The music is funk... that pretty much sums it up, there’s a bit of a bass solo and a guitar solo; the words on the other hand, I have a lot more to say about (*rant follows)

The title is a little joke between me, myself, and I related to the first line of the chorus.
The song is about my love/hate relationship with technology; the fact that every technological advance, whilst making our lives easier, also serves to remove an ability (simple or complex) from our basic skill set, makes us lazy, and (fairly often) eliminate jobs.  When watching futuristic/sci-fi films where computers and machines do everything, I can’t help but think “where are all the unemployed people?!”   One of the higher profile examples would be music downloads and people always say “oh well I don’t want to give money to those rich record execs blah blah blah” but of course those guys probably won’t take pay cuts; they just fire lower level employees (some of whom will presumably have families, mortgages and such) and of course the people working in music stores and CD pressing plants and other such places... but hey, at least we don’t have to pay for music if we don’t want to.
Many factories and processing plants have got into automation to the point where they don’t really need many employees.  One or two skilled jobs are created as far as maintaining the machines that do all the work, but of course that’s done at the expense of many, many basic physical jobs, the kind of jobs that people take on while they’re studying, or that they take on because academic qualifications are not something they are able to get at that point.

When I was travelling, I met a young Australian guy who told me that his car turned on the windscreen wipers and lights as and when they were needed, opened the boot for him when he walked past it and started the car when he got behind the wheel... I kind of had to wonder “What are YOU even doing then?   What happens when you have to borrow a car where you have to do all of this?  Will you remember how to, or will those reflexes have been dulled from disuse?”
Technology has the ability to join us to each other but also to keep us somewhat isolated and anti-social.
At the end of the day, I’m sitting here on the internet, posting music that I was able to record in the comfort of my own home thanks to technology, the internet has helped me discover music and movies and meet people that I might not otherwise have done, so I’m not really proposing some solution, such as returning to pre-industrial revolution era practices... I’m really just having a whinge on the current state of affairs that annoy me but that I also enjoy... confused?  I sure am; thanks technology.

The Convenient Bastard

Tom Waits meets Screaming Jay Hawkins via Ween?

I'd read about how dogs could sense/smell cancer and I thought of all the times a dog had been sniffing around me (as they are wont to do) I thought "wow, imagine if everytime they were sniffing at me it was because they were like 'buddy, what are you going to do about that tumour?'"
so from there (and with the music in place) the mental image came to me of some grizzled old man and his poor pooch who is doomed to be able to sniff out cancer wherever he goes.

TVH "Cancer Sniffing Dog"

short, fast punch of adrenalized rock (well I guess that's what it is anyway)

The Convenient Bastard

Funk-Station

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