The song’s territory is the murky ground between truth, obedience and consent. Psychologists divide conformity into two kinds. The normative kind is going along to be accepted, privately disagreeing while your hand goes up with everyone else’s. The informational kind is what happens in genuine uncertainty, when other people’s behaviour becomes your evidence about what is real. Most of life is a blend of the two, and they come apart only when someone stops and thinks for themselves. That pause is what herbie the rabbit is after. Someone told you a version of the story that wasn’t true, and the song asks whether you are to blame for not having a clue. It gives you no comfortable answer.<\/p>
Two old arguments hover over it. Kant called immaturity the inability to use your own understanding without another’s guidance, and insisted it was self-imposed, a product of laziness and cowardice rather than incapacity. Burke made the opposing case: inherited custom is distilled wisdom, and the lone reasoner is often a fool where accumulated practice is sage. The song sits in the gap between them and refuses to cheat. Suppose Burke is right and the village knows something you don’t. Suppose Kant is right and you are simply afraid. From inside the crowd the two feel identical, and that is the horror of it. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is the nearest literary cousin, a story about how politely everyone gathers.<\/p>
Lilith, the first witch, supplies the mythology. Made from the same earth as Adam, she claims equality, is refused, speaks the secret name of God and takes flight into the night. The cover borrows Rossetti’s *Lady Lilith*. The Pre-Raphaelites made her a gorgeous, dangerous ornament, and herbie restores her as the wronged party, a woman whose crime was forbidden knowledge and a refusal to kneel. Her defiance became the template for every witch hunted since. The song is quietly furious on her behalf without once delivering a lecture.<\/p>
The fury is credible because of where it comes from. This is the first music Dan Marsh has made entirely alone after his years fronting Ubiquity Machine, and the writing draws on lived experience of ADHD, autism and C-PTSD. Dissociation, hypervigilance and a skewed sense of blame are not decorative themes here. Hypervigilance is, among other things, an education in reading a crowd, and it is hard to hear the song as anything but the work of someone who has learned what a crowd costs. There is no band to hide behind, only the writing and the nerve to sign it, and the sardonic, character-led narration has the steadiness of someone who has stopped apologising for noticing.<\/span><\/p> Jordan Lawlor of M83 sits behind the desk, and the production has the manners to keep its claws sheathed, letting menace arrive as atmosphere rather than volume. That suits a song whose weapon is the raised eyebrow.<\/span><\/p> The subject also lands harder now than it might have a generation ago. Belief gets bent invisibly by feeds, by algorithms and by machine-made plausibility, and the pile-on has never been easier to join or more comfortable to mistake for conscience. “Burn the Witch” is the first release in a planned rollout leading to a full album, with the website and social pages still under construction. It makes a persuasive case for listening early. It is catchy, funny and unsettling, and long after the tune fades you are still asking where you were standing.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/herbietherabbit.com\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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