Bound For The Floor

This song has been interpreted a number of ways, but when we spoke with Local H frontman Scott Lucas, he attributed the lyric to clever wordplay. "I love words that nobody uses anymore," he said. "That crops up over and over in our songs. Phrases and words that have been tossed on the scrap heap of linguistics. 'Copacetic' was a word I'd heard in war movies about Vietnam." The other inspiration was the rock band Velocity Girl, who released an album in 1993 called Copacetic. "It was a way to reintroduce a dead word and give a shout out to Velocity Girl," Lucas said. "Plus, it rhymes with 'pathetic.'"

Lucas, who wrote this song with his bandmate Joe Daniels (the drummer and only other member of the group at the time), came up with the guitar riff at his apartment in Zion, Illinois. "I would hang out all day playing guitar and watching stolen cable on a cheater box," he said in his Songfacts interview. "I had come across stacked 5th chords from learning to play Police songs, and I was f--king around with this moving bass line thing that I was trying to perfect because of my guitar setup. I figured I'd mash them together. That basically took care of the riff."

The title does not appear in the lyric, but alludes to the first line in the song: "Born to be down." There is a lot of loathing going on, which could be someone talking to himself, or a conversation between two people. It seems the singer has become apathetic (a common theme in rock music of this era) and feels beaten down. The chorus, which could be his voice or that of a friend, could be either mocking him or echoing his sentiment: You just don't get it You keep it copacetic