Slave to the Wage

This song is about the ennui of a typical job in the modern world, and how we should take care not to work ourselves to death. Placebo frontman Brian Molko told Alternative Press in 2001: "The song tells you to be an individual, believe in yourself and have the courage to chase your dreams. If you do, the rewards at the end are tenfold versus doing what your parents tell you to do. Get a good job, get married, have 2.4 children, 1.2 goldfish, 3.6 cars... To a lot of people, that's the epitome of personal success. Which is why so many people get through a mid-life crisis. People reach a point in their lives and go, 'Is this it?'"

The line, "Sick and tired of Maggie's farm" is a reference to Bob Dylan's song "Maggie's Farm," which has a similar theme.

This samples the intro of Pavement's "Texas Never Whispers" from their 1992 Watery, Domestic EP. In a 2017 Vice interview, Molko shared why he chose the sample: "I was just a huge fan. It comes from the B-sides album and I just really liked this abstract guitar that was going on. It's much slower in its original state. We just looped it and sped it up really fast, at least ten times faster than the original. Again, it was sampling, which was something we had never done before. At the time, it was a great motivator for us. We didn't want to do what we'd done on the last record."