I'M NOT FROM AROUND HERE
Words and music by Eric Wrobbel
Description from 
Our culture cripples the emotional development of men. "You gotta be tough," boys are taught from birth. Males are allowed to feel an emotion like anger because it is a "tough" emotion, but for the male almost all other emotions must be suppressed. And to make it unanimous, most women have completely bought into this expectation of what it means to be a man. It is as much the mothers as the fathers who pass this on to their children. And it is the potential girlfriends and wives who reinforce it, reliably choosing the aggressive man, the cowboy, the arrogant, commanding, sure-of-himself male over the sensitive man.
Sensitivity equals weakness in the logic of this culture. (Remember, you "gotta be tough.") While sometimes paying lip service to sensitivity, our culture is engaged in desensitization at every turn. Music, sports, movies, video, gaming--the most popular of pop culture-- all assault the sensitive and pound them into submission. Why does our culture find it necessary to do this? Whose agendas are advanced by this desensitization? The two most obvious are corporations and the military. Think of the many ways they profit from the "tough." Then consider the ways the sensitive man is a threat to this worldview, indeed, in the case of the military and its warmongering, a threat to their very existence.
Generation after generation, we look the other way and fail to see the connection between this desensitization and the stunted, isolated, and abusive men it produces.
"I'm Not From Around Here" is a declaration that it is all right to choose a different path, to refuse to conform to this destructive social norm. This quiet yet powerful song reveals the emasculation of the male's emotional life for what it is: a con. This song encourages the listener to stop being had.
About Eric Wrobbel
This songwriter, artist, musician and humorist has written and produced hundreds of interesting tracks for himself and others in his long, eclectic career. Rarely performing live, he has almost exclusively focused his musical efforts as a studio artist, working in a wide range of styles that have variously been described as rock, folk, country, psych, humor, and pop.
©Copyright 2007-2021 Eric Wrobbel. All rights reserved.