Hope I Incorporate Before I Get Old

Peter Norvig
3 min readApr 30, 2020

In the 1970’s we thought that our rock and roll icons were leading a revolution against the establishment, and we the fans were part of it. But in 2020, when I see that a Wealth Management company sponsored the Rolling Stones tour and Cadillac has a Led Zeppelin theme song, I realize we’ve all become the bourgeois. So here are some suggested lyric changes for future tours:

The Who

Things they do look awful c-c-c-cold
I hope I incorporate before I get old
To avoid my taxation
To avoid my taxation, baby

The Police

Roxanne
You don’t have to put on the red ink
Those days are over
You don’t have to sell your IRA bonds

Thin Lizzy

Guess who just got back today
Them CPAs that had been away
Foreign junket got them a tax defray
But man, I still think them cats are crazy

The Boss

Oh, so your daddy says he knows that I don’t have any money
Well, tell him this is his last chance to get his daughter in a fine romance
Because a reinsurance company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance
Prices were slashed and the Dow almost crashed, but the Lord had mercy
Xerox machine, she’s a dud, copies are like mud
Somewhere in the office parks of Jersey

The Clash

Darling you got to let me know
Should I check the box in this row?
If you say you are my dear
I’ll be here through the fiscal year
So you got to give me instruction
Should I take you as a tax deduction?

Steppenwolf

Like a culturally privileged child
We were born, born to be mild
We started out so high
We hardly had to try
Born to be mild
Born to be mild

(And if you don’t recognize the songs, congrats! You’re not part of the aging demographic.)

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Peter Norvig

Fellow at Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and a researcher at Google.