My brain feels like a record store after an earthquake. Everything is technically still there, but nothing is where I remember leaving it.
Today is my friend Andy Williams’ memorial service, and I cannot bring myself to find the desire to watch it. It feels like losing Ashley all over again. I lost my editor, my advisor, my chief of staff, my critical-thinking department, my personal anti-depressant comedy hour. But more than anything, I lost the only person I genuinely cared about impressing with my writing. That is a strangely specific kind of loss, because once the person you are unconsciously trying to impress disappears, the entire activity can suddenly feel pointless. My desire to write about metal is just gone. The metaphysical pushback is too much. Even writing this feels like I am wasting my time, which is an impressive level of existential efficiency.
I also cannot get on board with the Ronnie/Serj/Corey skit. Sorry. The repetitious, mundane war cries of somebody pointing fingers and demanding vengeance do not strike me as romantic. They strike me as what happens when everyone has spent so long inside the same argument that the argument becomes the only remaining form of identity. I am equally exhausted by Rock Feed trying so hard to become everyone's best friend. Nobody actually believes Spiritbox wrote a song about him. He believes Spiritbox wrote a song that was somehow directed at him, and that the Grammys were therefore some elaborate middle finger delivered through the medium of modern metal. That is not necessarily what happened. It is simply how his brain has chosen to organize the available evidence, which is basically how the internet works now.
The reaction to the new Slipknot situation was strange, too. I think Sid might be on drugs. I am sure Corey interprets some of this as a middle finger after everything they endured with Paul, and perhaps as a middle finger to his kid and his wife. I am equally sure everyone involved is tired. Maybe they are all just looking toward the exit and this is the final mountain they have to climb before they can finally stop climbing. At a certain point, even a legendary band becomes a group of people who have been doing the same job for so long that nobody remembers what they were trying to accomplish when they started.
And maybe that is what bothers me about this entire era. I loved the early 2000s, but I think a terrorist attack helped create the deeply rooted cultural necessity that followed—the feeling that everything had to mean something, that music had to respond, that the world had become sufficiently terrible that art was obligated to become evidence. This time feels different. This time the objective seems less like surviving the bad guy and more like killing the bad guy. I don't think metal is going to win that particular round. I think the higher power it denies, will.
As much as I hate Finn McKenty's bitterness, he was right about one thing, everyone in this industry is mentally ill. Everyone is lying to themselves about their own popularity. Everyone is simultaneously terrified that nobody cares and convinced that everybody is watching. I have spent enough years inside that machinery to recognize the sound it makes when it begins eating itself.
And I am just over it.
Because there is better music to talk about. There are artists making extraordinary things who are not constantly attempting to position themselves at the metaphysical center of the universe. I don't need to write about any of this for a news outlet. I don't even necessarily need to write about metal.
You know who seems absolutely monumental without behaving like they are trying to become the axis around which culture rotates?
Every single artist on Rhymesayers.
I could kick my own ass until the end of time for not following through, booking Seez Mics and taking over management of Crush Kill Record. I'm gonna start walking back in that direction now to see what I qualify for.
XOXO
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