Universal Fire

Our religion was electric

Magnetic singing on a wire

Invisible waves

Making kings out of slaves

Encoding all freedom and desire

We pulled it down from the sky

To make us dance and make us cry

But one night it all burned away

In the Universal Fire

They came singing in the darkness

Shuttles rocking in the loom of night

Ten million souls

Weighed out in silver and gold

Two million gone straight to the light

They wept and they moaned and they called down

The intercession of some nameless choir

But the angels just let them keep singing

Until the night that it all burned away

In the Universal Fire

Gravity pushes down the stylus

God disappears into the sky

Electroplated silver

Cuts the master from the mirror

Every one the iteration of a lie

But we had Satchmo and The Killer and Sun Ra

We had Bo Diddley Big Mama and John Lee

Every soul now lossless in heaven

Until the night that it all burned away

In the Universal Fire

You can photograph a painting through a screen door

You can try to square the circle down

But the God that you serve is God of the curve

The irreducible mystery going round

Left all alone with the copies

Of the copies of the the masters of the name

Celluloid reels gone up in ashes and steel

Just the picture of a picture in a frame

It was Lady Day and Muddy and Coltrane

Little Walter and Rosetta and Ray

There was time when it seemed

We might all be redeemed

But one night it all burned away

In the Universal Fire