Glass Ceiling Records

Community — GCR Song Profile

Song Title: Community
Artist: Protyus
Release Context: A voix‑grave centerpiece from It’s Messy, written as a meditation on the double‑nature of communal life — the place where healing happens and the place where harm concentrates. It sits in your “collective wound / collective repair” arc, naming the truth that community is both medicine and contagion.
Core Themes: belonging, social rupture, mutual care, collective responsibility, structural strain
Emotional Function: Grounds the listener in the reality that community is not an abstract ideal but a living organism — one that hurts, heals, and demands participation.

Survivor Literacy Lens:

Signal: “We are hurting, and the hurt is shared.”
System: The social structures that bind people together while also transmitting inequality, greed, burnout, and inherited wounds.
Repair: Re‑establishing community as a site of mutual aid rather than extraction, and naming that healing requires participation, not perfection.

Why It Resonates:
Listeners feel the tension between longing for connection and the exhaustion of living in systems that fray those connections. The deep vocal register gives the song weight, like a communal chant or a warning bell. It becomes a reminder that community is not passive — it’s a practice, a choice, and a responsibility.

For New Listeners:
This track shows the “communal philosophy” side of your catalog — the songs that function like social theory set to music, blending poetry, critique, and invitation.

Best For:

grounding rituals
community gatherings
moments of reflection on belonging and responsibility

GCR Notes:
The repeated invocation of “Community” acts like a litany, pulling the listener into a shared emotional space. The final refrain — moving from kneeling to healing — frames the song as a call to collective action, not just observation.

Lyrics

Community 

Community 

The glue that runs between you and me 

The answer that could heal everything 

But it’s also the source of the disease 

 

Community 

Behaving between our commonality 

The source of our belonging 

The place we share our hopes and dreams 

 

Community 

Foundation laid beneath our feet 

To give us roots, and set us free 

Through our generations into eternity 

 

Community 

Wrought with symptoms of social disease 

“Can I get a doctor please?” 

Can it be fixed with hands like these? 

 

Community 

Stay true to me 

You don’t have to give until you bleed 

Just show up, fulfill a need 

 

Community 

Undermined by all this greed 

Losing life, with each dime squeezed 

But this has predictable endings 

 

Community 

Can see how bad you’re hurting 

Another page is turning 

In a world that continues burning 

 

Community 

Don’t slip through the cracks, “Can you hear me?” 

Coming together to see things more clearly 

Holding each other close, so dearly 

 

Community 

I won’t lie; it’s messy 

But it’s also the secret to ending 

The problems that this world keeps sending 

 

Community 

It’s up to you and me 

To participate in social healing 

Until we run out of reasons for kneeling 
out of reasons for kneeling
and start healing
until we run out of reasons for kneeling
out of reasons for healing