Queen's Roger Taylor releases protest song Chumps

(Image credit: Lola Leng Taylor)

Queen drummer Roger Taylor has quietly released a new single, Chumps, and it appears to be a barbed commentary aimed at the current resident of 600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC.

The mournful Chumps finds Taylor singing despairingly about "a man of no morality, of no more quality" over gentle washes of synthesiser, and demonstrating some excellent rhyming skills, partnering "treachery" with "lechery" and "pomposity" and "atrocities."

Taylor, who been happily neglecting to keep politics out of his music for several decades, has a history with this sort of thing.

In 2019, he released the state-of-the-nation address Gangsters Are Running This World, while his 1994 album Happiness included both Dear Mr. Murdoch – an attack on media mogul Rupert Murdoch – and the single Nazis 1994, a song railing against the rising tide of neo-Nazism. Dear Mr. Murdoch was subsequently updated in 2011 following the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Taylor also covered John Lennon's protest song Working Class Hero on his 1998 album Electric Fire.

The full lyrics to Chumps are below.

Roger Taylor - Chumps - YouTube

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Roger Taylor - Chumps

A man of no morality
Of no real quality
A shallow man

A man, devoid of empathy
No trace of sympathy
A callow man

A man, with no humanity
Of endless vanity
A swollen man

A one-man calamity, catastrophe
No trace of sanity, an empty shell

We’re drowning in your self regard
We’re drowning in your lies
We drown in your pomposity
In your atrocities
We drown

A man, of truthless vanities
Of countless fantasies
A nothing man

A man, of greed and treachery
Of mindless lechery
No kind of man

You men, of no morality
Your popularity, an endless mystery

Artists

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 40 years in music industry, online for 27. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.

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