Difficult Music

With the belter off writing mock exams today and tomorrow, sacrificing her weekend for the greater good of the EAC, I’m left to my own devices. As usual, I’ve got a song stuck in my head. Be afraid.

HATE YOURSELF
Two guys from Norway wrote my favourite song of last year. “Hate Yourself” by Solefald is a punk-metal anthem that arrives four tracks into Pills Against the Ageless Ills. It has several movements, working through variations of the opening riff. Lyrics are repeated against the evolving musical backdrop—the same words with different phrasing. “Hate Yourself” is a turbocharged tilt-a-whirl of a song. It’s totally mental. Self-loathing never sounded so good.

Hate yourself and I will make you happy
Pills… is a concept album about two brothers—Cain, a pornographer, and Fuck, a philosopher. There’s a rather flimsy plot involving Cain’s murder of Kurt Cobain and Fuck’s subsequent exile and soul-searching, but it can safely be disregarded. “Hate Yourself” is described thusly: “When Cain confessed to Fuck’s answering machine that he was Kurt Cobain’s murderer, Fuck sent this storm of messages to his brother’s mobile phone.” So there you have it. Probably the first metal song ever written about playing phone tag.

Hate yourself like Kate Moss
I’m not sure if they’ll ever surpass “Coco Chanel, welcome to hell” from Neonism, their previous album, but Pills… definitely has its share of fine couplets. “Out of the seven classic arts/Rhetoric rises to bust the charts.” “My apartment works fine, no need for locations/it’s spacious enough for a camera and some Asians.”

Hate yourself with a touch of glamour
I was reading about Thomas Homer-Dixon (The Ingenuity Gap) in yesterday’s paper, and what he had to say made total sense. I’m quite taken with the “Capitalist Trilemma” he describes. (1—The global economy is producing too many goods and services too many people can’t afford. In other words, the rich/poor gap is widening. 2—Population growth and economic expansion are outstripping the Earth’s ability to sustain us. 3—The problems facing the world are becoming too complex, and solving them in any comprehensive way is beyond our intellectual capacity.) There’s some serious trouble ahead, and we need more people like him to draw attention to the obvious. Not a day passes when I don’t give thanks to the random cosmic/universal forces that I was born when I was and that I live where I do. And I hope I’m outta here before the shit hits the fan.

Hate yourself continents are starving
I was depressed to read that the world’s population has quadrupled in the last century. Nothing can slow down now. You can call attention to the obvious, but when it's too late to change anything, should you even bother?

Hate yourself like I do. No way to improve. No way to do it better. Just suffer suffer suffer!