It’s the way they danced in Hungary in nineteen-fifty-seven
When the slow-revolving couples knew they had no hope of heaven
Neither here and now, nor never, nor in any world to come
When all hope of change is quenched beneath the beat of martial drum
Then it’s the slow mazurka
Dystopian grimy and grey
And when you dance mazurka
You are dancing the future away.
It’s the way they danced in Prague that winter, nineteen sixty-nine
With the river frozen like the hopes they knew to keep in line
And the dances of the West are free but cost too much to dare
So they dance the old mazurka while the tanks are sitting there
They dance the slow mazurka
Dystopian grimy and grey
And when you dance mazurka
You are dancing the future away.
From Berlin to Vladivostok people learned to dance this way
When repression closes in is when the band begins to play
Striking up the slow mazurka while the hope goes out the door
Until all of Eastern Europe takes their turns upon the floor
They dance the slow mazurka
Dystopian grimy and grey
And when you dance mazurka
You are dancing the future away.
And then they changed the rhythm, changed the beat, tore down the wall
In nineteen-eighty-nine no grim mazurkas played at all
Threw out tyrants, threw out water, threw out lots of babies too
Built some Starbucks and McDonalds to be free the same as you
With no more slow mazurka
Dystopian grimy and grey
For when you dance mazurka
You are dancing the future away.
What they wanted was more options, and the options they could see
Beat mazurkas, but they weren’t the promised dream democracy
And a choice is not the choice of which potato chips to buy
And there’s more than one dystopia and more than one bright lie
Buy just one slow mazurka
Dystopian shiny and new
For when you dance mazurka
You’ll forget that the future is you.
17th March 2010
