Ramblings of an Incoherent Mind

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November 24th 2012

Howdy, all.

I just thought I'd take a moment to semi-drunkenly ramble about censorship. You should probably do yourself a favor and stop reading right.... now. Actually, though I'll shortly touch on censorship, this has more to do with the way music is interpreted than censorship. It should probably be filed away under pop psychology.

Here in the USA, a lot of retailers sell censored versions of albums. Please note that this doesn't apply to me, as sensible retailers wouldn't touch my trash with a borrowed ten foot pole. Rest assured, I entertain no delusions of grandeur. What I do entertain, however, is a dull sense of outrage. Actually, "outrage" is much too strong of a word. Let's use "annoyance" instead. Anyway, the same retailers that insist on only selling censored albums (i.e. albums that don't contain any expletives) have no qualms about selling movies and video games with rampant violence, sex and "vulgarity".

Now let me stop for the fourth or fifth time here and clearly state that I'm a big fan of rampant violence, sex and vulgarity. That being said, I'm left wondering why music is treated with different standards than other, sometimes more interactive, media. And yes, I realize that this diatribe was probably much more topical in 1997, but here I am ranting and here you are reading (God knows why), so we'll rely on the old trope of "suspension of disbelief" here and I'll continue.

Growing up in the clutches of the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980's, I'm aware that music is how the Devil gets inside your head and corrupts you and makes you eat babies and paint your apartment with blood. Obviously, right? Beyond that, though, people seem to view music as being particularly autobiographical. Every song, as far as a lot of people are concerned, is at heart a page ripped from the singer's diary. It can be directly interpreted as "here's a bunch of garbage that happened to me and here's the overly dramatic way in which I internalized and am expressing it." In other words, it's pure horseshit.

I should take a moment to confess that I've never been possessed by the Algonquin spirit known as the Wendigo and subsequently murdered and devoured my traveling party. Back in 1693, I didn't actually lose my loved ones to the Kraken. Hell, as long as we're being totally honest, I've almost never taken a rifle from down off its shelf, as banal as that sounds. Who keeps their rifle on a shelf?

I've always been more interested in telling stories than dishing up personal history and how it made me feel. Everyone's gone through bad stuff. Who cares. Please note the distinct lack of a question mark in the last sentence. It's my clever way of indicating a rhetorical question wherein no one, in fact, cares. Is that to say that I write with insincerity? No, of course not. Just because I wrap concepts in narrative story format doesn't mean that I don't absolutely obsess over them. Of course I do. If I didn't, I guarantee that I'd be able to churn out albums with a higher frequency than once every three and a half years.

Well, this exercise in excess has obviously gotten out of hand, so I'm forcing myself to sign off. If you want to hear a yarn, I'm madly spinning one for "Trinity". I'm up to my elbows in the blood of its inhabitants. I've measured its cosmology and leer at its happenings with godlike malevolence. I plan on inverting its sickly universe in its entirety. Who would want to censor that?


Fog-mindedly,
Zeb