here he uses direct speech to argue *against* mechanization and dehumanization. Set that beside [[Welcome to the Circus]], where the clown archetype gets swallowed by spectacle: the Chaplin sample reads almost like a preserved artifact from *before* the capture. Where the Ringmaster synchronizes the crowd for the show, this transmission tries to wake it back into agency. (How structural that parallel really is — Chaplin genuinely pointing toward Lucius, versus two figures sharing a costume across eight years — is a fair question. See the Advanced reading below.) - **It may be the last un-cynical thing in the catalogue.** The speech quietly assumes four things: that unity liberates, that collective power stays humane, that technology and beauty coexist, and that mass awakening can happen without being captured. The later work — [[Online]], the Circus, [[Sir Lucius]], the algorithm — destabilizes all four. Which is what makes a 1940 speech land as *almost painfully hopeful* on a 2018 record: it's a snapshot of belief the rest of the discography spends years complicating. ## Characters - **The voice is Chaplin's, sampled** — this is the rare Jagwar Twin track where none of the cast speaks. An inherited voice, placed in the sequence. - **[[Roy]] is present only as curator.** The authored voice isn't his; the *selection* is. That's the whole move, and it's the cleanest example in the catalogue of the difference between writing a thing and choosing it. - **[[Sir Lucius]] is present only by contrast** — by his *absence*. The speech's decentralized, distributed authority (*"not in one man… but in all men"*) is the structural opposite of the centralized, managerial, spectacle-running intelligence Lucius becomes. Where the interlude scatters the sacred across everyone, Lucius concentrates it in one performing self. - **The Crowd / the collective "we"** — the addressee of the speech and the holder of the twin powers. This is the pre-cynical version of the crowd: not yet synchronized, not yet a market, still the site of hope. ## Symbols - **[[The Prop Room#The Machine|The Machine]]** — named here as *human creative capacity*, the album's clearest statement that it is not the antagonist. This is the anchor of the [[Concepts/Machine vs Human]] arc; the whole thread grows from these two lines. - **The clown** (via Chaplin) — inverted: the clown who *wakes* the crowd, the historical inverse of the Ringmaster who herds it for spectacle. - **The kingdom within** — interior divinity, distributed across all, concentrated in no one. The counter-image to the surveillance the catalogue later names. - **[[The Prop Room#The Flood|The Flood]]** — the interlude is 22 seconds inside an album named for the deluge. Set against that title, *"let us all unite," "make this life free and beautiful"* reads as the human cry against drowning — a brief flash of daylight inside the immersion. ## Connected songs - **[[Superhuman]]** — the full track this relay sets up. Whether the interlude is a straight setup, an ironic frame, or a thesis for what follows is genuinely open (see Source notes): track 6 answers the interlude's promise of divine power with a person straining to reach it by force. - **[[Dream - Dream]]** — the same album's *other* inherited relay: an interpolation of Johnny Mercer's 1944 "Dream," with Sarah Vaughan credited. Same curation practice. - **[[Precious Time]]** — the album's *third* inherited transmission, a sampled scrap of Sarah Vaughan's spoken banter. Chaplin, Mercer, Vaughan: three borrowed voices on one debut. This isn't a one-off; it's a method. - **[[I Like to Party]]** (*33*, 2022) — the crucial cross-era link. Chaplin's *"the kingdom of God is within man"* comes back here **re-voiced as Roy's own lyric** — *"Heaven is within your heart / you're the kingdom"* — not a sample this time, but the borrowed humanism carried forward and dropped into the media-machine. And the bridge's *"we interrupt our program"* plays like the Chaplin counter-broadcast breaking into the feed — only now the awakening gets cut off mid-word. - **[[Welcome to the Circus]]** — the clown archetype *captured* by spectacle; the historical inversion of the Chaplin clown who speaks against it. - **[[Online]]** — the database, synchronization, and surveillance the interlude's hope predates; the "counterfeit we." Also the [[Concepts/Machine vs Human]] escalation node. - **[[Good Day]]** (same album, two tracks earlier) — its throwaway line *"no time for the clown, clowns"* sits in quiet retrospective tension with the reverent Chaplin sample two tracks later. Not a contradiction — different registers (*"clowns"* = sycophant; Chaplin = humanist) — but a wry structural rhyme all the same. - **[[The Circle]]** (*33*, 2022) — the "collective face" / "you are it" doctrine that the *"not one man but all men"* clause structurally prefigures. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the provenance upgrade: invention vs relay *(tap to open)* > This track sharpens a distinction worth holding across the whole catalogue: the difference between **internal architecture** and **inherited transmission**. > > - **Internal architecture** is everything Roy builds *inside* the mythos — Lucius, El Roi, the Loop and the Circle, the algorithm language, the recursive mirrors, the theatrical duality. > - **Inherited transmission** is everything he *selects and relays* from the wider culture — Chaplin, Mercer, Vaughan, humanitarian modernism, anti-fascist speech, jazz-standard emotional vocabulary. > > The interlude is squarely the second kind. Naming which mode is in play — did Roy *invent* this or *choose* it? — is what keeps the interpretation honest and stops every resemblance from inflating into intent. The catalogue doesn't only build by inventing symbols; it builds by *selecting, relaying, and recontextualizing* inherited ones inside an evolving structure. This interlude is the cleanest case study, which is why it's the most important thing the track teaches. See [[Concepts/Inherited Substrate]]. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the decentralized sacred, and "not one man but all men" *(tap to open)* > *"The kingdom of God is within man / not in one man / nor a group of men / but in all men / in you"* does two things at once. It locates divinity *inside* — and then explicitly **de-centralizes** it, refusing to seat it in any single figure or hierarchy. > > In the framework this guide uses, that's a **distributed** version of the heart-center — the sacred scattered evenly rather than routed through one mediating channel. It sets up a structural contrast with the later Lucius material, where authority, optimization, and spectacle-management all become *centralized* in one managerial intelligence. The interlude speaks from the distributed pole; Lucius is the concentration the catalogue later dramatizes. > > There's a further resonance here that runs cross-era: that *"not one man but all men"* clause is the exact theological shape of two much later doctrines — **the Circle's "collective face"** (the idea that *"every person has it inside of them,"* the template anyone can instantiate) and **the anti-guru ethic** (*"everyone's a guru"* — no privileged holder of the treasure). Read that way, the debut's one borrowed-voice track already imports, in 1940 language, the precise anti-hierarchical stance the catalogue spends eight years rebuilding in its own myth. The album's "we, not me" was never *only* solidarity — it was already a theology of distribution: the treasure is in everyone, or it's nowhere. > > One honest flag: reading this as a seed of Roy's *own* later "God who sees me" throat-doctrine risks back-reading a 2026 idea onto a 1940 quote — and the quote is itself Chaplin borrowing from the Gospel (Luke 17:21). So the resemblance is real and worth naming, but it's a resonance between two inherited humanisms, not proof that the interlude *planted* the later doctrine on purpose. See [[Concepts/Witnessing vs Surveillance]]. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the human cry against drowning, and "objective art" *(tap to open)* > **Inside the Flood.** The album is named for the deluge — the sense of being immersed, overwhelmed, boundaries collapsing. Read against that title, this 22-second speech is the human voice refusing to go under: *"let us all unite," "make this life free and beautiful."* A momentary flash of daylight — an awakening call — inside the immersion. It's the smallest track on the record and, in this frame, the one that most directly names the stakes: not *we are being attacked* but *we are already breathing the water*, and here is the cry against it. > > **Gurdjieff's "objective art."** The interlude also works the way Gurdjieff described *objective art* — using an inherited cultural transmission to induce a genuine shift in the listener, leaning on historically embedded resonance rather than freshly written architecture. The effect is real: a listener who recognizes the Chaplin speech feels its whole 1940 weight arrive at once. But this describes what the track *does*, not a documented intention — there's no claim that Roy consciously set out to "deploy objective art." It's an accurate description of the mechanism, held at arm's length from the question of intent. (The same frame recurs on [[Happy Face]].) ## Spoken text ``` [Charlie Chaplin — The Great Dictator (1940), closing speech:] The kingdom of God is within man Not in one man Nor a group of men But in all men In you You, the people, have the power The power to create machines The power to create happiness You, the people, have the power To make this life free and beautiful To make this life a wonderful adventure Let us use that power Let us all unite ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (released music, credits, public record).** The sample itself is confirmed three ways: the Apple Music lyrics are verbatim the Chaplin *Great Dictator* speech; the Apple Music composer field credits **Charles Chaplin** (alongside Jeff Bhasker, Matthew Pauling, and Roy English); and the identification held up against independent checking. The recording is owned by Atlantic / WEA (the ℗-line). That the machine is named here as *human capacity* — *"create machines"* beside *"create happiness"* — is grounded in the text, not interpretation. One tidy inconsistency worth noting: Apple's *composer* field credits Chaplin, but Apple's shorter *"Written By"* line omits him (listing only Bhasker, Pauling, and Roy English). The verbatim text plus the composer credit settle it — the Chaplin sample is real; the "Written By" line is just incomplete. - **A note on Bhasker.** His credit isn't only a metadata name. The full [[Superhuman]] (track 6), which this interlude feeds, *"began with Jeff Bhasker in Venice, California in 2012,"* was worked on in Haiti with Michael Brun, and *"really came together with Linus in Lake Arrowhead"* (per Roy's press). Bhasker appears on both the interlude and track 6, so his presence is a genuine composition-history anchor. *Subject to Flooding* itself was built across roughly 2012–2018 — the "wilderness years" of Joshua Tree, Florence, Haiti, Ireland, and Lake Arrowhead — with producers S1 (Larry Griffin Jr.), Linus, and Matt Pauling. (No per-track producer credit is on file for track 5 specifically; the engineering team is documented album-wide, not clip-by-clip.) - **Strong readings (grounded in the material, but interpretive).** The relay/curation frame; the machine-as-not-antagonist thesis loaded onto the *choice*; the clown-before-the-Circus parallel; the "last pre-cynical vision" reading; the decentralized-sacred contrast with Lucius; the human-cry-inside-the-Flood framing. All coherent with the text and the catalogue — and all clearly interpretation, not the artist's stated intent. - **The useful caution.** This is one of the most-sampled speeches in all of popular music — countless artists have used it as an inspirational gut-punch. So its placement here may be partly *convention*, and the honest move is to honor it as a curated inherited transmission without loading a precise cosmology onto the mere *fact* that Roy dropped it in. The falsifier is clean: if the interlude is simply a borrowed inspirational moment (this speech's commonest use), then the decentralized-sacred, proto-witnessing, and clown-before-the-Circus readings are overlay, not encoded meaning. Two of those readings lean especially hard — "clown before the Circus" bridges on a single shared word across eight years, and "the kingdom within seeds the later seeing-doctrine" back-reads a modern concept onto a 1940 Gospel quotation. Both are worth having; neither should be mistaken for the artist's design. - **The standing guardrail.** By his own account, 2018 Roy is *not* yet thinking in the later system — no Lucius, no Circus, no algorithm in the contemporaneous vocabulary. The album sincerely participates in language the later work reinterprets. The machine-line reading is grounded; the cosmological overlays stay interpretive. The soil held the seed, but the seed wasn't planted on purpose. - **Paratext gap.** No dedicated interview, video, or post about *Superhuman (Interlude)* exists — it's 22 seconds and got no press of its own. The operative paratext is the album-level material: the composer credits confirming Chaplin, and Roy's launch-press mission statement — *"we should all let go of ego… after all, we are all Subject to Flooding."* ## Read next - [[Superhuman]] — the full track this relay opens; the human reaching for divine power by force. - [[Concepts/Machine vs Human]] — the arc this song seeds, followed from 1940 Chaplin through the algorithm to Lucius. - [[Dream - Dream]] — the album's companion relay (the Mercer interpolation); the curation practice in a second register. - [[Concepts/Inherited Substrate]] — the method itself: how the catalogue builds by selecting and relaying, not only inventing. - [[I Like to Party]] — where the borrowed "kingdom within" comes back as Roy's own words, inside the machine. - [[Welcome to the Circus]] — the clown captured by spectacle; the far end of the inversion this interlude sits at the near end of.