There aren't enough songs sublimely conveying universal feelings of dislocation using a slightly obscure literary reference as lyrical lynchpin. Some background from New York Magazine's review of Michel Houellebecq's H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is useful for context:
In Houellebecq’s reading, Lovecraft was initiated into the secrets of the vile by his disastrous move from Rhode Island to Brooklyn in 1924. He did it for love: At the age of 30, he’d married an older woman, Sonia Haft Greene, who was both Jewish and divorced (no small thing, Houellebecq points out, “for a conservative anti-Semite”). But affection, which had taken him this far, could take him no further. In the metropolis, he was jostled and out-hustled by immigrants and “negroes” and could not find work. “My coming to New York,” one of Lovecraft’s narrators concludes, “had been a mistake.” In that story, the hero is shown a terrifying vision of the future by a demon in Greenwich Village; in real life, the desperate Lovecraft and Sonia were forced to sell their furniture. For some time, he had to live alone in Red Hook. Two years later, utterly defeated, he left. The marriage failed.
Now to delve into what Lovecraft, in top spine-tingling form, called the "Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid" lower east side:
The Mountain Goats - Lovecraft In Brooklyn
Gonna be too hot to breathe today
But everybody is out here on the streets
Somebody has opened up the fire hydrant
Cold water rushing out in sheets
Some kid in a Marcus Allen jersey
Asks me for a cigarette
Companionship is where you find it
So I take what I can get
Lovecraft on the car-length funhouse mirrors
I stick to the shadows when I can
Lovecraft in Brooklyn
Well the sun goes down
The armies of the voiceless
Several hundred-thousand strong
Come without their bandages
Their voices raised in song
When the street lights sputter out
They make this awful sizzling sound
I cast my gaze towards the pavement
Too many bloodstains on the ground
Rhode Island drops into the ocean
No place to call home anymore
Lovecraft in Brooklyn
Head outside most everyday to try to keep the wolves away
Imagine nice things I might say
If company should come
Woke up afraid of my own shadow
Like, genuinely afraid
Headed for the pawnshop
To buy myself a switchblade
Someday something's coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here
It will store our brains in mason jars
And then the girl behind the counter asks "How do you feel today?"
"I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn!"
Yeah!
