So. The ghost is all over this one like a bad smell. It came out in ‘97, and I have no idea how he came by it - must have been through his Uni connections, I suppose - and I must have made a cassette copy, because I can picture the CD he had, and I didn’t have a CD player back then.


Anyway.


As previously discussed, ‘97 wasn’t a good year for me. ‘98 was worse; that was when the wheels actually fell off. But ‘97 was the guy with no chute halfway between the plane and the ground, saying ‘so far, so good’. My friend group and I are in the death trap house where we will play many hours of Werewolf (and I will play many hours of X-Com) and I aggressively ignore the fact that I'm failing college, and that merely having some level of talent at acting isn’t going to mean shit in a world where I simply can not get my arse out of bed with anything resembling a regular pattern.


So there’s a good chance that this was the first outright hip-hop album I ever owned. Rage Against The Machine had forcibly disabused me of the notion that rapping was a somehow inferior form of expression (‘they only talk because they can’t sing’ is something I almost certainly said at some point, because, yeah, I was that kind of ignorant dumbshit kid) but I still needed loud guitars to engage my gut before the rest of me would be willing to come along for the ride. And, sure, the Judgement Night soundtrack punched another hole in the armour; still, tho, we’re pairing hip-hop artists off with metal acts, so it’s not exactly taking me over the cliff. And, look, true, this record features Alice Cooper, Slash and (I literally learned ten minutes ago, thanks to a Google search) Steve fucking Jones guesting on various tracks. So maybe that makes it the perfect bridge.


Regardless, the fact remains; looking at the Public Enemy, NWA, Ghostface Killah, and yes, sure, Eminem CDs on my shelf, there’s a non-trivial chance none of them end up there if I hadn’t first been exposed to The Insane Clown Posse’s The Great Milenko.


How did it appeal to me? Let me count the ways. Let’s start with the intro - a skit that starts with rednecks in a bar, putting on a country record for ‘a shindig’, only for the record to slow, before bleeding into an Alice Cooper monologue that sets out the stall of who - what - The Great Milenko is. It’s pure horror hype bullshit (‘The unleashing of the fourth joker’s card! The Necromaster!’), and it might as well have been precision engineered for my late teen brain.


See, as we’ll probably cover in greater detail later as this series comes to a close, I was at this point notionally still in training as a student of magic. And an album that set up its protagonists as magicians (albeit clearly cartoonish, carney magicians) had a deep appeal. One phrase I’d been given to conjure with at this point (yeah, sorry about that) was ‘hiding in plain sight’, and I think it’s possible teenage me half-believed ICP might just be doing something like that; setting up the exaggerated sense of magical carnage to hide a kernel of Actual Real Shit. Which, not to jump ahead, but of course they were, though their particular kernel - Born Again Christianity - was something I’d already found wanting (if you want to know what was going on for me on that subject, I have to recommend my debut novel, honestly).


If fact, fuck it, let’s deal with this now; how on earth did nobody notice ICP were Born Again? Viewed through the lens of hindsight, it’s kind of embarrassingly obvious; for all that they dress the idea up in terms of Shangri La and Juggalos at a never-ending live show/party, it’s clear that the final song is about heaven and hell. ICP and everyone else with ‘clown love’ (carefully described as multiracial, plus redneck truck drivers, implying an interesting class distinction we may return to) having a good old post-death time, while the ‘greedy skank motherfuckers’ burn forever. Sure, ‘free money, and mad bitches non-stop’ doesn’t sound exactly Biblical… but for white trash hip hop heaven? Sure, why not?


And when you start looking at some of the other songs, it’s striking how many of them run as pretty straight-up morality plays. The obvious ground zero for this is Halls Of Illusions, where a Cypress Hill tinged beat bleeds into a shredding chorus from Slash, as a series of men are shown visions of their families living happy, pleasant lives, only to be dropped back into a violent, squalid reality, created by their misdeeds (before being slaughtered by our faithful narrator). But elsewhere, How Many Times? lays out a litany of modern misery about the human condition (with an admittedly off-beam dig at being taught science in school that feels like a precursor to their infamous ‘magnets? Fuckin how do they work?’ moment), and Under The Moon feels like an Old Testament rumination on the hollowness of violent revenge. Now, with that last, you might fairly ask how that squares with the rest of the gleeful horrorcore slaughter of nasty people; I’d answer that Under The Moon doesn’t feature any supernatural elements or characters, so it feels like a slice of ‘realism’, dropped in an album that is constantly swinging between genuine portrayals of deprivation and desperation alongside EC Comics level blood, guts, and humour. In other words, vengeance belongs to God (or at least, in the case of this album, God’s agent, The Great Milenko), not man. And Piggie Pie has a vengeful wolf taking out a series of worthy targets - a racist redneck, a sadistic judge, and in the final verse a very, very rich man. Yes, the album does equate obscene wealth with The Devil.


And I think that last begins to signpost how they got away with it.


Because I did find myself wondering, as a kid. The final one-two of Just Like That and Pass Me By clearly pointed at a belief in an afterlife predicated on your behaviour when alive. And though some of the subject matter of Pass Me By fits the same mold as their earlier celebrations of The (Juggalo) Life - Faygo root beer, women with a bit of meat on their bones who like shagging Clowns, hip-hop being awesome and Elvis sucking - there’s a shift in tone, both in the beat (which samples an evangelical preacher talking about ‘mansions above’ over an insistent piano) and in the voices of the performers. Throughout the album, Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J (yes, really, that’s what they’re called) have yelled, shrieked, snarled, voices constantly under some physical or emotional strain, an audible representation of Insane Clown energy… and in the last song, it all shifts, their tones lower, become calmer, working in an entirely human register. There’s a sincerity that comes from letting the act go… and sure, it’s in part an energy juxtaposition with the penultimate track, a man so frantically engaged in the concerns of the present that he doesn’t realise he’s hurtling towards his own end until it’s past him. But it felt like there was something more at play; like this was something that actually meant something to them, some deeper truth they actually believed in.


So, sure, I picked at it. But they disguised themselves so well.


Not so much with the misogyny or violence; even at that age, I’d known enough born agians to understand neither of those particular issues were seen as in any way a barrier to entry; especially as the violence was always either directed at ‘worthy’ targets, or presented as a symptom of poverty (though I remember having doubts even back then about the random claims that ICP had ever been involved in armed robbery - it seemed a bit ‘stolen valour’ then and seems even more so now). No, it was partly the class dimension, I think; the constant identification with the suffering of poverty, alongside a surprising willingness to blame rich people for the suffering, that felt very at odds with the materialism present so often elsewhere in Hip Hop. And the constant positive references to voodoo and ‘dark magic’ felt hard to square with even a relatively mild Christian doctrine.


But it was mainly because they seemed to hate evangelical preachers.


The track Hellaluja is a shotgun aimed right at the heart of prosperity gospel preaching. And throughout the song ICP aim, reload and fire over and over again. And they do not miss.


Their outrage is palpable, their fury audible with each spit lyric. The framing device for the song is a preacher delivering a cheesy healing ceremony, imploring the crowd to give ‘the first portion of their income’ before bringing on a disabled boy and promising that ‘for just $6000 we can heal this boy!’.  This skit interrupts the song at a couple of points, including at the end of the second verse with an absolutely outrageous phone call (‘people, that was the Lord! Today, he will heal this boy for just $5000!’) each interruption demonstrating the hypocrisy the verses excoriate. It’s the opposite of subtle, with ICP bringing a full-bore contempt for the subject that I found, and find, admirable.


We had a local born-again sect in the town I was living at the time, and they’d infrequently witnessed myself and my friends. I’d also had occasion while living in a halfway house for people at risk of homelessness to read some of their ‘literature’, left there by one of the residents, who was in a faith-based recovery from drugs and alcohol addiction. Of that read, I have retained only an emotional impression; a rising tide of incredulity and disgust, with an undercurrent of fear - just how crazy were these people, and how many of them were out there? The only concrete articles I can remember any detail of were both op-ed style pieces (though I suspect the whole magazine ran along similar lines), one explaining that capitalism could only work if it ran alongside a Christian society (which, erm, okay) and, I shit you not,  piece justifying private jets for preachers, on the basis that precious souls might be lost if said priest was too fatigued from an inferior form of travel to offer the correct words of spiritual comfort at the crucial moment.


Yeah, really.


So Hellaluja hit hard.


And, really, it kinda still does. It’s absolutely excoriating about spiritual conmen and the role they have to play in reinforcing poverty, by soliciting payments from those who can least afford it (the snarling bridge captures this best, with a menacing ‘pass the collection plate!’ cut alongside ‘Show me how you give, I’ll tell you how you live!’). And, knowing what I know now, it’s fascinating to revisit and realise the rage comes not from a generalised disdain for the religion as a whole, but rather the fury of a couple of believers at the commodification of faith for evil ends.


And look, here’s the thing; ICP are pretty much universally discussed and described in critical circles as a punchline. Sure, there was that moment of insanity when the FBI actually classified Juggalos as a criminal gang, but I think it’s telling that this was mainly met with howls of derision rather than outrage from the wider music community - because, seriously, ICP fans? Even before their spiritual coming out, the band was treated as a punchline; contemporary reviews of The Great Milenko were excoriating, and Eminem’s brutal, homophobic skit mocking them on one of the best-selling hip hop albums of all time, The Marshall Mathers LP (and, yeah, we’ll get to it, don’t worry) pretty much buried the band in terms of pop culture relevance (oddly, a fate not accorded to Kid Rock’s infinitely worse album from the same year, Devil Without A Cause, which is still inexplicably listed as ‘important’ somehow). Tellingly, that spreads even to your humble correspondent; despite loving The Great Milenko on release, and appreciating it a huge amount on a contemporary revisit, I can’t report any especial desire to engage with their more recent work. I remember playing MMLP to a friend of mine who’d encountered Milenko the same time as I did, and, despite that friend overall not being a hip hop fan, and certainly not being in any way as enamoured by Eminem as I was, nevertheless sadly concluded That Sketch was the most effective nail in the ICP coffin imaginable.  Not to jump ahead, but Slim Shady as a character shares enough characteristics with the ICP Juggalo aesthetic that the Wicked Clowns can’t help but be harmed by the comparison. It’s not that ICP are bad MCs; The Great Milenko is competent-to-good horrorcore hip hop, and it also has a genuine sense of humour, plus some class-based righteous anger that’s surprisingly well targeted. It’s just, you know, it’s Eminem; one of the finest natural talents hip-hop has ever produced. It’s not a remotely fair fight.


That said, this isn’t exactly Limp Bizkit Vs. Rage Against the Machine, either. For starters, ICP are legit contemporaries of Eminem, if not antecedents; the root of their entire beef was when a young Marshall Mathers added ICP as ‘possible’ guest stars at a party he was organizing, which unsurprisingly pissed off ICP, and there’s really no way to spin that to make Eminem the good guy in that situation (though it’s fair to say as the beef evolved that ICP probably took things a bit too far with the diss tracks).


Whereas Limp Bizkit feel like something the record industry dreamed up - ‘what if Rage Against The Machine but without all the messy politics?’ - ICP have remained absolutely committed to a bit that has been mercilessly mocked from the moment of inception onward, and it’s hard not to find that kind of admirable. Similarly, their relationship with their fan base remains strong; mutual solidarity of the mutually despised and mocked that, you guys, I just don’t have it in me to disrespect. I remember hearing some stand-up comedian laughing about Juggalos as ‘the “Uncle Harry ain’t going to bad-touch me no more!” gang’ and thinking, you know what, my smug dude, so fucking what if they are?


Because, not to jump ahead to the final essay I may or may not end up writing, but ICP, I have (re)discovered, actually meant a lot to me at the time they came along. The love affair may have been relatively short-lived, and their place supplanted by rappers with undeniably superior technical proficiency, but they spoke to me at a time I was sliding into a pretty dark place. They spoke with adolescent humour and rage about real-life concerns; there are differences between post-industrial collapse Detroit and North Devon… but there are similarities, too. This is an album written by men who understand the claustrophobia of poverty, and the crawling, sweaty feeling of shrinking horizons, door after door slamming shut. They understand dark humour as a response to horror, the powerless fantasy of supernatural retribution against the rich and powerful at whose whims we suffer, bleed, starve.


And here we are in 2022, and I am sad to report that doesn’t feel less relevant. My own personal circumstances may have improved almost beyond comprehension, but the big picture is bleaker than it’s ever been, the arc of descent clear and still accelerating, and for much the same reasons; an insane pursuit of wealth, a machine of appetite into which our bodies and the futures of our children are being fed, pulped, burned. We’re ruled by a tiny number of sociopaths with unimaginable power and influence, and they absolutely don’t consider anybody actually reading this as real, as you and I understand the term. And no, ICP’s The Great Milenko doesn’t exactly articulate that… but it doesn’t exactly not articulate it. The targets of the album's fury - racist rednecks, corrupt, evil judges, prosperity gospel grifters and, above all, very, very rich people - are all either the problem or enablers of the likely terminal cancer currently afflicting our species. And, I mean, I really, really love Eminem, I do, and we’ll get into it… but there’s really nothing in his body of work that comes close to this, in terms of identifying unapologetically with an underclass and against the oppressors. And let’s not forget that the reason this album obtained notoriety in the first place was because of a backlash from Christian groups that led to the label pulling release at the last minute. Unquestionably, that controversy helped sell more records, but that wasn’t inevitable. This is an album that spoke truth to power, and power hit back.


And while we’re on the subject; yes, it’s true that this album contains misogyny, of the type that appears as baked into Hip-Hop as it is Rock n Roll, but frankly it’s a lot less vicious than in many other artists. And unless I’ve missed something on my recent relistens, theres’ not a single even tacit bit of homophobia, which is, sad to say, itself kinda noticeable in the context of the general milieu. If that doesn’t strike you as anywhere near good enough, I’m not going to argue with you; but it’s not nothing, either.


You know, it’s genuinely gleeful to discover, after writing maybe sixty of these essays, that the process of My Life In Horror is still capable of surprising me. I knew I’d be writing about this album, and honestly, I was dreading it, certain that it’d be, at best, a Headless Children moment, and at worst, another Lost Boys disaster. Instead, I find myself, improbably, in the opposite position; not merely defending but damn near evangelising for a piece of work that was despised at the time, and has been basically reviled ever since, by a group that has near-universally become a synonym for embarrassingly bad music.


I knew The Great Milenko had been an important album for me when it came out. I could never have predicted that, in 2022, it would still be important.


But it is.


And it fucking rocks.


KP
4/7/22

This one has been on and off the list a lot. Up to very recently, I was leaning towards not covering it. Truthfully, if I hadn’t noticed I was heading towards writing not one but three essays about white hip-hop artists from Detroit as the finale, and realised it’d be best to break that run up, lest I test your already superhuman patience with my bullshit entirely past breaking point, you might not be reading this at all.

And a big part of the problem is that I can’t do the usual pack drill with regards to when, where, how old I was. None of it. Did I see it? Yes, yes I did, on a small screen, sometime in my late teens/early twenties. Did it peel the top of my skull back and take a loving shit over my brain? Well, now you mention it, yes, it did.

And yet.

The fucking rep this movie had, too. I mean, Reservoir Dogs had a rep, and so did Pulp Fiction, but this bad boy was next level; like, ‘banned’ from a video release (yes, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s what I understood at the time) next level. It ran into a couple of very UK-centered shitstorms, which, okay, yeah, I guess we do need to get into that, don’t we.
Okay.

So. In the UK, in 1993, a 2-year-old boy was abducted from a shopping centre in broad daylight, taken to a second location, tortured and murdered. His horribly damaged body was discovered two days later on a nearby railway line.

The perpetrators were charged 8 days later. They were two 10-year-old boys.

Yeah.

Now, a lot of people had an awful lot to say about what could possibly have caused this kind of unfathomably awful crime. And, because we have a uniquely vicious, virulent and stupid right-wing tabloid press tradition in the UK, every single aspect of the perps life was poured over in obscene detail.

And it turned out they’d probably watched a few horror movies.

The main focus of ire was, and I shit you not, Child’s Play 3, as there seemed some certainty that the boys had seen it, perhaps even owned a copy. Point is, it kicked off a weird and thankfully short-lived second ‘video nasty’ type scare, with all the attendant moral panic bullshit. You’re a horror fan, you know the drill by now; corruption of innocence, sick, depraved Hollywood, monkey see, monkey do: Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children?

So when NBK found itself up before the BFCC in the summer of 1994, the tabloid press went into full-on Ban This Sick Filth mode, and some nonsense reporting about possible copycat killings in the states led to a delay in certification. Ultimately, the movie (cut by 3 minutes to achieve a US R rating) was given an 18 certificate and made it to theatres, but the miasma of controversy was well established.

And look, I’ve talked about this before, but truthfully I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to ‘extreme’ cinema. Last House On The Left did permanent damage, I’ve never seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I’m pretty confident I’ll go through my entire life without ever watching a Saw movie. Some of that is a basic squeamishness about blood and guts, sure... But I think there’s more to it. I think that certain movies have a reputation for me that, itself, has become a kind of psychological barrier to entry. 

And I think, for me, thanks to the sheer volume of tabloid panic (exacerbated when the movie’s proposed VHS date coincided with the Dunblane massacre, leading the distributors to unilaterally decide to ‘ban’ the movie until 2001, despite securing an 18 certification for home release), Natural Born Killers became one of those movies.

Which, when you consider what many of the obsessions are that drive the movie, is pretty fucking funny, really.

I don’t think I caught the Channel 5 broadcast, shown while the movie was still in limbo in terms of a home viewing release. For one thing, Channel 5 was a dicey proposition in North Devon at that time. For another, I suspect that rep just made me steer clear. So I think - and it really is just a guess, but - I think I must have bought it on DVD, when it finally came out in 2001. Which, logically, must be because I’d by then become familiar enough with Oliver Stone’s other work (especially JFK, which hit me with the force of revelation in my late teens) that my desire for more work from this man was enough to override my previous fears.

I was finally ready. Or so I thought.

It’s frustrating, not being able to do what I usually do, and reconstruct the shock of that first viewing. On the other hand, this is a movie that I’ve seen, many, many times, and yet its power to shock me has barely diminished at all; indeed, there are ways in which I find it even more disturbing now than I did as a young man.

The sheer ferocity of it, is what lingers the most. Sure, the violence; both the overtly, hyper-stylized opening diner massacre and the later gruelling and gruesome prison riot scenes. Both sequences have, in their own way, made their marks on me, on my imagination. But also, one of the things the movie does, with it’s shifting modes of storytelling, kaleidoscopic soundtrack and dizzying use of different film stocks, is present the viewer with an interrogation of the form itself; the movie, especially through the first half, appears to be in a state of constant transformation, creating moods, inhabiting genres, only for those states to collapse upon themselves, as if they’re unable to bear the weight of the story they’re trying to tell (or, perhaps, the rage of the characters the movie is concerned with). We shift from hyper-stylised action movie to oversaturated colour to sit-com (complete with monstrous laugh track); and in between, these collages of film and sound, as Mickey and Mallory’s Cadillac appears to be travelling through some portal between worlds, haunted by monsters and black and white streets.

Never mind the action on screen, the very editing itself, the soundtrack, the lighting, it’s all fucking furious, and it wants you to know it.

Because, sure, the film is about violence. Mickey and Mallory are both products of violent childhoods, escaping via the nihilism of a shotgun barrel pointed at anyone that gets in their way. Similarly, the deeply fucked up cop pursuing them is also a product of childhood trauma. Violence perpetuates violence throughout the movie, including, in the second half, the mass violence of the carceral state. I don’t think the movie revels in the violence, exactly (and the accusation that it celebrates it is not just fatuous but Actually Wrong, IMO), but it sure doesn’t pull away from it, either.

Still, that’s not all it’s about.

The story goes that as the movie was being made, Stone realised the movie could be much more than a straight-up fucked up crime thriller about two mass murderers. At some point in the process, Stone started to realize it was about America; and more specifically, how America saw itself, down the lens of a TV camera. As with Don't Look Up, later, NBK is absolutely excoriating in its treatment of the media, and the venal race-to-the-bottom of ratings uber alles.

And that tendency is given flesh in the person of Robert Downey Jr, giving for my money a career-best performance as the slug that walks like a man, Wayne Gayle.

He is magnificent. A surface smarm/charm that is almost instantly obliterated by his monstrous ego, Gayle quickly takes the movie over from about the one-third mark; as soon as he appears, the story of Mickey and Mallory starts to warp in his hands; footage of the pair replaced by actors shot from salacious angles, and full of artless cuts and inserts. It’s ballsy as hell, when you think about it, given just how gonzo the filmmaking has been thus far; almost as if Stone is winking at us as he says ‘of course, this can be done badly, if you don’t know what you’re doing’. And yet, does Gayle have his own dark, awful attraction? Sure he does. He’s so awful, you can’t take your eyes off him. You are - I am - both disgusted, and delighted by my disgust. Every time I feel he can sink no lower, Gayle plumbs yet further depths of narcissism. He’s the perfect avatar for the worst that infotainment represents.

I mean, is it any wonder the press weren't thrilled with this one?

They’re still at it, by the way; a recent Google search showed that on the 25th anniversary, The Guardian ran a piece saying the movie failed because it ultimately blamed the media for Mickey and Mallory’s violence. Yeah, somebody got paid to write that. Given what we’ve already discussed about how the film portrays violence as a cyclical, generational phenomenon, it’s hard not to take such a poor misreading as deliberate; in that respect, I guess you have to give Stone credit that more than 25 years later, the movie is still making media types sore enough that they feel defensive.

Because, no, obviously, the media isn’t to blame for the violence.

What the media - specifically, the news media - is guilty of, is the sensationalized coverage of the violence (If It Bleeds, It Leads), turning murderers into celebrities, trials into circuses, and, often, matters of scientific fact and political reality into matters of opinion and topics of ‘debate’ or ‘controversy’.

Seen through that lens, the fact the NBK predates the establishment of Fox News by two whole years gives the movie an aura of eerie prescience. The utterly amoral, value-free rendering of ‘reality’ as entertainment is a poison that, in 2022, feels likely to be terminal, as we continue to ‘both sides’ ourselves off the cliff of climate apocalypse and the flapping gums whose only job is to keep us informed of what’s actually going on shake their heads, shrug, and say ‘gosh, it's complicated, isn’t it?’

It’s not that NBK predicts that, exactly; it’s that in the movie, you can see the contours of the trends that will lead us there; you can almost feel the rough beast of Murdocks poisonous News Station child slouching into place.

I think that’s what I mean when I say I found it more disturbing on a rewatch than I did as a young man. Back then, sure, it seemed bad, but, well, a) it was America, they’re all nuts, everybody knows that, and, relatedly, b) It Couldn’t Happen Here. Back then it was the violence that got to me, the electric confrontation between Gayle and Mickey, and the teeth-grinding tension of the jailbreak - which, to be fair, is no less raw and darkly thrilling as it was on first viewing.

But now?

Shit. Now it’s 2022, and it is happening here, and it’s happening everywhere, and I just don’t know anymore. The anger of this film used to sing to me; it used to light me up, helped me feel like less of an alien. Because, on some level, based as it was in emergent trends and then-current concerns, it felt like satire, still; overblown, caricatured. It has some serious things to say, but it still felt like a warning.

Now? Shit. Now it feels like a prophecy of something it’s become too late to fix.

And a world in which Natural Born Killers no longer feels like an exaggeration is a scary fucking place to be.

KP
8/6/22

Well, well, well. The year 2000 AD, get down with your bad self.


Things have gotten better. I quit working at the fucking pub. I didn't have a job to go to, but I simply wasn't prepared to work millennium eve in that place for the princely sum of double the national minimum wage. It’s interesting; obviously through the strict lens of transactional logic, it was a bad move, in that I ended up earning nothing and being unemployed. But, you know, I knew I was worth more.


Yeah. That’s what mattered.


Anyhow, 3 months of being unemployed wasn’t fun, but then I landed an admin job at London Guildhall University, initially processing forms in their registration department. It was a 9 month fixed term contract job. For the first time in my life, I was being paid monthly.


And I was earning - after tax, mark you - £1000 a month.


My rent, on the shared house I was living in with The Ghost, was £270.
I felt like a fucking millionare.


I started there because I’d assumed this was the point I acquired this album. Like, I remember my first Saturday after payday (fuck, weekends were mine, now, rather than being the busiest and most soulcrushing days of my week), riding the tube to the west end, going into HMV on Oxford Street and grabbing a fucking basket; like, I am here to buy some damn music.


I denied myself nothing, and I walked out £120 lighter, and with a canvas bag bulging with jewel cases.


And I got some beauties that day, some all-time hall-of-famers: Queens Of The Stoneage Rated R, NiN’s The Fragile, and Slipknot’s debut (later that year, I’d queue for hours in that same store to get it signed by the band, when they were doing their first UK tour. I still have it). Sure, some misses too; the cover art for Limp Bizket’s Significant Other got me over the line, and spent frankly too long in rotation; it wasn’t until I saw the band playing at Leeds in 2000 that the scales fell and I realised I’d been mugged off. But, you know, hey, they can’t all pay off. Overall, it was a roaring success, and one of the most straightforwardly happy days of my life.


And I really thought I must have picked this one up then, but I checked the dates, and that cannot be the case.


See, I bought Devil Without A Cause as a present for The Ghost - likely as a birthday present. And it must have been near after it came out, because I’d picked it up as a result of XFM playing the absolute shit out of Cowboy for weeks, which must have been in 1998.


Except… I wasn’t working in the pub until December 98, because I phoned in sick for Christmas. I remember, because when I put in my notice in December 99, the boss said ‘Wow, that’s two Christmasses you’ve fucked me over’.  So…


Jesus, you know what? I think Cowboy must have lodged in my head so badly that I went and hunted the album out once I had money. Like, I think that almost has to be it. I know I had the album by the time I was at Guildhall because I remember talking with people about it, so…


Okay, so; either that shopping trip, or one of the subsequent ones.


Back in the room. Jesus, I know the past is a foreign country, but why does it have to be such a fucking maze?


Anyway. The Ghost had access to a CD burner and a colour photocopier, so I knew anything I was buying for him, I was also basically buying for myself, and sure enough I still have the burned copy, somewhere on a shelf or in a drawer.


And I fell pretty hard.


Now, in my defence, my entire experience of Rap music to this point was Rage Against The Machine and Insane Clown Posse’s Great Milenko (don’t worry, kids, we’ll get to it before our time is done), and the aforementioned LB record. And I was - hell, am - primarily and first a metalhead. Sure, my respect for HipHop as a form has grown over the years, and I’ve lately been listening to a lot of it, for reasons that will become clear. So one might fairly point out that this album was almost cynically tailormade to appeal to me. Hip-Hop, but with slamming rock/metal guitars and a lead singer rapping about being a white trash trailer kid? How could I resist?


And I’m listening to it now, and you know, it’s about as well produced as any rap/rock album from 1998 could possibly be. The guitars on Fist Of Rage, Bawidaba, and I Am The Bullgod chug and crunch like you want them to, and Fist Of Rage actually has a pretty good riff going on.


At the same time…


So, you’ll recall back when we were talking about The Lost Boys, I posited the entirely uncontroversial fact that it’s just a bad movie, regardless of what your nostalgia may be telling you? Well, I stuck Devil Without A Cause on a few months back, looking for some aggressive music to help me pretend I wasn’t hating every second on the crosstrainer, and despite knowing every word, I found myself itching to hit the skip button about halfway through Cowboy… then again as Devil Without A Cause entered it’s 17th minute… Until I skipped Rollin into Wasting Time, and just noped out entirely.


I have a shocking and terrible news flash from 1998; this album may have sold 11 million copies in the US, to widespread critical acclaim, but it’s actually not very good.


I know. Try and contain your shock.


The why of the badness is trivial. To start with, there aren't enough good songs; that’s a pretty fundamental issue. Bawitdaba is a strong opening; it builds well to the chorus intro, and the first verse sets out the stall well; it comes off like a classic chest-beater, but there’s a bit more going on under the hood. ‘This is for the questions that don’t have any answers’ is a fucking good opening line, and the parade of misfits the song (album?) is dedicated to (‘the G’s with the 40s and the chicks with beepers’, ‘wild mustangs/ The porno flicks/ and all my homies in the county in cell block 6’) feels like if Fun Loving Criminals were going dirty on this one, and the riff is solid. Cowboy is what it is; it was a good choice for single, but it’s certainly run through it’s replay value for me, at this point. Good comedy makes you laugh; truly great comedy makes you laugh the thousandth time you hear it. Cowboy no longer makes me crack a smile, though I remember why it once did.


But then we get to the title track, and the problems start to surface.


Like, it’s not terrible or anything, but it is just a bit too long. The Joe C verse is cute, and contains probably the best single line on the album  (‘I’m a freak, don’t call me sick/ 3 foot 9, with a 10 foot dick!’), but there’s one too many tours through the chorus. I understand this is something about which reasonable people can differ, but, for me, a rap metal song that has you checking how much longer it has to run has failed some pretty elemental test.


I Am The Bullgod makes some strange production choices with the guitar sound, an issue that’s exacerbated on subsequent tracks; by the end of the record, I feel like I’ve heard seven or eight different producers who have aggressively different approaches to the job, which in turn generates a track to track dissonance that I found tiring. That said, Bullgod makes a good case for Kid Rock’s drug consumption; it’s also the last straightforwardly good song on the album.


The issue from here is pretty simple; I’ve heard everything Kid Rock has to offer. The entire gamut of his emotions, the limits of his rhyme schemes, the subject matter (having sex, taking drugs, being White Trash, going platinum, okay). But the album still has 15 tracks to go. And a combination of lyrical diminishing returns and the aforementioned tonal production and beat/tune choices mean that I’m both bored and oddly exhausted by the time the risible Welcome To The Party and faux-cool I Got One For Ya kick in. Marking the halfway point.


The back half isn’t devoid of charm; Fist Of Rage has a sub-sub-RATM quality that still has enough blood in it’s veins to bring on a nod, and Fuck Off sees KR audibly upping his game, in a vain attempt to not be demolished by his special guest MC. It’s the definition of a doomed effort, but it does at least give you a glimpse of what could have been, if KR had put more effort into being The Hottest Shit Ever, instead of merely declaring it, like every success-visualising huckster in the embarrassing history of capitalism.


Oh, also, in the final track, Black Girl, White Guy, Kid Rock casually drops the n-bomb.


So, you know. There’s that.


And, no, of course I’m not sat here in 2022 trying to get Kid Rock cancelled; frankly, if, here in 2022, you’re still enjoying Kid Rock, you deserve each other, and it’s none of my business.


What I am curious about is why I liked this so much, at the time and place when I did, given how transparently mediocre it always was. Like, I had RATM’s debut when I was twelve or thirteen. Fear Of A Black Planet existed, Straight Outta Compton existed, and in two years, A Certain LP is going to demonstrate just what a white boy from Detroit can do in the realm of Hip-Hop, and without being some middle class twat cosplaying as a drug dealer.


So, let's start here; it’s not good, but it’s not aggressively and unremittingly awful; if I also enjoyed Limp Bizket and, heh, Methods Of Mayhem, maybe I should just cut myself some slack. Like, there’s some legit good guitar playing here, and the band behind him is rock solid. All Hip Hop is essentially new to me at this point, so I had no way of knowing just how reliant Kid Rock was on what had gone before. I was still green, about the past and the present-as-was; the point of the big shopping trip was to take some risks, see what was out there. I was terminally easily impressed, and the rap/metal thing was still new enough (and rap in general still essentially unknown enough) for the thrill of discovery to whitewash a multitude of sins.


Also, I guess let’s kick this about for a second; it’s the same record I heard in 1998. Not a note has changed. What’s changed is me; my positionality to the work, and therefore my relationship to it. The stuff I loved is all still there; if I love it no longer, is that just because I’ve since heard so much done so much better that what seemed impressive now sounds mediocre?


Sure, that’s part of it. Shit, this one goes all the way back to our early conversation about the music of WASP, doesn’t it? I loved that, too, and, well, yeah.


And intellectually, that’s a perfectly reasonable, defensible position to hold. I was young. I’m no longer as young. Considering how long it’s been with some of the work I’ve covered here, it’s honestly astonishing this hasn’t happened more often.


Sure. But also…


Well, look, I think, even by the subterranean standards of hip hop and metal, this album is kind of frighteningly misogynistic. Not that other titles in this series so far covered and still to come don’t have their share of, erm, issues, but fuck me, this guy just has nothing else to talk about. This is a man who, like Fred Durst, appears to hate women because his sex drive means he has to be in their company but they just won’t stop talking. Seriously. And, like, sure, welcome to patriarchy, welcome to toxic masculinity, and it’s not like it isn’t a crowded field. But with Rock it stands out so starkly, for me, because of the paucity of the rest of the material; when your entire persona is pimp/street hustler, and you don’t have the creative chops or imagination or confidence to ever move outside of that, it becomes a kind of relentless dirge of self-loathing; the party anthems feeling like dead eyed embracing of nihilistic abuse just to feel something.


Only, you know, a bit shit.


Like, I bought this for The Ghost, a horrifically misogynistic man, and I remember he loved it but was surprised that I’d know he’d like it because rap wasn’t his thing (oh, yeah, he was a massive WASP fan). And for those of you staring at me in Guns N Roses, sure, but in my defence, I called it out there, too. And I think what bugs me - and I admit this is subjective, but - is just how deeply felt the assumptions appear to be, just how much it feels like KR thinks these are simply Facts Of Life, obvious truths.


I dunno. I came here to work out why there was this gap between early 20’s me and mid 40s me and I feel like I’m trying to grasp smoke.


That fucking n-bomb does bother me too, though. And it bothers me a lot that it didn’t bother me at the time. Like, I didn’t even remember it, so little impression did it make. And, again, not trying to relitigate 1998, but at the same time, that’s not a fucking hundred years ago, is it? Did it not bother anyone because Kid Rock was clearly just an awful person, or because he has a black son and therefore can’t be racist, or… what, exactly? Like, of course he could say it, but, I mean..


Like, Axl Rose has spent decades, now, rightly apologising for One In A Million, and here we are ten years on from that songs release, and a white middle class kid cosplaying as a street hustler drops it in a song talking about his relationship with the black mother of his son, and… crickets all round? I dunno, man, it feels fucking odd to me, and defnately kind of shameful that I wasn’t more uncomfortable about it at the time.


Because what it comes down to is a faint bad taste the whole thing leaves in the mouth for me, at this point. I don't like Kid Rock, as a human; and that’s okay, there’s plenty of artists whose work I love who I don’t like either… but the work is pretty mediocre too, and that’s what I think pisses me off. It’s one thing to get taken in by a blinding talent that happens to be owned by a garbage human, but when it’s a garbage human who also doesn’t have a huge amount going on creatively, when it’s an album that, in retrospect, feels like a cynical rebranding of a struggling hip-hop artist who saw the nu-metal wave starting to crest just in time to grab it, creating an album that feels oddly half baked and inchoate… yeah, then it’s just a little bit upsetting to have gotten caught up it that, taken along by it.


I’m sure it won’t be the last time, but even so.


Still, there is one big fat, silver lining. On track 14, with the pleasingly direct title of ‘Fuck Off’, Rock delivers his best bars on the album, over a truly snarling guitar line. The subject matter’s the same as ever - getting fucked up, getting laid, determined to be The Biggest - but it’s delivered with more conviction and skill than anywhere else on the record; you kind of get the sense of why the suits thought they could make use of this guy.


And then, at the end of the song, he calls in his guest MC.


And for the first time in my life, I hear the high, nasal voice of someone KR introduces on the track as Slim Shady.


And on a few short bars, I get a sense of what this form can really deliver.


Everything he’s doing is next-level. He does Kid Rock's same subject matter but there’s an edge to it; the flow is more assured, more intelligent, the rhyme scheme far more complex, and yet the overall flow sounds effortless, as though he’s making it up on the spot. And it’s funny in a way that Rocks 2D machismo simply isn’t capable of. Slim sounds like a whiny brat, the anti-cool, the nerd kid, only with more skill than everyone put together, a swagger that knocks Kid Rock off the stage with one hip swing, borne not from a need to rooster strut to cover for insecurity, but from a place of total, furious confidence - I got this shit, I own this joint, just you sit back and let me go (if my sources are to be believed, at least some of that swagger came from young Mr Mathers enjoying a rare encounter with cocaine, supplied at Rock’s studio prior to recording). The track bleeds away behind him as he closes the song out (‘so when you see me on your block, you’d better lock your cars/’cause you know I’m losin’ it when I’m rappin’ to rock guitars!’) and he closes with an electrifying dedication/call to arms that sets me off in a way nothing has since Rage Against The Machine.


So, sure, I think Devil Without A Cause sucks, and Kid Rock sucks, and I’m embarrassed that I loved this deeply mediocre artist and album, as a young man.


But, on the other hand, it did introduce me to Eminem.


To be continued…


KP
12/02/22

Sure, some of it was that Tripods had a thrilling pedigree with me, what with them being part of probably the first horror story I ever heard. And yes, absolutely, the BBC/Who pedigree was also in the mix. But, beyond that, there’s… well, it’s like this. I spent almost my entire childhood to the date of this broadcast living in highly rural settings. My earliest memory of home is a farmhouse that was a 4 mile walk from the nearest (very) small town, and, a brief, single term of school in a town near Middlesbrough aside, it had all been small village life. So, seeing children walking around in this intensely rural setting hit perhaps a little different with me than for many of the kids watching it. Sure, I could tell we were meant to realise this was a low tech world, what with the way a simple pocket watch is treated with almost reverential awe; still and all, it just wasn’t that different, or distant, from what I saw around me every day.  And, I mean, head says I must have been too young for concerns about puberty/coming of age to have resonated in any meaningful way, but my heart says different. It whispers about just how much anxiety my young mind was capable of; that bottomless well of sadness that opened up in my centre at the fact of my father’s absence, sure, but also just fundamentally my ability to imagine terrifying situations, even get a kind of perverse enjoyment from this kind of imaginative catastrophizing…


And the fucking Tripods were terrifying. They were impossibly huge, and the fact that they took you up inside them combined my fear of heights with a constant low-grade fear generated by moving about in a world fundamentally not friendly to a child’s height. I had frequent nightmares at this age, about giant railings that would in no way prevent me from falling from dangerous heights, huge walls of corrugated metal with an awful, painful, whining, grinding sound behind them…


And then, again, a Gandalf type figure who turns up to suggest The Way Things Have Always Been is hiding a deeper truth felt precision-engineered to appeal to my child mind, especially as I was likely partway through my first read of Lord Of The Rings around this time, my mother and I taking turns to read pages to each other as summer turned to autumn turned to winter. It’s often been observed that creativity and originality are really just finding ways to collide pre-existing ideas in new ways; in this particular case, replacing the journey to Mount Doom with a trek to join the resistance to the alien invasion, across a world that is both recognisably Europe and also changed in inexplicable ways certainly blew many doors off in this kid’s noggin.


I loved it so much, I bought the paperback.


It was a reissue for the TV show, with a cover featuring a photo of the actors huddled around a rock that reminded me of the County Durham moors I’d spent so many hours of my young life walking over. And within, I got so, so much more than that tantalising first episode; not only did I get the trip across the channel, I got the stupifying ruin of a modern city, confirming this was my world, or at least, had been. I got the incredible sequence where the author pulls the stunning trick of using the reader's real-world knowledge to create a moment of extraordinary tension while the POV, first-person narrator is entirely oblivious. In fact, let's zoom in on that moment, because it’s instructive; Will and the gang find themselves in a subway that has been converted for military use. Sandbags and a machine gun is described (the latter without Will having the slightest clue what he’s describing, to be clear) before he talks about finding a crate ‘full of little metal eggs in straw’. Will casually pulls out the inviting ring pull, then stares at the live grenade, wondering what’s going to happen.


Gotta tell you, folks, in terms of screaming tension, it doesn’t get much better. Utter genius.


The whole first book is like that, in fact; providing the reader with information that makes more sense to us than it does to the characters; painting the picture of an invasion that has become an occupation, the human population clearly strictly controlled and rendered docile by the coming-of-age ceremony that instals ‘caps’, metal grafts attached to the skull and which seem to convince the wearers of the benevolence of the Tripods. That somewhere around one in ten of the recipients are driven insane is a nicely macabre touch, as is the fact that such ‘Vagrants’ are treated with pity and kindness by the rest of the population. By the time Will desperately throws his final grenade up into the opening inside a Tripod that is picking him up I was edge-of-the-seat invested in his ragged band hooking up with the resistance.


The trilogy also escalates brilliantly; in Book 2, we learn the Tripods have built cities; humans are taken in from all over the world (boys who win some kind of athletic challenge similar to the Olympics, girls, and I wish I was making this up, from giant beauty pageants), and none ever leave. Our gang, fitted with fake caps, undergo training to compete, and once Will and the, sigh, German kid called Fritz who’s all taciturn and Will doesn’t like For Some Unknown Reason make it into the city, man, the whole thing just kicks into another gear. The human slaves have to wear masks because the air is toxic, the artificial gravity produces a crushing weight (which makes sense of the use of physical competition to select the entrants), and The Masters themselves are utter grotesques, with descriptions that would be difficult to realise in a movie without looking laughable, but on the page, ah, the mind’s eye is free to make it all work, and it really does.


The other big escalation from Book 2 is that we learn that even the remnants of humanity don’t have much time left; there’s a huge ship on the way, and it’s going to convert the earth’s atmosphere into the same poison as in the cities. There’s a brilliant moment, here, where Will’s master expresses this plan with clear signs of anxiety; there’s a lot of political disagreement amongst The Masters, about how much of a threat humanity represents, and what the ethical thing is to do about them/us. And as shitty as the setup of women’s only selection criteria for city entrance being beauty, the payoff is monstrous, as Will is taken into a museum inside the alien city, and is suddenly brought face to face with the girl he’d fallen in love with in the first book, and who had been taken by the Tripods after being declared the queen of the tournament. I can still remember the shock of the moment, and also the sick thrill of a setup that took a whole damn book to pay off.


What I’m trying to get to here is that this trilogy taught me a lot about storytelling; not because it necessarily did anything blindingly original, but because it was well written on a sentence level, with a ferocious readability on a par with Terance Dicks on his best days, combined with a rollocking plot that piled on event and tension and escalation in a manner most pleasing. I read it several times, wanting to revisit these kids, and their long, strange, dangerous journey. I also appreciated another entirely-new-to-me-trick; that Will, the narrator, was not actually much of a hero, and was in point of fact, somewhat of a dick - selfish, whiny, self-absorbed, and jealous of the friendship his travelling companions developed. That dickishness runs right through Book 2, with his judgemental treatment of Fritz, and it’s really not until Book 3 that he starts to develop maturity enough to rise to the moment; and even then, the final moment of heroism falls to his childhood frenemy, Henry, with Will bearing witness.


And with adult eyes, there’s tons going on under the hood; in addition to the above, there’s classic anxiety of empire (similar to War Of The Worlds, actually - what if someone landed in England with the kind of firepower and tech advantage the English were landing on other shores?), a hell of an excoriation of liberal apologias for slavery and colonialism, as personified by Wills tentacle wringing Master, and a brilliantly downbeat ending where, the extraterrestrial threat removed, the resistance starts crumbling and fracturing back along nation-state lines. I love how Will’s final act is to turn his back on his dream of being an explorer to leverage his status as a hero of the liberation of Earth to try and hold everything together; something about that really speaks to me.


And sure, there’s flaws; in addition to the gender issues highlighted (and more fundamentally, the entire absence of female characters that aren't either Will’s mum or Will’s love interest, FFS) there’s plenty of Eurocentric 'national character’ stereotyping that, erm, hasn’t aged well. But, acknowledging those real and present flaws, it’s absolutely still a rip-roaring narrative that’s genuinely about bravery and heroic resistance to tyranny, and, you know what, I think that’s an important thing for kid’s fiction to do.


And that’s why, a couple of years ago, I sat and read this series to my daughter, as bedtime reading. Before we started, I told her that the lead character was a boy, and so were almost all the other characters, and would she like it if we changed him to a her, and if so, what name would she like me to use?


And so it was that my daughter heard the story of Alice; an angry, selfish but brave girl, who undertook a dangerous journey, joined the resistance, became a boxing champion to infiltrate an alien city, gained crucial intelligence, and finally led the guerilla action that destroyed the enemy base once and for all.


And it fucking rocked.


KP
27/2/22


PS - A few months before Nan passed away, she was taken into care; she’d lost the ability to safely prepare food for herself and was increasingly disoriented. While in care, she was given medication, and her personality transformed; mum reported that she’d asked after myself and my sister, sent her love, and that she’d spoken kindly with mum, too. I’d made jokes for a while, after seeing the first season of The Sopranos, that Olivia was exactly like Nan, and that Nan had borderline personality disorder. The joke stopped being funny after she’d been taken in and received treatment.


Given who she was, and the generation she came from, there’s really very little realistic chance that she could have been diagnosed sooner. And, on a selfish level, I’m glad my mum got the closure of those last few kind chats, after a lifetime of vitriol. Still, I can’t help but reflect on the enormous harm done - to Nan, and to those about her - by a lack of understanding of mental health issues. It’s a mostly hidden cost and damage, I think, but it’s very, very real all the same. May we all somehow receive the care we need to be the best of ourselves.


27/2/22


My thanks to Daniel Harper, who recorded a podcast some years ago with me on the subject of this trilogy, which allowed me space to rehearse some of the above. He’s currently doing vital work documenting the American far-right via his I Don’t Speak German podcast; please check out his Patreon, and consider throwing him some support.

It’s 13th June 2017. And, accompanied by my dear friends Justin, Duncan and Rob, as well as my stepson, I’m inside my favourite music venue in the country (at least since they tore down The Astoria; yes, still bitter, thanks for checking); Brixton Academy, London.


We’ve had a beer and some grub in a nearby bar, and, T-Shirt acquired, we’re positioning ourselves in a good spot; centre stage, far enough back to hopefully not get caught in the initial crush, but plenty close enough to soak up the considerable atmosphere. 


And, sure, the boy and I had seen them just the previous weekend, as part of probably my favourite Download 3 day weekend ever, and they had been Mighty… but this was Brixton fucking Acadamy, and the crowd was, and I believe the kids used to say, lit. And as well as Prophets Of Rage had gone down in front of the Download crowd (very, very well indeed), the intimacy of this show, a feeling like we were in on the ground floor of what was sure to become a world-beating colossus of hip-hop/metal supergroupery, promised something truly epic.


So, we’re in the pit, and getting ready for some moderately serious jumping up and down action, and the reception that greets DJ Lord is raucous and rapturous. He acknowledges the crowd, and with an obligatory ‘Make some noise!’ (we do), he starts doing his thing.


And 90 seconds in, a guitar riff comes rolling out the speakers….


And suddenly it’s, fuck, mid to late 90’s and I’m an angry young teen, and I’m browsing The Ghosts moderately sizable cassette tape collection, and I notice the black on red script, gothic style, single word.


I pull it out, look at the cover. The image is so dark it’s hard to make out, but I can just about see a painting of a bare-chested, muscular, angry-looking black man, with a gun in his belt, and that same word - band or album name? - half on either side of him, in two columns.


“Is this any good?”


He looks up. “Yeah, it’s good. Heavy. It’s Ice T, but it’s metal.”


Huh.


I know of Ice T, of course; even in whitebread North Devon, we’ve heard of Ice T. I will have known very little about the man, and what I did ‘know’ was likely playground bullshit, potentially even filtered through second-hand tabloid panic, laundered by schoolkids too dumb to even know that’s what they were doing, absorbed by me, also too dumb to know better. Still, the name carried weight, cache. All I really knew was Ice T was Cool, and a Bad Ass. Despite the seismic influence of Rage Against The Machine, I still wasn’t connecting with hip-hop in a wider sense; screaming guitars still basically owned my soul, and with the depth of my passion and the shallowness of my pockets, I didn’t really have any way to explore other genres if I’d wanted to.


Still…


Ice T.


And Metal.


Interesting.


It opens with something that I now know as a standard of hip hop albums, but which at the time was deliciously alien to me; a skit. Ice T gets a gun from Mooseman (bass player in the band, we learn in the following track), goes over to a policeman, asks him for help changing a flat tyre, then shoots him.


The track is called Smoked Pork.
​
A guitar starts chugging. A siren wails. A voice says the name. Another voice yells “YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER!”. A second guitar joins. The drums roll in.


“BODYCOUNT!!”


Over a riff and chant (hypnotic, repetition, bodycount, bodcount), we hear the sounds of a car chase; police sirens, squealing tyres, gunfire popping off. The guitars are immense. As they drop into the second riff (still no sign of anything so dull as a verse or chorus) Ernie C shreds a wild flurry of notes out into a wailing bend that gives me chills. 


I have no idea what’s going on. It sounds like someone wrote a song to recreate the feeling of playing GTA; like, fuck verses, fuck choruses, just pure riff and attitude, get it.


I do. By the time Ice T has introduced the band and taken us back into the… verse? First riff? I am sold. It’s fucking glorious. “BODYCOUNT, MOTHERFUCKER!” I yell, then and now, joining in with Ice T as the song ends.


And, you know, sure, back then I couldn’t really say there was nothing like it, because I was a teenager, fucking everything was new to me; I had no idea what musical innovation really sounded like. I didn't have the terms of reference. I liked how RATM had made me feel, I liked how Bodycount was making me feel…. But I also liked how GnR and WASP made me feel, and I’d never heard anything like them, either. 


But coming back to BodyCount after thirty years… man, there really wasn’t anything quite like this, was there?


Sure, as noted above, the constant interjections - Opera, Now Sports, A Statistic - mirror hip hop ‘skits’ (though there’s not much in terms of humour, here), but there’s also the fact that there are no less than three tunes named after the band (the album opens with the one/two punch Bodycount’s In The House and Bodycount, with Bodycount Anthem towards the end of side 2), which, what? 


Then there’s the, uh, eccentric approach to song structure. So, in addition to the opener, whose lyrics consist entirely of the word Bodycount repeated a lot, the band being introduced like at a live show, and the phrase ‘Bodycount’s in the house!’, we have Bodycount, with a long spoken-word intro over a gently picked guitar riff, before, for the first time on the album, we get into something that resembles a verse/chorus structure. And even there, after the second verse, we get a drum solo into chorus into an extended guitar solo. And I want to be clear; it’s not that it’s bad. It is not bad. It’s pretty fucking awesome, combining a punk inventiveness and energy with metal musicality, and all the muscle of both, with the continued vibe of a live show (‘Yo, Beatmaster V! Take these motherfuckers to South Central!’). It’s a pure adrenaline shot, and in many ways it’s almost an ideal of metal, shedding the flab the genre is not infrequently known for, but preserving the musicianship. And this persists; There Goes The Neighborhood, Evil Dick, and Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight have similarly gonzo structures, and KKK Bitch has spoken intros to each verse, setting up the scene.


And sure, coming back after 30 years, it’s not flawless. Bowels Of The Devil is a metal/hardcore riff for the ages, but the lyric is pretty basic, and the chorus punchline (‘And you don’t want to die there! They call it going out the back door!’) only really lands the first time. Similarly, Voodoo chugs along perfectly serviceably, but there just isn’t enough there there in the lyric to really sustain the song. And I’m never going to be a fan of anti-drugs ballads like The Winner Loses; the sincerity is there, and the directness is admirable (opening line: ‘My friend’s addicted to cocaine’ lets you know what you’re in for), but it’s a genre that basically always bugs me. Like, I don’t even dig She Talks To Angels, you know?


Elsewhere, though, hearing the album is throwing open all these doors of memory; reconnecting me with a very teenage sense of rage at the state of the world that never entirely left, and seems to be resurging with some force as I approach the midway point of my fourth decade on this planet, given, well *gestures at the absolute state of the world*. But remembering that sad, angry, scared, lonely teenage boy, listening to this album at stupid volumes, I guess there are two things I really have to get into; the anti-racism, and the misogyny.


Let’s start with the anti-racism. As I may have mentioned before, I spent most of my childhood in one of the whitest areas of the country, if not the planet. In my entire school career, there was exactly one Asian kid, and zero teachers of colour; and that includes school and college. What flows from that? Well, I was raised leftie, and I knew discrimination was Wrong. And I think my mum’s feminism, especially, gave me a leg up, purely in terms of a ‘people have the right to do what they want, and love who they love’ mentality. At the same time, the absence of any chance for first-hand experience of anyone not-white led to a shy awkwardness, when I finally made it to London. I fucking loved the multiculturalism of that city - hell, still do - but I carried a mortal dread of saying or doing something stupid out of the ignorance I knew I carried, and, yeah, that took a bit of time to process. 


And that was compounded by the fact that the shared ignorance of my young white peers (alongside, in some cases, some good old fashioned bigotry) meant there was a lot of racism around me in Devon; at school, at college, and in society in general. Random examples float into memory; the bizarre piece of graffiti on a wooden locker at college, where someone had written across the dark door in tippex the phrase ‘Ja Rasta Fart’; the late 20s guy who, as part of a wider conversation about whether or not jealousy was innate to the human condition or a social construct, calmly asserted to me that he believed white and black people had evolved entirely separately. The apparently nice eccentric older gentleman who wandered around town barefoot, and was always up for a chat, who, upon hearing I was moving to London, frowned and said “Why would you want to do that? It’s full of wogs!”.


And the endless jokes about black people.


And I just can’t. And I don’t need to. You’ve heard them, one way or another, and I can see no value in rehearsing them here, devoid as they are of any scintilla of merit, as harmful as I now know them to be, as shameful as it is to recall now how I would listen, and God help me, sometimes even repeat these… I mean, jokes are meant to be funny, and they aren’t, so, I don’t even know what to say. I was young, I was dumb, I was surrounded by assholes, and I am deeply ashamed, and that’s kind of it, really.


I also, and I do want to note this, did know it was wrong.


I say that not to excuse, incidentally, rather the reverse. What kind of person, even a kid, goes along with something they know is wrong, harmful, for… what? Some kind of shitty awful badge of ‘cool’ or ‘edgy’? Some imbecilic and not remotely thought through ‘commitment’ to ‘free speech’? Repeating lies I knew were harmful to impress people I didn’t even like?


Jesus, what a wretch.


But that knowing it was wrong, that did matter.


Because when Bodycount came along, they were ready as fuck for my dumb white ass. And they had some shit to tell me.


There Goes The Neighbourhood is the riff DJ Lord hit that sent me spinning down the memory hole, even as I joined the crowd in a roar of approval. Jesus, that riff. And then the title, delivered staccato as the drums crash in, and then that piledriver verse riff as Ice T just rips the lid off. Earlier, on The Real Problem, he’d spoken about the fear of white kids liking a black artist; on this track, he takes that up to eleven, directly addressing racism in rock by ventriloquising the meathead position. He’s dropped n-bombs throughout the record, but here it’s different. Here, he’s voicing the ugliness, the fear, the hate. 


And, I mean, by this point, the start of side two, he’s completely won me over. This is a fucking awesome metal album, with a bluntness and brutality I’ve seldom experienced but always been looking for, and a (mostly) righteous fury that I feel as my own, despite the chasms of life experience and culture that divide us (and, fucking hell, isn’t that the point of music, of art, when you get down to it? Aren’t we all reaching out for that, either as creators or audience?). And if you want to call bullshit on a dorky white teenager in North Devon finding music written by a black man from LA relatable, I of course can’t really argue… but it doesn’t change how I felt, or how I feel now, as I listen back to the album.


I do feel a connection. And hearing There Goes The Neighbourhood, especially the breakdown when Ice T announces ‘We’re here/ we ain’t going nowhere/ we’re moving right next door to you/ Bodycount, motherfucker!’, man, my teenage fist is punching the air in mute agreement. 


And by taking on the stupid, racist position in the verses, the moral vacuum of that stance was revealed to me on a visceral level, in a way that no amount of well-meaning teaching about ‘we’re all the same’ could ever manage. Like, no disrespect intended to those teachers (well… maybe a bit) but this, this was precision-engineered to reach a kid like me - a white metal dork who knew racism was wrong… but maybe didn’t really understand why on a level beyond the intellectual, not having had occasion to see the impact up close, first hand. 


And then here’s Ice T, who, having kicked my arse for an entire side of punk-metal of variable quality but undeniable energy, gets right up in my fucking face and over the best riff on an album with an abundance of face-melters, says, in effect, ‘whose side are you on?’


And the correct answer on this issue, then and now; your side, Ice T. I’m with you. And I can’t unsay the things I said as a child, but I can - I could, I did - commit to talking less bullshit and more truth, from that point on. And it did mark a moment for me, a before-and-after, both in terms of how I’d behave, and what behaviour I’d tolerate in the people close to me. Looking back, Bodycount was the moment I first grasped that anti-racism was a verb, not a noun - not something you are, but something you either do, or do not.


Man, it’s really tempting to end things there. But, well, there is the small matter of the album’s cartoonishly awful misogyny.


Now, as we’ll be covered in posts past and future, this isn’t an issue particular to Ice T, or Hip Hop, or metal. It does, however, feature prominently in all those forms, and as uplifting as the anti-racism message of Bodycount is, if I’m being honest, I do also have to reckon with the comfort zone that the likes of Guns and Roses had given me for misogynistic art.


Because I mean, fucking hell.


Women, on this album, exist exclusively as objects of lust, or as pains in the ass, and that’s it. Voodoo features a woman with a voodoo doll fucking up Ice T just, you know, because, and Evil Dick features a sequence that is toe-curling even by Rocket Queen standards. And sure, that last is clearly a tongue-in-cheek riff on, as the Oprah intro phrases it, ‘male promiscuity’; still, it’s not exactly not a celebration of fucking whoever you want. And to be clear, as long as there’s enthusiastic consent, fine, but… well, I just think it’s not ideal if half the population is reduced entirely to their potential appeal as sexual partners, as opposed to being, you know, fully functional human beings.


And the two tracks where this tendency becomes most apparent and egregious are where the two themes collide; KKK Bitch and Mama’s Gotta Die Tonight.


KKK Bitch has some of the feel of a skit, given the aforementioned spoken intros to each verse, and sure, the story of Ice T dating the daughter of a KKK Grand Wizard is, I mean, if you’re not already grinning or even laughing at the concept, I dunno what to tell you. And it is, transparently, a gag, to be clear - right down to the third verse intro where Ice T says ‘...it really don’t matter, if you from mars and you got a pussy, we will fuck you, and you know that’s all we tryin’ to say…’


And I can’t tell you if that’s a funny line on the page, but in the context of a song where Ice T is touring southern states with Bodycount and shagging all the white women whose racist boyfriends can’t satisfy them, the way he delivers it… look, I’ll own that it still makes me grin.


At the same time, the ‘woman as object’ trope is all over the song; Ice T is ‘using’ the daughter to get to her dad; the song even has him getting turned on and having angry sex with her as her old man delivers a racist speech. And she has no appreciable personality or agency of her own, she exists purely to worship Ice T sexually, and…


Like, I get it, I get it, I get it. She’s not real. None of it is real. It’s a story, a goof, a joke, and the punchline is racists are awful. And teenage me is looking at adult me with total confusion, but like…


Well, the problem is, teenage me, and Ice T, for that matter, I guess; you didn’t dig those other jokes that denied humanity and agency to a whole segment of the population. And at this point, I honestly can’t tell if I’m an alien or I’m missing something that’s blindingly obvious to everyone else, but, like; misogyny has a bodycount, too, and violence against women is an endemic and ongoing crime against humanity, and obviously, fuck playing oppression Olympics, and fuck whoever even first coined that hateful phrase, but…


I grin, sure, but the grin doesn’t sit easy. And sometimes I listen, and sometimes, I skip. And I don’t have any answers, and I’m not saying the song shouldn’t exist or that you shouldn’t listen to it or shouldn't enjoy it. I’m just saying I think There Goes The Neighbourhood does it all way better, and doesn’t leave an unpleasant aftertaste.


And then there’s Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight.


And this one’s way tougher for me, because I really fucking like this song. I like it because it comes on like a horror movie, I like it because it’s about anti-racism as a verb, I like it because the core conceit is you really need to fuck off racists in your life, no matter who they are, because racism is Actually Evil. And as we’ve already rehearsed at painful length, that was a message I very much needed to hear, when I first heard it, and the internalisation of that message measurably improved my quality of life.


On the other hand, it’s a song about murdering a woman and chopping her up.


Yeah, but a racist woman, I know, teenage me, I did catch that bit ‘I learned my momma was an evil woman. She hated black people, Mexicans…’ on and on, yup, racism wrong, racists bad, got it. Still, tho… at a certain point, it’s hard not to notice that there’s at least a subtheme of the album, and it’s not ‘women are awesome’. And no, nobody is obliged to put out art that does that, of course not, but… It’s not just me, is it? 


Like, music; at least the music I really love, the stuff that goes down deep and really matters, has always had a liberatory quality; and I know that sounds both corny and laughably subjective, and it is both those things, but it’s also how I feel. And, as with much of the horror  literature I love, there’s a specific liberatory quality to laying bare dark truths; ugly impulses, unworthy thoughts, dangerous, unpleasant beliefs, vomiting them up and really poking about in the chunks and drool, see what’s what. There’s a purging, but also a reckoning; and let’s face it, we vomit for a reason, right? If your body is trying that hard to get rid of something in your stomach, you’re probably better off rid.


And viewed through that lens, and given the utterly pervasive nature of misogynistic patriarchy, the literal and metaphorical stranglehold it has over women and men alike, there’s a case to be made that art that doesn’t at least reflect that to some degree isn’t being honest (well, my kind of art, anyway - I guess utopians get to imagine what humans look like without this poison coursing through every interaction, and good luck to them). And Ice T is an artist, and I can’t see into his soul any more than I can into anyone else’s.


Still, I can’t get away from the lack of challenge. Bodycount, a band of black musicians that Ice T knew would primarily appeal to a white audience, comes right the fuck at racism from the off, understanding that the vast majority of metalheads would embrace the attitude and be moved in the right direction as a result. Bodycount was throwing the best party, and the only price of entry was to reject racism.


And, again, just to be crystal clear, fucking good show.


But there’s nothing here, or, really, in most of the music I love, from that era to this, that challenges the poisons of misogyny or patriarchy. Sure, in grunge, the outright misogyny is mainly absent, and of course, that’s not nothing, but nor is it doing what BC was doing here with racism.


And I think that’s a damn shame.


Not - one more time - because patriarchy was or is Ice-T's problem to solve. But because when I see and hear so much of how men still behave, in the year of our Lord 2022, I feel like a fucking alien, and I just wish some artist had done for them what Ice T did for my dumb teenage racist self.


Still. 30 years on, Bodycount still packs a punch, and I’m grateful to have had it in my life.


KP
16/3/22


PS Prophets Of Rage absolutely killed it. But that’s a story for another day. And, indeed, project.


 :)

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.
​

It’s been a year since my first experience of a horror movie at the cinema. I remain scarred and hungry. And since then, there’s been the utterly remarkable Superman III (most likely on TV, over one Christmas, but clearly an experience that lingered). And it’s the summer of 1985, and I’m staying with my father, which means it is, once again, time to Go To The Cinema.


Now, dad’s taken a bit of stick in this series, in an affectionate sort of way, and I’m not really in a position where I could roll that back and remain remotely intellectually honest; at the same time, I feel like, as we’re getting close to wrapping up, some kind of apologia or contextualisation is needed.


So, to be fair to the man, it’s not actually his fault that it took the UK five years, following the hilarious debacle of giving Temple Of Doom the PG certificate to realise what the US clocked immediately; the need for something in between that says, effectively, ‘this one’s ***really*** PG, go see it first’.


In the US they invented the PG-13 certificate. Over here, we had to wait until Burton’s 1989 Batman for the existence of the now-standard certificate for superhero movies with any kind of bite at all, the 12 certificate. I can still remember The Sun headlines on that, incidentally - ‘Film Censors Ban Kids From Batman’, because moral panic only extends as far as gay teachers, and not in any way towards kids seeing potentially traumatic media, like, well, let’s be honest, Jack Nicholson, full stop.


And, again, the old man was strict about this stuff; if there had been 12’s back then, he’d have vetted, and likely we wouldn’t have seen either Temple or tonight’s topic. And in his further defence, alongside the ‘Spielberg presents’ tag, practically guaranteeing family popcorn entertainment, this was also connected to a franchise which has, rightly or wrongly, both feet planted firmly in mainstream, acceptable pop culture.


So, there’s that. On the other hand, Spielberg had a pretty heavy involvement in last summer’s Temple debacle.


So, should he have known?


Anyway. The lights go down, and we’re in Victoriana. I am almost certain this predates any Granada related experiences, but I’m an English child, so the imagery and iconography is, at seven years old, already familiar almost unto contempt; I can’t be sure, but I suspect part of my much-lamented antipathy towards Dickens is the degree to which it seems to me that English pop culture is so infatuated with and saturated by Victoriana it feels like you’re a member of the world’s biggest cult.


Still, given who the lead character is, at least I know it’s not going to be boring.


Hopefully.


Be careful what you wish for, kid.


So, cobbled streets, fog, gas lamps, horse-drawn carriages, yadda yadda, oh, look, it’s a gentleman with one of the tall hats, guess we’re following this dude, okay, let’s follow him. Truth to tell, I can't picture him, even having broken with tradition and completed a rewatch recently, but the folk memory is slightly portly, ruddy cheeks, and sideburns, so let’s go with that. And before long, we note that this gentleman has a shadow.


A figure, completely shrouded in a dark brown cloak that is hooded and falls to the floor, meaning the figure appears to glide as it follows the man. Also meaning we can see only darkness where the face should be.


I’m a Doctor Who fan, even at this age, so you can bet my SpideySense is tingling a three-alarm warning down my spine already; a feeling that spikes deliciously as… something slides into view, out of the hood.


I mean, it’s clearly a weapon of some kind, probably made of wood. At the same time, the smooth motion as it appears puts in mind a robot, to me, some piece of machinery opening to a firing position. And what the hell can you shoot from your face, anyway? I mean, it’s a period piece, so it can't be a robot, but… but on the other hand, I’m too young to know what canon is, but I’m not too young to understand that this story was made now, even though it’s based on stories from ago, so, maybe…?
Everything about the cloaked figure screams mystery, that’s the thing, and again, Whovian, mystery = alien/robot, I guess. Anyhow. The nozzle, as I think of it, comes into view, there’s a noise of some kind, and the man slaps his neck, as though bitten, and the nozzle slides back into place, in a reversal of the old movement, and the figure glides away.


We follow the man into a restaurant. There he is seated at a fine table, tucks in a cloth napkin, and is brought out a succulent roast bird (it’s the Victorian era; if it’s roast meat, it’s succulent, I’m only seven but I’m not stupid). He’s clearly wealthy, clearly happy. Even at seven, I have ambivalence about that, given what I know about Victorian poverty. It’s literally as I come to write this that I wonder if that wasn’t actually the point, if my teachers weren't trying to smuggle in class consciousness the only way they felt safe, via the medium of Ago, when Things Were Bad. In a week in which the Tory government of the United Kingdom have done the not-at-all Fashy thing of declaring we should no longer teach ‘a version of history’ that ‘does Britain down’, it’s hard not to look back on admittedly traumatizing and in many ways indefensibly insensitive teaching with a kind of weary acceptance that, yeah, better that than this ahistorical nightmare. A nation so strong and proud we need commissars - excuse me, freedom of speech champions, of course - in Universities to make sure the racists get equal time with the anti-racists, with presumably the flat earthers and creationists queuing up behind.
Very Unity. Much Strength. Not at all the screaming insecurity of the ignorant bully, terrified above all of being found out.


I swear to God, this fucking country.


Anyway.


He grabs his carving, erm, fork, I guess, and stabs it into the dark roast flesh, knife raised in the other hand, eager to get with the delicate rending of flesh.
And that’s the moment when, accompanied by a nerve-shredding attack of violins on the soundtrack, the bird grows a head and launches himself at the man.
It’s the mental shock of the moment I remember most clearly. I can't tell you if I dropped/launched my popcorn, flinched, what have you. But I remember that stab of cold, right in my gut, as the clearly-roasted-and-dead-and-equally-clearly-very-much-not-dead-and-profoundly-cross bird launched itself at, and I really can’t emphasise this enough, the man’s fucking face, there to peck and scratch and draw blood.


I mean, are you out of your fucking mind? Or am I?


As I think that, literally as I think it, we cut away to bemused restaurateurs, staring, the soundtrack snap-cutting from strings-in-full-fucking-Psyco mode to a Christmas carol, then back to the man waving his hands in front of his face, apparently wrestling with thin air…


Except then, no, the fucking bird is in his hands, and it is evil, twisting and pecking and writhing at supernatural speed, and his face is bleeding and holy shit it’s going to take a fucking eye out…


Sidebar: I’m watching this with kiddo, 10, and the second the cutaway happens she says, with engaged delight “Oh! He’s hallucinating! He must have been drugged!”


And I don’t know how to feel. I mean, glad, I guess, even proud; sure, she’s a couple of years older than I was, but still, that’s film literate, right enough, and that same glee carries across the rest of the sequence; for her, it’s the safest possible thrill ride, and they can chuck as much scary shit they want at the screen because fundamentally, it’s Not Real.


The rest of the sequence was burned on my brain, in no small part because I would describe it later, for weeks, to anyone who showed the slightest interest, and likely many who did not, doing what I always did (hell, looking at this two-volume series, what I am apparently still compelled to do); trying to exercise power over that which had scared me by retelling it for others, trying to convey my terror faithfully, and in doing so, by some process not entirely clear or remotely examined, to gain mastery over that fear, even as I relieved it.


So, the snakeheads on the hatstand, coming to life and attacking, the gas lamps rippling and spitting fireballs, the man’s final, frantic plunge from his apartment window; there's a good chance that some of the kids I went to school with have nightmares about what they imagined that film was like, based on my telling.


Or, I dunno, maybe not, maybe that’s hubris. Probably that’s hubris. Nice to imagine, though, that my world’s youngest Ancient Mariner shtick had a shelf life beyond the immediate. But the truth was and is; it’s a compulsion, nothing more. When something gets as deep under my skin and fucks me up as gloriously and completely as Young Sherlock Holmes did, I’m going to speak to it. Repeatedly. At length.


Welcome :D


And I think kiddo ultimately nailed it; she got it, straight away, and I… didn’t. This movie may have introduced the notion of hallucinogenic substances to me; it’s certainly clear that the idea was obscure enough, and the immediate impact of the moment so visceral and all-consuming that my own kid’s simple, obvious observation didn’t occur to me.


Which left me with… what?


Was the chicken invisible? Had the alien/robot shot the man with something that meant he’d be attacked by furious undead chickens and hatstand snakes that only he could see? To which the answer, from a certain point of view, was yes, but that was how my kid brain interpreted the moment when the man was flapping his arms in front of his face, clawing at the air. Not that there was nothing there, but that the others couldn’t see it.


My memory is that I didn’t finally work out what was going on until the characters did, which was some way into the narrative, and by that point, I’d half-watched several more hallucination sequences, peaking between fingers that I could snap shut over my eyes at the slightest provocation, and sure, some of that was no doubt Temple trauma revisited, but also, this damn film earned its keep, I think. The stained glass window Knight was eerie as hell, of course, but oddly, it was the ostensibly more lighthearted moment of Watson being attacked by cream cakes (no, really, that happens) that drove the terror levels all the way back up, for reasons I'm not sure, even now that I can fully articulate.


Well, okay, fair enough, I should try, shouldn’t I?


So as a kid I had a somewhat uneasy relationship with food. I’m not sure why, but especially restaurant dining would, sometimes, lead to me becoming suddenly nauseous and throwing up. Sometimes, I’m sure, it was a simple case of overeating food slightly too rich for me; and I think, over time, some kind of low-level negative feedback/anxiety loop was kicking in.


Which means a kid being attacked by food is going to inherently ring a little more sinister for me than maybe the average kid. Also, though, it’s a sinister sequence; the cream cakes have tiny, black, angry/evil eyes, and the chittering non-language is skin crawling, and they do end up using one of their own number as a cream horn battering ram, trying to literally ram it down Watson’s throat and make him choke, and, oh, look, I can hear you laughing from here, ok, fine, I was a weird kid, let’s just leave it there, but it freaked the fuck out of me. Again.


Despite (or let’s be honest, because) of the abject fear, and many, many nightmares, Young Sherlock Holmes became a vital part of my childhood pantheon of cherished movie memories, and though the relationship with the source material is, oh, let’s be charitable and call it tenuous, nonetheless I’m sure the film was at least part of the reason I ended up diving into the complete short stories as a young teenager. I loved them then, and love them still; enough that Patreon backers are getting to hear Jack Graham and I discuss each of the stories, in order, via a podcast series.


So, there’s that.


But I think I’ve discovered, in the process of writing this, that it’s that first moment of pure shock, the jump scare in the opening of the feast-turned-predator, that did the most damage. Both on its own terms; as a terrifying and inexplicable image, and for the deeper horror that lurked behind it; the notion that the world didn’t have to make any sense at all; that, something incomprehensibly weird and awful could not only happen, without warning, but happen and then immediately try and eat your face off while everyone else stared at you, bemused.


In retrospect, a pretty good warning, for secondary school, adolescence, and the world of ‘gainful employment’ in general. And, perhaps, the perfect object lesson for someone who wants to write about what scares him, and you.


You just never know when your Sunday Roast is going to decide you’re on the menu.


KP
19/2/21

 “Born down in a dead man’s town,
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground,
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much,
Till you spend half your life just coverin’ up.”