'Keep Myself Among?'

yeah, that bit kinda bugged me... I've always thought that it was ''Keep myself from harm'' 0_o"



'And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high saying, O Lord bless this thy hand grenade'

I was very curious about this as well! Most lyric websites seem to list it as "to keep myself from harm." I'd love to give Damon the benefit of the doubt but who knows?

The blow-hard egotists and power mongers in comfy "palaces" only start wars---they don't fight them. This difference in lyrics is significant because it changes the mood entirely; "to keep me from harm" would make it seem like the narrator feels separate and isolated from local people on the ground; "To keep myself among" puts the soldier in the same boots as the locals and civilians.

Soldiers and civilians alike, while they do their "duty", surely experience moments when they stop and think about what it is they're actually doing. The soldier in the song is singing with a kind of quiet reluctance---he's in the desert, carrying a gun, biding his time until he fights, is killed or someone else is killed. And the pointlessness of it all kind of hits him; all the talking-head noise and fluff that's going-on around the war is a world away from them. The ideals that sent him there, might feel like a hazy dream from another time. He's on the ground, waiting to fight, when he'd much rather be living his life away from war--when "all [he] wants to do is dance".

It's the young, "little people" that charge into battle or underprivileged civilians who are manipulated into blowing themselves up "for a cause", while the people who send them are usually highly protected and surrounded by both sychophants and luxury. Like Albarn said: The song is pacifist.