# 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/Jagwar-twin-superhuman-lyrics) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official audio (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2okBC6oxZ7o) One of the album's *oldest* seeds. Per Roy's public interviews about 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 Mirror Sessions conversation. 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 [[Influences/Alice Bailey|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 **[[Artifacts - Gallery 1 (1-37)#29 · Suggestion of Apex|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> **THE [[Artifacts - Gallery 4 (113-149)#125 · THE SERPENT MUST TAKE FLIGHT|SERPENT MUST TAKE FLIGHT]]** · `THE MONKEY MUST BECOME THE BIRD` — [[Hall of Mirrors/Hall of Mirrors|Hall of Mirrors]] room 125 carries this song's whole tension as a pair of imperatives: serpent into flight, monkey into bird. Read against this page, the formula names the vector the anthem lacks: not more monkey, not "try, try, try" harder, but a change of form, transformation rather than endurance, through rather than over. (The maze even draws it: room 16, THE [[Artifacts - Gallery 1 (1-37)#16 · THE EMPTY ROOM|EMPTY ROOM]], shows the divided monkey below, the serpents already in flight above, and the bridge between.) → [[Artifacts - Concept Images and Emblems|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xfba584b226f83d7a734d58494875652f3179c776feab05907958323558285499..jpg"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xfba584b226f83d7a734d58494875652f3179c776feab05907958323558285499..jpg" 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. - **The warhorse (a later comparison):** the Hall of Mirrors' Mars animal, [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - 5 The Horse (Cinnamon)|Cinnamon the Horse (who lives on Mars)]], reads as the individual version of this march. Its ladder line has a child become a warrior among smiling serpents with swords in their mouths; the song has no child, only a collective *"we"* that cannot stop, so read together they show the cost of an armed life from two sides. ## 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 [[Characters/Stars/Mary|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. ([[Influences/Gurdjieff|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 > [!quote]- Full lyrics<br><span class="jt-drawer-summary">The song's full released lyrics, kept folded.</span> > ``` > 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 (statements from the project, 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 from the Mirror Sessions conversation. 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.