Gabriel Kahane - Villains (4616 Dundee Dr.) Lyrics

Why do villains
Always live in houses
Built by modernist masters?

A dithering police force
A mutant sprung from a cage
A giant half man horse
A frustrated actor on a spitball rampage!
Are you nostalgic for a time
When you could put a face to ev'ry crime And the violence was as wholesome
As it was imaginative, baby?
How would you feel
If we moved into
The house where they shot Pulp Fiction?
We'd put the nursery Where Uma OD'd
A reminder of greed Of the dangers of Heroin addiction.
A cantilevered beachhouse
With clerestory windows
An open air sleeping porch
Frank Lloyd Wright built a whole loa bungalows!
Rudy Schindler and Neutra
They had a great big falling out Two great architects
Let me tell what that was all about
Is something absent in design
Where the heart is mastered by the line And all you've got is the reflection
Of what's on the outside, impure?
Say, all these houses look the same
The uniform of steel in ev'ry frame
You could think about a lot of things Waiting for the concrete to cure.
I've been thinking a lot
About action movies of the 1980's Particularly Die Hard,
Which seems to illustrate
So many of the anxieties

Central to a time + place:
Japanese capital
The waning of the cold war Pride in a downtown
What did they build it for?
Risen from the ashes
of a once great neighborhood All the ghosts of Bunker Hill Who needs history
Was history ever any good?
Are you nostalgic for a time
When art + commerce toed the line When entertainment had an easy smile As it looked upon you, too?
Back then Bruce Willis had some hair He smoked in airports, no one cared And in the end, Alan Rickman
fell out of a window, boo hoo
Are you nostalgic for a time
When you could put a face to ev'ry crime And the violence was as wholesome
As it was imaginative, baby?