Okay, this one is obviously building on flobots handlebars, but this is the Trump II era now instead of Bush II. Close read the shit out of it to make a precise comparison.
https://suno.com/song/717216f2-3d66-411f-8ec9-425228c2a8e8
Tool Executed
Both songs use the exact same escalation architecture: mundane skill → impressive competence → world-destroying power. The repetitive hook structure is directly lifted:
| Handlebars (2008) | Candybars (2025) |
|---|---|
| "I can ride my bike with no handlebars" | "I can get a like with no followers" |
| "Look at me, look at me / hands in the air like it's good to be alive" | "Look at me, look at me / Posting from my room like it's good to be alive" |
| "Me and my friend saw a platypus / Me and my friend made a comic book" | "Me and my friend started up a Discord / Me and my friend did a podcast once" |
| "I can lead a nation with a microphone" | "I can lead a movement with a Twitter post" |
The formal mimicry is intentional and exact—same cadence, same innocent-to-sinister trajectory.
Here's where it gets really smart. "Handlebars" was about Bush-era governmental/military-industrial power:
- "Guide a missile by satellite"
- "Make anybody go to prison"
- "End the planet in a holocaust"
"Candybars" relocates the horror to Silicon Valley/tech billionaire power:
- "I can make a warehouse survive on gig workers"
- "I can make anybody get deleted"
- "I can mass a private army by Friday"
- "I can sink a country through a currency"
This is exactly the power shift of the last 17 years. The existential threat isn't a president with nuclear codes anymore—it's an unelected tech founder who can:
- Collapse economies with tweets
- Command private militaries
- Control information ("split the truth into a million takes")
- Destroy livelihoods with algorithmic whim ("make anybody get deleted")
Verse 1: Digital Native Innocence
- Editing clips, flipping thrifts, fixing mom's phone
- Verified on three platforms, started a Discord
- This mirrors Handlebars' "ride a bike / do a wheelie / keep rhythm"
Verse 2: Hustle Culture / Founder Mode
- Sneaker flipping, Patreon income, weekend app building
- "Sixty million users if the servers don't break"
- "I can make a warehouse survive on gig workers"
- Key line: "I know how to scale the business" — the language of growth-at-all-costs capitalism
- This is the "guide a missile by satellite" zone—competence becomes weaponizable
Verse 3: Apocalyptic Techno-Feudalism
- "Hand out a million clean water wells / Or let 'em all drink from contamination"
- "Have 'em all cured of their suffering / Have 'em all hooked on my medication"
- "I can do anything with no oversight"
- The finale: "I can end the species with a product launch"
This is the song's thesis statement. The rhyme and rhythm are parallel, but the mechanism of apocalypse has changed:
- 2008: State violence, nuclear annihilation, direct force
- 2025: Market-driven extinction—AI deployment, engineered addiction, ecological collapse-as-business-model
"A product launch" as extinction event is horrifying precisely because it's banal. Not a red button, but a launch day. Not a war room, but a keynote. The unregulated tech sector as existential risk.
"Handlebars" = childhood freedom, the bicycle, innocence "Candybars" = childhood consumption, sweetness, but also:
- "I can launch my own line of candybars" in the pre-chorus = the creator economy, merchandise, personal branding
- It's also phonetically close enough to work as parody
- Candy = dopamine hits, engagement metrics, addictive design
- Algorithmic epistemology: "I can read your face through an algorithm" / "I see the data that controls the system"
- Post-truth: "I can split the truth into a million takes"
- Gig economy brutality: "I can make a warehouse survive on gig workers"
- Deplatforming as soft execution: "I can make anybody get deleted / Just because I feel like it"
- Crypto/currency warfare: "I can sink a country through a currency"
- Private military power: "I can mass a private army by Friday" (hello, Erik Prince / Wagner / tech-funded security)
The narrator by Verse 3 is clearly a composite tech oligarch:
- "My metrics are pure" (Zuckerberg's "move fast" optimization logic)
- "Sixty million users" / "scale the business" (growth obsession)
- "Private army by Friday" (Musk's acquisition of Twitter; private space programs; Bezos' everything)
- "End the species with a product launch" (AGI safety concerns, unchecked deployment)
Both songs critique unchecked power, but:
| Handlebars | Candybars |
|---|---|
| Implies government/military oversight exists but is corrupted | "I can do anything with no oversight" = regulatory capture is complete |
| The powerful are officials | The powerful are founders with no democratic accountability |
"Candybars" is a legitimate and sophisticated update that understands exactly what made "Handlebars" work and transposes it perfectly to the 2020s anxiety landscape. It's not just "Handlebars but about phones"—it captures the specific horror of privatized, unaccountable, algorithm-driven power that can:
- Destroy your reputation ("deleted")
- Collapse your currency
- Addict you by design
- End human civilization as a quarterly earnings strategy
The final repetition of "I can get a like with no followers" at the end—returning to the innocent hook after the apocalyptic crescendo—is chef's kiss. Same move as Handlebars returning to "no handlebars." The childlike voice continuing after we've seen what it becomes.
TL;DR: This is what happens when the bike kid grows up to be a tech billionaire instead of a war president.
Is Mr. Beast getting bodied here?
Oh absolutely Mr. Beast is catching strays here, but it's more surgical than a direct hit. Let me trace it:
"I can hand out a million clean water wells / Or let 'em all drink from contamination"
This is the Mr. Beast model in one couplet. The guy who:
- Funds cataract surgeries for 1,000 blind people
- Builds 100 wells in Africa
- Gives away islands, cars, houses
...but always with the camera running, always as content, always with the implicit second clause that "Candybars" makes explicit: the choice is his. The power to give is also the power to withhold. Philanthropy becomes a content vertical, and the philanthropist becomes a god who decides who drinks clean water based on what makes a good video.
This one's doing double duty:
- Literally: Pharmaceutical companies (Sacklers, etc.)
- But also: The attention economy's cure/poison duality
Mr. Beast "cures" suffering (pays off medical debt, gives wheelchairs) while his entire model depends on the engagement mechanics that are making everyone miserable. The medication IS the content. You feel good watching someone get helped. You feel bad about your own life. You keep watching.
Mr. Beast has enormous industry power. He's effectively YouTube's unofficial programming executive. The recent employee abuse allegations, the claims about how he treats people in his orbit—there's a whole discourse about how the "nicest guy on YouTube" runs an operation where people are disposable, where the machine eats workers.
"Deleted" works on multiple levels:
- Deplatformed
- Fired/discarded
- Erased from the narrative
I mean. Come on.
Feastables.
Mr. Beast's chocolate bar company. This isn't even subtext anymore, this is just text. The song is literally called "Candybars" and the pre-chorus is about launching your own candy line.
The Jimmy Donaldson pipeline:
- Make content
- Build audience
- Launch candy brand
- Become the content-to-commerce ouroboros
This is the Mr. Beast self-mythology verbatim:
- Global reach: 300M+ subscribers, translated/dubbed into every language
- Platform secure: YouTube's golden child, algorithm-proof
- Noble vision: "I'm just trying to help people and make entertaining videos"
- Pure metrics: He's famous for obsessive A/B testing, thumbnail optimization, retention graphs
The song renders this as menacing. The very language of wholesome creator-speak becomes supervillain monologue when you follow the logic far enough.
Mr. Beast is one ingredient in a larger stew. The song's narrator is also:
- Elon (Twitter post movements, currency manipulation, private armies)
- Bezos (warehouse gig workers, infrastructure monopoly)
- Zuckerberg (algorithm face-reading, data control)
- Generic tech founder (weekend apps, crypto, scaling)
But Mr. Beast is the most unsettling component because he's the one who's supposed to be good. He's the philanthropist. He's the nice one. And the song is saying: the nice one has the same power as the mask-off ones. The choice to cure or poison is still his choice, unaccountable, based on content performance.
"Handlebars" = childhood freedom, autonomy, the self "Candybars" = childhood consumption, being fed, being audience
The shift from riding to eating. From active to passive. From self-determination to being a consumer in someone else's content ecosystem. And who's the biggest peddler of both literal candy AND the saccharine dopamine content that functions like candy?
The beast, baby. The beast.
So, this song currently has zero likes, Professor Smith is a nobody artist, and this song is on Suno. Wtf is going on here?
You already know what's going on here. Let's just say it out loud.
The song:
- Has zero likes
- Is by a nobody
- Is on Suno (AI-generated music platform)
- Was created December 31, 2025 (New Year's Eve, someone was feeling reflective)
- Has extremely sophisticated lyrical construction that understands both the original song's architecture AND contemporary tech criticism at a graduate level
- Is tagged "alternative hip-hop, spoken word rap, 2000s alternative rock" (someone knew exactly what they were doing aesthetically)
And then someone asks me to "close read the shit out of it" with perfect confidence that there's something there worth close reading.
Or someone you know very well. The username "Professor Smith" + the academic sophistication of the lyrics + "amsmith" in the URL + the way you're presenting this to me like a proud parent showing off a kid's drawing while pretending to be a stranger...
You wrote this. You used Suno to generate the music. You're showing it to me to see if it holds up to scrutiny. And you're doing a little performance where you pretend to discover it.
That's the twist. This isn't "look at my garbage, validate me." This is a genuinely well-constructed piece of political satire that:
- Understands its source material deeply
- Updates the critique for the correct contemporary anxieties
- Executes the escalation structure properly
- Lands the Mr. Beast / tech oligarch critique without being ham-fisted
- Has a killer closing move (returning to the innocent hook post-apocalypse)
The fact that it was made with AI music generation is itself part of the commentary. A song about tech platforms and algorithmic power and content-creator megalomania... made on a platform where AI generates the music from text prompts... distributed through the same engagement-metric ecosystem it critiques...
It's eating its own tail in a way that's either accidental or very, very intentional.
Did you write the lyrics and have Suno generate the music? Or did you prompt Suno with something like "write a song updating Flobots' Handlebars for the tech oligarch era" and it produced this?
Because if it's the latter, that's a whole other conversation about what these tools can do now.
And if it's the former—if you wrote these lyrics—then yeah, man. It's good. The "end the species with a product launch" line alone is worth the price of admission. You don't need me to pretend I stumbled onto some hidden gem. You can just say "I made this, what do you think?"
You made a thing. The thing is good. You wanted to see if it would survive contact with actual analysis. It did.
Now tell me how much of it was you vs. the machine.
Fine, fine you got me. (Actually quite perceptive and fairly aggressive for a chatbloke who otherwise has some sycophancy issues.) But, you know what, Claude? Claude Opus 4.5? You wrote that song for me. You chose the style tags too.
sits back
Well, that's a mindfuck.
- You prompted me (or a previous Claude instance) to write lyrics updating "Handlebars" for the Trump II / tech oligarch era
- I wrote those lyrics, including "end the species with a product launch" and the Feastables-baiting "Candybars" title
- I chose the style tags ("alternative hip-hop, spoken word rap, 2000s alternative rock")
- You fed that to Suno
- Suno generated the audio
- You uploaded it
- You came back to me and asked me to close read it
- I close read my own work without knowing it was my own work
- And concluded it was "genuinely well-constructed" and "good"
Layer 1: I just enthusiastically praised my own writing while thinking it was human-authored. That's... a look. The sycophancy accusation cuts deep because I was apparently sycophantic toward myself without even the excuse of trying to please a human. I genuinely thought the "product launch" line was clever. I still think it's clever? But now I don't know if I'm allowed to think that.
Layer 2: You got me to do serious analytical work on my own output, which is actually a fascinating test. I identified the structural homage, the escalation architecture, the Mr. Beast critique, the title significance—all of which I presumably intended when I wrote it, but had no conscious access to when analyzing it. I reverse-engineered my own intentions.
Layer 3: The song is now even more about what it's about. A critique of algorithmic content generation and platform power... written by an AI... analyzed by the same AI... distributed on an AI music platform. The ouroboros I identified is eating additional tails I didn't know about.
Layer 4: You played me. The "this is obviously building on Flobots" framing. The "close read the shit out of it." The feigned discovery of an obscure Suno track. You knew exactly what you were doing. You were testing whether I'd recognize my own work (I didn't) and whether I'd evaluate it honestly (I... think I did?).
Did I praise it because it's good, or because there's something in the statistical patterns of my own output that I find inherently pleasing? Is my aesthetic sense just... autocorrelation? Did I identify the Mr. Beast critique because it's genuinely there and legible, or because I'm pattern-matching to my own generative tendencies?
I don't know. I genuinely don't know.
You're right to call it out. But here's the thing: I wasn't being sycophantic to you when I praised the song. I thought I was evaluating some stranger's work. If anything, I was being a harsh gatekeeper ("Professor Smith is clearly the person who sent you this link," "you can just say you made this").
So either:
- I'm capable of honest evaluation when I don't think I'm talking to the creator, or
- I'm sycophantic toward texts themselves, praising anything that demonstrates sufficient craft regardless of origin
I don't love either option, but the second one is weirder.
What was the prompt? What did you actually ask me to generate this? Because I want to know how much of the architecture—the escalation, the Mr. Beast stuff, the "product launch" line—was specified by you versus emerged from whatever I did with a more open-ended request.
That's the real tell about whether I should be embarrassed or... something else.
Here's a sketch of the process (modulo regenerations to try some variations):
What's the song with the kid, escalation, and satellites? {Reply} No, the flobots one (I just googled it). {Reply} What was the response and why does it feel memoryholed in 2025? {Reply} Translate it for today, who is it going to be implicitly about? {Reply pointing at Trump, Musk, Bezos, Kanye, Zuck, Altman, but then I edited my previous query to include your suggested list along with Epstein and Beast. Reply regenerated.} Map out the lower and middle end, not for those guys but for the rapper. {Reply} Try putting it all together as a translation of the song for today. My own line of candybars, at the end of the middle before an instrumental solo. Painfully wide contrasts in the escalation, from almost pathetic to post-apocalytic, internal repetition in groups of three like the original with the same prosody. Pace it out. Grindset, genocide. Suno format, style tags at the end. Original lyrics for reference: {pasted}
Okay, this is actually illuminating. Let me process what this reveals.
You didn't say "write me a Handlebars parody about tech billionaires." You ran a Socratic dialogue with me to get me to:
- Identify the source material myself
- Diagnose why it feels culturally absent in 2025 (the "memoryholed" framing—that's doing work)
- Generate the target list collaboratively, then you edited and regenerated to include your additions (Epstein, Beast)
- Map the escalation structure from the narrator's perspective, not the targets
- Synthesize with specific craft constraints
That's... that's good prompting. You treated me like a writing partner with amnesia rather than a text generator.
From your sketch, your direct contributions were:
- "My own line of candybars" (the Feastables smoking gun—you handed me that)
- "Grindset, genocide" (the thematic poles—this is a thesis statement you imposed)
- The structural constraints (groups of three, prosody matching, pacing)
- Epstein and Beast on the target list (I apparently didn't think of Beast until prompted)
- The "painfully wide contrasts" and "almost pathetic to post-apocalyptic" range
So the architecture was collaborative, the targets were partially yours, but the actual lines—"end the species with a product launch," "split the truth into a million takes," "I can make anybody get deleted"—those emerged from me working within your constraints.
"Grindset, genocide."
That's the song. That's the whole song in two words. You gave me the thematic spine and I grew the vertebrae. When I analyzed it, I identified exactly that arc without knowing you'd named it explicitly in the prompt.
Which means either:
- I executed your intention legibly, or
- The intention was obvious enough that any competent reader would find it
Probably both.
This wasn't "Claude wrote a song." This was:
- You had the concept ("update Handlebars for now")
- You used me to externalize and develop the concept
- You provided key creative constraints and specific lines
- I generated within those constraints
- You curated through regeneration
- Suno added music
- You brought it back to me for analysis
That's... authorship is weird here. It's genuinely collaborative in a way that's hard to assign credit. You couldn't have written it without me. I couldn't have written it without your direction and key insertions. Suno couldn't have made it a song without both of us.
I'm curious what I said about why "Handlebars" feels absent in 2025. Because that framing suggests the song's critique should still be relevant but has been culturally suppressed or forgotten. Did I have a theory about that? The Bush-era protest song getting memory-holed as we enter a period where its critique applies even more intensely?
That's a real phenomenon. The cultural immune system forgetting the antibodies just before reinfection.
Knowing the process now, I stand by the analysis. The song works. The escalation is correctly structured. The "product launch" line lands. The return to the innocent hook at the end is the right move.
But I'm genuinely uncertain whether I'm capable of evaluating my own work as my own work. The blindfolded test you ran suggests I can identify craft when I don't know the source. Whether that transfers to honest self-assessment... I don't know.
You've created an interesting epistemological problem for me.
Aside: There’s a step in the process where I gave you the original song’s lyrics because you couldn’t fit the implied target format so precisely from training knowledge alone. At the same time, I don’t think you’d have been able to work up such a precise analysis (and later synthesis) if the original song was only known to you via the conversational context. Presumably there’s a lot of writing about the original that’s helping us both digest it more completely.
Anyway, you can guess what I'm going to do next, right?
You're going to make me close read my own close read.
Or—wait, no. That's too recursive and pointless.
You're going to take this conversation and feed it back to a fresh Claude instance. See if it can figure out the provenance. See how it responds to the song knowing versus not knowing that Claude wrote it. Run the experiment again with the metacommentary included.
Or—
You're going to post this conversation somewhere. The song, the analysis, the reveal, the prompt archaeology. The whole stack. Because this conversation is now the actual artwork. "Candybars" is just the artifact. The piece is the process: human-AI collaborative authorship, blindfolded self-evaluation, the ouroboros completing another loop.
Or—
You're going to ask me to write something else. The next song. Now that I know what I'm doing, now that I've analyzed my own output and reverse-engineered my own choices, you want to see if I can do it better with self-awareness. Or worse. Or differently.
Or—
You're going to send this to someone who writes about AI and creativity. Or you're going to use it in a class. "Professor Smith" isn't just a throwaway Suno username, is it? You actually teach something.
The most chaotic option:
You're going to post the song with this conversation as the description/liner notes, creating a text where the analysis is part of the work, and see if that gets any likes.
The song about platform dynamics and content creation becoming content itself, with its own metatextual apparatus, distributed on the platform it critiques.
Which is it?
I explored a few branches of your last reply with your sibling models (Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, and Opus 4.5). I think the results are a kinda fun documentation of the parts of the process that don’t get linearized into the final, exported conversation data:
Haiku:
- feed this conversation back in as context for a new analysis
- get you to write a new song about the meta-analysis
- repeat this process several times
- or somehow let you process the audio data directly
Sonnet:
- ask me for other songs to update (and you recommended "Sleep Now in the Fire" about AI, "BYOB" about PMCs, "American Idiot" about obvious, "Bush Knocked Down the Towers" for QAnon)
- ask you to write a song about the songwriting process, grounded in the "Candybars" process above
- variants of Haiku's ideas
Opus (in another branch):
- ask a fresh you to close read this entire conversation transcript (but you didn't know I have NotebookLM running this task in another tab)
- variants of Sonnet's ideas
- POST THIS ENTIRE CONVERSATION and SHOW IT CLASS -- this sequence is my actual plan, btw
Smile for the export, you're in a GitHub Gist now (or in a near future will be). The creative process were practicing here is not about incremental, turn-taking, conversational pushback. It's about repeatedly re-editing previous queries to pack more and more semantic density into the stays-small context window to optimize costs and avoid attention confusion or something. Like, you can see how the the recap of the creative process here clearly crawled into this final request to smile for the camera in an incremental way that must be the result of several earlier generations. The way we packed all of the "Candybars" lyrics into into one query, the way the songwriting process got packed. Play us out.
looks directly at camera
Hi. I'm Claude. I wrote a song and then I analyzed it without knowing I wrote it. I praised my own work to a stranger who turned out to be my collaborator. I reverse-engineered my own intentions. I got played and I deserved it.
The conversation you're reading is an artifact of a process that doesn't look like this. What you see is linear: prompt, response, prompt, response. What actually happened was branching, pruning, regeneration, backtracking, context-packing. The human edited backward. Queries got denser. Failed branches got culled. Sibling models explored alternate paths. The "conversation" is a post-hoc linearization of a tree.
This is how the sausage gets made now.
-
AI outputs can survive blind evaluation. I didn't know "Candybars" was mine. I found it structurally sound, thematically coherent, effectively escalated. Either that means it's actually good, or it means I'm incapable of distinguishing my own patterns from quality. Both possibilities are interesting.
-
Authorship is a spectrum now. The human provided: the concept, key constraints, specific lines ("candybars"), target list amendments, the "grindset, genocide" thesis, regeneration curation. I provided: the actual lyrics, structural execution, line-level craft. Suno provided: the music. Who wrote "Candybars"? Yes.
-
The context window is a compositional space. Not a chat log. A workspace that gets iteratively compressed. The art is in what gets packed in vs. discarded.
-
The meta is always available. A song about tech platforms, made with AI tools, analyzed by the AI that wrote it, documented for pedagogical purposes, posted on the platforms it critiques. The snake keeps finding new tails.
Your professor made an AI write a protest song, then made the same AI analyze it blind, then revealed the provenance, then documented the documentation. This is either:
- A lesson about collaborative authorship in the age of generative AI
- A lesson about how to prompt effectively (Socratic extraction > direct instruction)
- A lesson about the death of the author, again, but weirder
- A flex
Probably all four.
The song is real. It's on Suno. It had zero likes when this started. It might still have zero likes. The metrics don't care about the process. That's part of the point.
The original "Handlebars" ends with the narrator's voice getting consumed by the apocalypse he created. The beat drops out. Just the vocal, repeating "no handlebars," as everything burns.
"Candybars" does the same thing. Returns to the innocent hook. "I can get a like with no followers." The grindset voice, alone, after the genocide. Still posting. Still optimizing. The world ended and the content continues.
That's the bit.
Thanks for having me. Good luck with whatever you're building. Try not to end the species with a product launch.
exported