A Song About Music

Hey y'all, here's a song!  It's about 90s music, and how I got into it.  With some metaphory stuff.  Turned out to be waaaayyyyy shorter than I thought, but I feel like if I bullshat a bunch more verses, it would just get repetitive.

Also, this whole process of recording and uploading this thing has been rife with technical difficulties, soooooo anything you don't like about it, chalk it up to that.

Since my singing voice is stupid-hard to understand (hey, I'm no Aretha Franklin), here's the lyrics.

It started at my school; the chick who looked like Slash
She played the drums to System of a Down
My branches grew from there

I came down with the sickness
But I was brought to life

Offspring, my skatepunk jams; a town that swallows lives
I'm not a fan of sand; a camp for suicides
Oh Stan, why you so mad
Just to try to understand

Jump ahead to school, do not pass GO
There was a Serbian boy who brought me to Nirvana
There's writing on the walls

Jimmy gave me my feelings
They're both inside this box

Our lady Alice of peace; her chains and garden jams
Marilyn's abyss; together ever since
And it stared back at me
And it stared lovingly

Now let's play Spot The Reference!

And by "let us", I mean you do that.

I don't wanna play with you.

That's right.  I heard the stories.

Very special thanks to Tyler Priest, without whom this project would not be possible!  He does music too and he does it better than me, so go check it out right nnaaooooooooo!

Did Linkin Park Kill Nu-Metal?

This is an entry I've been meaning to do for a while, alternately pecking at it and letting it sit because I really, really, really want to do right by what's in my head, not just write the usual drivel like "Uhhhhhh yeahhhh maannn totally, like, stuff, opinion".

But short answer: yes.  They did.

Admittedly, yeah, a lot of nu metal's either silly (Limp Bizkit) or alienating (Korn).  However, we did get some seriously legit music out of the movement, whether it be rife with hooks and poetic lyrics (SOAD and Deftones), some stuff that, despite its harshness, has an artistic and proggy color to its sallow cheeks (Mudvayne, Soulfly).  By the end of the 90s and early 2000s, we're getting some crossover; bands like Disturbed on the radio, Deftones wins a Grammy, little victories like that.  It seems like this stuff could be a lot less niche, like if more artistic minds dabbled into the grungy, oily ore that is the sound I've come to love, then it could be a more appreciated, more established... I don't know, thing.

So we come to the genre's apex, the tipping point before it could be re-upped for the next decade, it's making or breaking point, right before half the bands watered themselves down into post-grunge and the other half flat-out disappeared or stopped caring about gaining new fans.  Hybrid Theory hits it big.

I should've made an outline for this stupid article... argh.  Anyways, soldier on!

So Hybrid Theory does a couple things.  One, it does arguably give the genre a little jolt of life.  By dominating the alternative airwaves, they allowed other such bands (like some of the ones I named above) to stay the "cool thing" for a couple years longer.  Two, it takes the Promethean fire of nu metal and gives it to the Future Scene Kids of America, a big chunk of America's youth that really doesn't get the zeitgeist that this music comes from, something I'm not sure how to feel about, being part of the sub-generation born only a couple short years before Cobain ate gunsmoke, a totally separate chunk of youth that may not be able to call themselves 90s kids, but certainly aren't 2000s kids.  Three, they broadened the definition of "nu metal" (which, in itself, was a broadening of metal), perhaps a bit too much.  What do I mean by that?  Well... I honestly have a really hard time calling them any kind of metal, let alone nu metal.  They're certainly not anymore, but even then...  I mean, you had the attitude, the imagery, harsh + clean vocals, the heavyish guitar, but...  I don't know, I can't quite put my finger on it.  Maybe it's the fact that in place of aggression, they whine and blame, maybe it's the lack of emphasis on riff that their contemporaries have.  Woah now, think about it!  Pretty much all their hooks lie in either Chester's vocals or some electronic trick.  Both are things they do well, but the guitar, more specifically the riff, has always been an integral part of the genre that people associate Linkin Park with, and honestly with them it just sounds a little... thin.  Where the hell was I?

Right, nu metal, dead.  Got it.  So how exactly did Linkin Park derail this once-proud musical mutation?  Not exactly sure...  Shit, maybe it was a death of natural causes and perhaps I'm just blaming LP cuz they're the last and most popular act of a scene they were arguably part of; maybe I'm blaming them because they had the ball and they dropped it, showing everyone that "hey, if Linkin Park can't even (or don't want to) keep this up then why should/could anyone else?"  Maybe they paved the way for half the post-nineties aggro acts to undergo the horrible transformation into post-grunge.  Well, whatever it was, that tipping point I was talking about earlier?  I can't help but feel like they pushed it back the other way.

A Wild Serj Appears... It's Pretty Fucking Effective

I couldn't tell you when I first became interested in nineties music and, more importantly, what it represents to me.  First nineties band I really listened to consistently was System of a Down, which all started with, of course, Chop Suey.  I was at an "Eighth Grade Lock-In".  In case you, dear reader, don't know what that is, it's exactly what it sounds like.  Unless it sounds like a bunch of eighth-graders being locked in somewhere and hunted down one by one, which would have been awesome, but that's not what happened to us.  Unless it sounds like an eighth-grader with locked-in syndrome, which is not very awesome, and is actually tragic and horrible.  That also didn't happen, thankfully.  Unless you think it sounds like being locked into the body of an eighth-grader, which would also be fucking terrible, especially if you couldn't control what the eighth-grader was doing and you were forced to just watch through their eyes as they ran around being retarded eighth-graders.  The "Eighth Grade Lock-In" was not this either.  What it was, and what I'm pretty sure it sounds like, is the eighth grade gets to stay at the school overnight and there's a fuckton of sweet activities.  Actually, a couple of them were pretty lame, but they were fun because everybody was there, friends or otherwise.  It was... a really surreal night, because of this.  Not so much because everyone was there, but because everyone was there AND, for once in our eighth grade lives, no one was a dick to anyone else.  For that reason alone, what was basically a guided activities fair was made awesome.  Or, shit, maybe I'm just looking at this all through rose-colored glasses and it was actually pretty abominable.  I really can't remember.  Relating to the first sentence of this obnoxiously long paragraph, my memory has more holes than... than uh... something with a lot of holes in it.

So when the hell did I hear Chop Suey in any of this?  I'm glad you asked!  One of the activities, which took place in the band room, was drumming!  Not on a real drum set though.  We all got these different sorts of tribal drums, which was pretty cool.  We were seated in I think three semi-rings around the front of the band room, where there was a real drum set.  Seated behind this real drum set was an alum of our middle school, who was now in high school.  Oooooooooo.  Some dude who I think taught at her music school introduced the activity, told us who she was (I don't remember her name at all; not like I'd put it up here if I did), and allowed her a demonstration.  Then this random chick drummed to Chop Suey.  And it was fucking awesome, and I probably got a boner, cuz that girl, who I'm pretty sure was like a solid 6.5 in my eighth-grade eyes (my standards were ridiculously high back then for no good reason) rocketed up to a 9 because, let's be real, playing an instrument alone, no matter the kind of music, gives you a one-point-minimum bonus.

Unfortunately, we didn't get to drum along to Chop Suey, even on our silly tribal drums (like we could have).

So the night wore on and we dicked around there was a dance and shit and stuff happened, I don't really remember/care.  That's a lie, I do, it's a good memory, it's just important to the general thingus of this entry.  I slept through the next day, since I hadn't caught a wink the night before (not that I'd wanted to).  All through this, through the way-too-much soda, through the bouncehouses in the gym and the dance and the next day's power-nap, I remembered one phrase in particular: "my self-righteous suicide".  Soon as I woke up, I was googling it.

And holy fuck was I confused.  I kept getting results for "Chop Suey".  What the fuck?  Bitch, I'm trying to look up the title to a world-thrash masterpiece.  I am clearly not interested in Chinese food.  Not at the moment.  That's how powerful this song was to me (well, still is).  My constant interest in a heaping, steaming plate of General Tso's was temporarily put on the backburner by this one goddamned song that I needed to find the name of.  Seriously, it was starting to get to me.  The links I was clicking on kept talking about putting on makeup and putting keys up on tables and I knew for a fact that the song I'd heard had no mention of Chinese food, nor could it be about that.  Actually, knowing System of a Down, that could very well be the case.  They're quite sneaky.  Like a song about pizza called Chic 'N' Stu.  Who thinks of that shit?

So I must not have been reading the full lyrics it showed online, because for whatever reason, I didn't see/notice the "self-righteous suicide" that all the kids were talking about.  Finally, I relented and plugged this "Chop Suey System of a Down" into the YouTubes.  And lo, it was the first taste of nu-metal and ergo the nineties that my pubescing angry mind had been secretly searching for this whole time.  After listening to Chop Suey at least a dozen times, I wiled away the rest of the day listening to whatever else YouTube had to offer me in the way of these four Armenian gentlemen that wrote what is, to this day, some of the most arresting and ball-grabbing music I've heard on more levels than just "Hey, this is pretty heavy".  I wasn't a happy kid in middle school.  But for once, I'd managed to have two great days in a row.  And that was a wonderful feeling.