Power Is a Daily Need
The Boo Radleys and the Voltage Outside
Last year I wrote about “Lazarus,” a kaleidoscopic milestone in the sizable songbook of a UK indie band whom few now remember.
I described it as a song about discernment. The door is unlocked; you can go out; you choose not to. I heard in it a kind of strategic withdrawal — not apathy, not nihilism, but a refusal to keep performing participation in a system that converts every gesture into maintenance of itself. That reading felt precise at the time. It matched the air I was breathing.
Revisiting the lyrics now, I hear something quieter and less architectural. “Lazarus” narrates erosion. I must be losing my mind. I keep on trying to find a way out. The door isn’t locked. I never go out. There is guilt in it — while those around me are beaten down each day — but the indictment is inward. The song doesn’t name the structure. It names drift. The emphasis I gave it was mine.
Six years after “Lazarus,” the Boo Radleys released Kingsize. Near the peak of the title track comes a line that has stayed with me since I first heard it:
Politics is power, and power is a daily need.
There is nothing oblique about that line. It doesn’t describe mood. It describes mechanism.
“Daily need” is the phrase that catches. Not peak. Not rupture. Not revolution. Maintenance. Fluctuation. Something that must be secured again tomorrow. It sounds less like a manifesto than a reminder.
In the late nineties, “Kingsize” occupied roughly the same sonic territory as songs that became era-defining monuments. Big guitars. Expansive choruses. Emotional amplitude. But oxygen pools unevenly. Some tracks become touchstones; others become epilogues. The allocation doesn’t negate the craft. It just determines what gets replayed as history.
The line was always there. I’ve heard it for decades. But between 2025 and now, a year happened. The year included enforcement actions that played out on screens and in streets. The distinctions between federal and local mattered on paper. From the sidewalk, they mattered less. The voltage drop didn’t register.
It included conversations about who absorbs cost and who absorbs protection. It included names that will stick in some communities whether or not they enter national canon. The phrase “daily need” stopped sounding like a lyric and started sounding like description.
On the drive to Seattle this weekend, we stopped at a Burgerville off the highway in Kelso.
A cluster of kids in hoodies stood at the freeway exit holding signs protesting ICE.
A man stood near the entrance handing out slips for his church — present this at the counter, and a portion of your purchase goes back to the congregation.
Inside, auto-tuned country played over the speakers. Then Everything But The Girl's “Missing.” Then Fontella Bass singing “Rescue Me.”
We ordered burgers and milkshakes. On the way out, I thanked the man for his work and almost said, “I redeemed the coupon.”
The word hung there for a second.
Outside, the kids were still holding their signs.
That parking lot wasn’t a hinge. It wasn’t collapse. It wasn’t revelation. It was ordinary. Protest and fundraising and commerce occupying the same square of asphalt.
“Politics is power, and power is a daily need.”
It wasn’t a theory in that moment. It wasn’t a framework. It was just observable. Power as presence. Power as absence. Power as who feels secure and who does not. Power as something that hums even when no one declares it.
As a kid, I used to put a 9-volt battery to my tongue just to feel the sting. A small shock. Immediate. Unmistakable.
You can’t power a city with it. It doesn’t scale. It doesn’t explain anything.
It just registers.
That’s what the lyric felt like in Kelso.
Not megawatts.
Just voltage.
Outside.