Can't Prove a Hunger at a Rich Man's Table
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
I proved it in my mansion, every shelf stacked to the beam
I proved it in my mansion, every shelf stacked to the beam
Nothin' in that house was missin', so it sailed through like a dream
You can't prove a hunger at a rich man's table
No, you can't prove a hunger at a rich man's table
Take it down where the cupboard's empty, prove it there if you're able
Then the shack out on the bayou sent the bill back to my door
Yeah, the shack out on the bayou sent the bill back to my door
Same empty can, same hollerin', same as it was before
You can't prove a hunger at a rich man's table
No, you can't prove a hunger at a rich man's table
Take it down where the cupboard's empty, prove it there if you're able
Ask yourself, if you were wrong, what would your test have said?
If it pass you either way, brother, that pass is good as dead
A pass that couldn't fail is a loan you can't repay
Everybody down the line thinks the trouble went away
So strip them shelves down bare, watch the trouble come around
Then fix it where it hurt you, on the poor side of town
The poor man's kitchen tells the truth
Yeah, the poor man's kitchen tells the truth, now collect!
The band
The Technical Debt Collectors
A gravelly, swaggering voice calling out over a band that struts. Twelve-bar phrasing with a repeated opening line, and a lyric that is all debt, interest, collection and somebody eventually paying.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post Your Machine Has Too Much Installed To Test That Fix.
A fix for a missing dependency can't be proven on a machine that has everything installed, so the verifying environment needs to be at least as poor as the one that failed.