From the album Rat Saw God
This is a song about being alive while feeling already dead. The speaker watches their own collapse with the same detachment they bring to watching someone else play a video game. The bull in the opening isn't a metaphor. It's the emotional position from which everything else gets observed.
Got him right between the shoulders / And the bull loses blood / No fight left to give / Can't pull his head up
The song never says who shot the bull or why we're watching it die. But that wounded animal unable to lift its head becomes the template for every image that follows. The speaker identifies with something that's been hit and can't get back up.
Comfort fools us into faith / Then fate pulls us away again / A corpse with a spirit / Got out of my bed today
Getting out of bed is presented as both an achievement and proof of being dead. The logic only works if you understand that survival and being alive are not the same thing. The speaker is narrating their own continuation without believing in it.
Bottles call you from their / Seats on the choir riser / Laid on my back in the / Tepid bathtub water
Bottles get personified and placed in a church while the speaker is horizontal in cooling water. The drunk becomes the congregation. The tub becomes the space where you stop pretending to stand. Wednesday doesn't explain how we got here because the song assumes you already know.
I sat on the stairs with a never-ending nosebleed / You were playing Mortal Kombat / God, make me good, but not quite yet
Augustine's prayer for delayed conversion appears while watching someone execute finishing moves in a fighting game. The speaker wants redemption but not badly enough to stop spectating violence. The nosebleed is never-ending because no one is trying to stop it. It's atmosphere, not emergency.
Finish him / Finish him / Finish him
The Mortal Kombat command loops eleven times. It's the game's instruction to execute a downed opponent, but it doubles as the speaker's relationship to their own survival. They're the bull, the fighter on the ground, and the one calling for the final blow. The song ends by demanding what it's been circling the whole time.
Wednesday writes like someone who knows the difference between being alive and being functional. The bull loses blood in the first verse and the song spends the rest of its runtime proving that wound never closed. By the end, the call to finish him sounds less like a threat and more like a mercy the speaker can't grant themselves.
Bull Believer by Wednesday depicts a state of emotional numbness where the speaker observes their own deterioration with the same distance they'd feel watching someone else play a video game. In Scalpel's line-by-line reading, the bull referenced in the opening establishes the emotional vantage point from which all subsequent observations unfold, rather than functioning as metaphor.
"Bull Believer" by Wednesday explores the bull can't lift its head, getting out of bed proves nothing, church imagery for secular collapse, and spectating your own ending. The central thread is the bull can't lift its head: The opening image of a dying animal sets the emotional position for everything else. These themes come from Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of the lyrics.
"Bull Believer" by Wednesday was released on September 8, 2022 on the album "Rat Saw God". Scalpel's analysis covers the full lyrics of the 2022 release.
Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of "Bull Believer" by Wednesday lands here: Wednesday writes like someone who knows the difference between being alive and being functional. The bull loses blood in the first verse and the song spends the rest of its runtime proving that wound never closed.