[note: Colton didn’t write a thing. I tried to get a replacement thing from someone else, but didn’t get that either. So here, have this article about music that deserves more attention. FOWRies resume on Monday.]
In my sophomore year of high school, a friend of mine gave me a psychological exam. It was all heavily symbolic and psychoanalytical, drawing really incredible extrapolations from what I would do about all these donkeys in my yard or whatever. It was all a good laugh until we came to the question that changed the way I thought about the world.
After walking for a long while, your path ends in with a wall. Do you sit down and wait, or try to find a way around?
This is how I discovered I was afraid of death.
The eating of it started slowly, a general unease at the idea. It grew into a hollow feeling in my chest, under my collarbone. I’ll still grab at it if I feel anxious. As time passed, the realities of the human condition begun to stack up in overwhelming, crushing blocks. I wasn’t able to enjoy things anymore without the specter of a ticking clock in the back of my head. Every movement or moment that wasn’t perfectly used brought guilt, while every new thing seemed terrifying and separating from the few things I had left of what my life was.
This continued for years, and fortunately didn’t get much worse. I still cant sleep without having anxiety over the sound of my own beating heart, but it’s no longer the moment to moment bite of fear and waste. Moving on is the hardest thing I’ve had to do, and I finally feel like a more functional human. As it calmed down, I was able to return to hobbies one at a time, although music took the longest to really slide back into. There’s always been songs that’ll bring all of that up in full force, but most songs that have addressed death just… don’t know it the way I’ve known it.
One minute and fifty four minutes into the record “Own Your Ghost”, Doseone summarizes the worst decade of my life in one refrain: “You can’t get the eat out of death.” And like that, I was snapped out of passive listening as It’s Own Sun came to a close. The tone changes immediately, and Death Major begins to ooze out of the speakers, line by line summoning every nuance of despair I’ve kept inside since my father was wheeled out of my house, just the shell of who I grew up with.
But where the evoking of such grim things would usually bring me to that more selfish despair, the pulse of it and the understanding contained within the dense language seemed to act like an exhaust pipe. The head of steam built over all that coping came out steadily. And that’s all just about the first verse.
As the bridge passes by, Doseone digs into the existential rot that drags people down, pulling handfuls up to display about the world’s collective panic over not being, sneering at the futility and dishonesty of denial while slowly giving into the physiological symptoms that made me think I was fucking crazy for having, before a growl places an exclamation of overcoming the fears and feelings: “This will only work once.”
Another bridge passes, meditating on the odds of ‘you’ and how crushing that can be. The song takes a breath, before the anxiety of the ticking clock shows up, in a rapid fire third verse that beings to blur the coherence into just raw emotional discharge, the panicky incoherence of an imaginary instant threat of death that begins to feel like the end of all suffering, romantic in it’s way. And it’s just at the point that it’s finally spelled out that the song bursts into a gliding song, an ode to the fire that ‘you are only once’ can light, using it to see, to comfort, and to burn for fuel.
WINNER: “Death Major” by 13 & God
WHY: A song that expresses the totality of an existential crisis without feeling sorry for itself. This isn’t said lightly: Death Major is awesome.
Fermata over Whole Rest 