In a fantasy that could only be dreamt up by politically frustrated musicians in a quarantine, Austin duo Dumb transmits COVID-19 to the man who’s led the state’s substandard coronavirus response.
Dumb, a longstanding lo-fi rock project involving Croy & the Boys frontman Corey Baum and drummer Michael Pierce, today floats that scenario with “I Gave Greg Abbott the Coronavirus.” The track arrives with a video combining puppetry and paper animation, created by the art team at Hovercraft Records.
In one particularly memorable animated sequence, Baum coughs colorful coronavirus germs on Abbott, who instantly withers into a skeleton. He’s then hauled into an ambulance, which arrives to an emergency room with a sign reading “no beds,” so the ambulance instead drives off a cliff.
Meanwhile, the bandleader sings:
Yeah, I walked right up to him,
And I pulled my mask aside.
I said, ‘I cough on you
For the sick and the blue,
The poor, the weak, the downtrodden, too.’
And I coughed and I sneezed, and I spit and I wheezed.
As his henchmen carried me away, I sang,
’I gave Greg Abbott the coronavirus and he fuckin’ died.’
Baum continues to livestream weekly via his Sunday morning series, Coffee with Croy, where you can drink in his humor, politics, and songwriting. “I Gave Greg Abbott the Coronavirus” premieres here:
This article appears in July 31 • 2020.