Elvis Costello - How To Be Dumb lyrics

I was hell-bent on destroying my powers of concentration

While you were living like a saint

And all the time the very one you trusted was washing off

somebody else's paint

Now you've got yourself a brand new occupation

Every fleeting thought is a pearl

And beautiful people stampede to the doorway

of the funniest fucker in the world

They're here to help you

Satisfy your desire

There's a bright future for all you professional liars

CHORUS

Now you know how to be dumb

Are you ready to take your place in the modern museum of mistakes?

Don't you know how to be dumb?

Like a building thrown up overnight in one of those reverse earthquakes

They emptied out all the asylums, they emptied out all the gaols

The "New Bruise" was the name of a dance craze

By "Jesus Cross and the Cruel Nails"

Followed up by "Torturing Little Beaver"

With their contraption of barbed wire

Between the fear and the fever lies all the rejection they require

They'll be howling by midnight, they'll be drooling by dawn

Skulls shrunk down to the size of their brains

Heads shaven and shorn

CHORUS

Trapped in the House of the Perpetual Sucker

Where bitterness always ends so pitifully

You always had to dress up your envy in some half-remembered

philosophy

Now you're masquerading as pale powdered genius

Whose ever bad intention has been purged

You could've walked out any time you wanted but face it you

didn't have the courage

I guess that makes you a full time hypocrite or some kind of

twisted dilettante

Funny though people don't usually get so ugly 'til they think

they know what they want

Scratch your own head stupid

Count up to three

Roll over on your back

Repeat after me

Don't you know how to be dumb?

Are you ready to take your place in the modern museum of mistakes?

Don't you know how to be dumb?

Like a building thrown up overnight in one of those reverse earthquakes