Forgotten Too Soon

Were you around downloading album rips on the internet in the late 00s and early 10’s? Shoot, I was. It was the late 00s and early 10’s when social media was still in its infancy and scrollable feeds were a totally new thing. You could search almost any album with with “rar blogspot” at the end and find a download link on mediafire or rapidshare to it. After finding countless albums on its blog, I ended up getting really into the recommended albums of a blog called Holy F###ing Sh##: 40,000, which was named after a track on Have a Nice Life’s cult classic album “Death Consciousness.” I remember booting up my PC everyday to check the recommended albums and sampling from the obscure recommendations. This is how I found Jesu, Isis, Mogwai, and any number of moody, loud bands I still listening to today. I remember cramming my sh#tty gateway PC full to the brim with .rar files.

The last week I have been waxing poetic about this time period of music discovery in my head. Yeah, you know, I am a hermit that rarely talks to people, so I really don’t talk to other people about stuff, except simple pleasantries. But I am a weirdo with super obscure interests and can’t just walk up to a fellow parent at Juniper’s 2 year old soccer class and ask, “Yo, you remember the wild west of blogspot music criticism and sharing?” To avoid the difficulty of being reminded of my own niche interests, I tell the stories here. It’s a nice space, this substack. I don’t have to create hashtags or think of word counts of where I have to split my post to ensure that it fits within the initial word limits of Instagram. Oh, and I can ramble ad nauseum about things I care about. I don’t have to treat my life like an endless human interest story where I overcome grief, mental illness, or the patriarchies boot on my neck. No, I can just be a gentle weirdo that doesn’t fit in anywhere, talking about stuff that interests me.

I hadn’t revisited this time period in my own listening history until I started listening to a bunch of bands who release music through The Flenser, a dark experimental record label in San Francisco who releases experimental, metal, other related music. Chat Pile, Ragana, and Agriculture are all bands that I have been listening to a lot in the last couple months, who all either have or will release music on The Flenser. Once I get to three bands that I listen to regularly all releasing on the same record label, I start exploring the other records that they have released. You know, I take the mystical rule of three to its logical extreme into my own music listening and let it be a divining rod to new sonic discoveries/horizons. I started perusing through the Flenser list of releases and saw that they had reissued Have A Nice Life’s Death Consciousness. WHAMO, a flood of memories of the Cambrian explosion of my own music listening came back to me. I remember just letting the absolutely sweet meloncholia of Have a Nice Life’s “ Blood Hail” wash over me for the first time.

“I feel the top of the roof come off
Kill everybody there
And I'm watching all the stars burn out
Trying to pretend that I care

But I didn't, no one ever does
And I would, no one ever will
Can't you see it's all flown out of my hands?
And our clothes are all too often ripped
And our teeth are all too often gnashed
And it lasts as long as it possibly can.”

Have a Nice Life - Bloodhail lyrics

I cannot think of a more apt song for this year of our collapse 2023. How can one muster any more energy witnessing the collapse all around. I know this week I had to really prioritize what emotional energy I had left on taking care of my daughter, who I picked up from school with a fever. Consequently, I had no time left to ponder the specter of fascist, white, christian, nationalists; bank collapses; the international pandemic; mass shootings, or climate collapse. It truly feels like it has flown out of my hands. I just had to focus on ensuring that apple juice is flowing, the cookies are close by, and Cocomelon does not turn off. Do you feel that way, dear reader? There is that running joke on the web that we all here now have had to experience too many epochal events to even be able to understand or process them. As soon as one attempts to process one event, another startling awful thing happens that threatens your own understanding of your safety.

Is it possible that the onslaught of apocalyptical events is all too fast now that we can’t even absorb any event’s implications any more? When asked during a roundtable of other late 00’s music bloggers on The Awl if something exists in the 21st century if it doesn’t exist somewhere on the internet, Mutant Sounds Blogger Eric Lambleau, noted,

“If something can be said to meaningfully exist, if said existence occurs amid such endless proliferation, (than) it’s forgotten sooner than it’s absorbed.”

Though he was talking explicitly about the spread of music on the internet here, I think Lambleau’s point about the problem of absorption in the 21st century seems to be the key to a lot of what we face today. I have a deep skepticism in our ability to be able to easily absorb anything anymore. There seems to be too much culture, too much information, and too many generation-defining horror stories all pummeling us in an endless stream. I know it sort of paralyzes me into a sort of catatonia at times, where I am just trying to get to a point in the day where I can sit in my own interiority with it. I wonder if it has a similar effect for you. Do you feel like yesterday’s tragedy is too soon eclipsed by the horror story of today?

This is where music helps. I agree with Lambleau that too much music too fast only leads to surface listening and a lack of really returning to records. It’s why I stopped downloading records off the internet, canceled my spotify subscription, and went back to buying records, tapes, and compact discs (I wrote about that shift in “The Seed of Rebirth” essay). But once one starts buying physical media again, this absorption problem really isn’t a big deal any longer. That emphasis on physical media gets you back into a place where you have a set limit on what sonic worlds you can possibly inhabit any one day. For me, in a world of slow motion collapse, it’s a balm to listen to worlds where that darkness is not denied. As I talked about last week, music, specifically darker music like metal, offers this visceral sonic world where you can experience emotions that are typically looked down upon in our society. I find a safe space to be with death and tragedy in music like Have A Nice Life’s Death Consciousness album. I find the courage to be with the structural violence of the slow motion collapse we are experiencing in last stage capitalism in those songs. It is a real gift to have albums, or really any artform, that help you absorb and process real human tragedy at that deep of a level and I have one iteration of the internet during a five year period to thank for that.

One of the most difficult things I still find myself dwelling in these days is the grief I have for the 6.8 million people who have died due to COVID-19.1 Just take a moment to think about that number. That is like losing the equivalent of an entire large metropolitan area like the Washington DC metropolitan area over a three year period. Yes, this past week we reached the third anniversary of everything shutting down and everyone going to their homes. Yet, this is not an anniversary that our government will ever note. To put that into perspective, we have a national day of remembrance for Pearl Harbor, when roughly 2,400 Americans lost their lives in a military attack, but we do not have a day of remembrance for the one million Americans who have died due to COVID-19 or the day the world stopped for us. I can't help but feel like a majority of those people would still be with us if we had universal health care and had continued paying people stimulus checks to stay home. But, we sacrificed more people on the altar of capital to keep the economy running.

And again we have devolved into the unyielding grief of the death sociologist who can’t quite let go of the ghosts of the structural violence of our society. Even before I lost my mom to poverty (well, to be specific it was a form of cancer that is entirely treatable if you have health insurance and can go to the doctor), I would court the ghosts of our bloody past. How many people have we lost to entirely ignoble pursuits of power, wealth, and prestige? How many great myths are those of the victors justifying their bloodshed? It’s haunting to sit, surrounded by the blood, knowing its not over. Yet, this is the minutiae of the death worker who operates not with individual loss but societal loss. I mourn those we lost to societal failures. I mourn those we’ve lost to hatred, domination, genocide. I mourn those we lost due to poverty. I mourn those we’ve lost to fascism, eugenics, lynching, slavery, segregation, and ethnic cleansing. I mourn that we have not created a world where everyone could be safe and be provided for. I mourn that we live in a world where you have to “earn” your life. Your life is precious and you matter. I hope we can build a world that is worthy of your light, because your ghost will never be enough. I want you to be living, breathing in your own abundant prosperity here, now. Here’s to making that world a reality so you won’t be forgotten too soon.

All my best, dear reader, until next week.

James

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