I've just been studying the lyrics of the death metal album The Wretched Spawn by Cannibal Corpse.
The first song is called 'Severed Head Stoning'. My pedantry begins with this title. Let's examine the lyrics:
His family's head strike him
The most recent victims
Without mercy savage killers throwHis wife's head breaks his jaw
Bruised flesh becoming raw
From many wounds blood begins to flow
Surely, what we have here is not a stoning at all. A stoning is when someone is executed with stones, used as projectiles. In this case the projectiles are severed heads. Therefore, the title of this song should really be, 'Severed Heading'.
Here's a quote from the song 'Slain':
Wasting no time he began defiling whores
He would be the last man they felt, a carnivore
Yes, indeed, why waste time on idle chit-chat before defiling whores?
Anyway, what catches my attention with this kind of couplet is the lilting, sing-song rhythm. Reading it, I begin to feel that Cannibal Corpse really missed their vocation as writers of greeting card rhymes. Lyrics such as these should really be read out in the following manner:
In fact, not many people know this, but 'Twirling Trouble' is a lost Cannibal Corpse lyric. Note the gory imagery of hair ripped out, of the strangulation of fingers and so on.
Also from the song 'Slain' we have the following:
There is no escape, he holds your fate as the death rate climbs to the fullest extent
Maybe I'm just being picky, but I can't help wondering what the "fullest extent" of the death rate actually signifies.
Here's a list of countries by death rate. I quote:
Crude death rate refers to the number of deaths over a given period divided by the person-years lived by the population over that period. It is expressed as number of deaths per 1,000 population.
The crude death rate is, no doubt, that preferred by Cannibal Corpse. As an example, the death rate for the island of Jersey between the years 2005 and 2010 is given as 9.26 per 1,000.
Presumably, the fullest extent would mean 1,000 per 1,000. In a five year period, surely what this would mean was that, at the end of it, everyone was dead. Since the period to which a death rate refers is also variable, would the "fullest extent" of the death rate also mean the shortest possible time period? If it does, we can pretty much assume it refers to the instant extinction of everyone. I suppose my quibble here was with the word "climb". Can you climb to total and instantaneous extinction, or is it actually instantaneous and total? Maybe it is legitimate to climb to instantaneous extinction, but since it is only measuring the last possible instant, how will you know that the death rate has actually accelerated from just below the fullest extent? For instance, when you're down to the last three people alive, let's say that within three minutes, two of them are killed, then, after another five minutes, the last one is killed. The moment the last person is killed, the death rate has actually climbed to its fullest extent, but is this an acceleration, or is it merely the end of a process of extinction?
Perhaps I'm being needlessly pedantic here, but I wonder if Cannibal Corpse thought about this when they wrote the lyric. Considering the next two lines, I rather suspect that they didn't:
One more town, slowly going down
This is the comming of endless torment
Is instantaneous extinction compatible with endless torment? (This is one for the anti-natalists out there.) Perhaps what's happening is that the death rate is climbing to its "fullest extent" really, really slowly, thus never reaching it. But does the lyric suggest eventually reaching that fullest extent, or is it merely a climb towards? And is it possible thus to climb, the death rate ever accelerating, and never to reach extinction? That's a question, I suppose, for mathematicians and demographers.
The next lines I wish to take issue with come from the song 'Decency Defied'. They are as follows:
Torn from your body, removed while you scream
Dissect to collect, my blade now reams
I had my suspicions and have just looked up 'ream', here:
1. To insult someone to the point of suicide. 2. To rip someone's asshole apart.
I shall see if I can find other definitions later, when I have a little time. Supposing that the protagonist's blade really does insult someone to the point of suicide, or rip someone's anus apart, what bothers me is that the verb is clearly transitive and demands the mention of an object. It is not enough, for instance, merely to say, "I kicked"; one has to say what one kicked – "I kicked a severed head" etc. In this case, we could have something like, "My blade now reams another of my unfortunate victims."
Perhaps that's enough needless pedantry for now. Next time I look at The Wretched Spawn I intend to examine gender roles in the songs, Nothing Left to Mutilate and Blunt Force Castrastion.
Steven writes:Well, look at the average death metal fan, you notice they always look stoned because more than half of their brain cells are dead. They think they are rebels but they are much too stupid to rebel in any meaningful way.
Originally posted by anonymous:Well, look at the average death metal fan, you notice they always look stoned because more than half of their brain cells are dead. They think they are rebels but they are much too stupid to rebel in any meaningful way. We must be careful not to generalise (about people who like to ream with blades), but this puts me in mind of a Celtic Frost interview that I read many, many years ago. I believe it was both Tom G. Warrior and Martin Eric Ain who were being interviewed, so I’m not sure which of the two the quote should be attributed to. Anyway, in the interview, one of them said something like this:”I don’t want to criticise death metal fans, because they have been our fan base and put us where we are, but they can be very narrow-minded. They believe they are behaving in a free manner, but actually they are very conservative and have their own strict dress code and social rules.”Originally posted by anonymous:I did not realize how much you had been thinking about these Cannibal Corpse lyrics. I am fairly certain that nobody has ever analyzed them in such detail before. You probably even spent more time writing this blog entry than was spent on writing the lyrics for the entire album. Believe me, I’ve hardly even scratched the surface in terms of the potential for pedantry with the lyrics of this album. Even with the snippets quoted, I didn’t talk about the lyric, “His family’s head strike him”. Does this mean that his father, head of his probably patriarchal household, slaps the protagonist across the face, in order to discipline him and encourage him to study more grammar, or does it indicate that his family were in some way mutated, all their various necks ending in a single head? Or, is it, again, merely one of countless signs on the internet that the entire world is dropping to this level of literacy and even a dedicated fan cannot transcribe a death metal lyric correctly? I could have spent all day being pedantic without coming anywhere near to the end of it, I’m afraid.
Alexandra writes:I did not realize how much you had been thinking about these Cannibal Corpse lyrics. I am fairly certain that nobody has ever analyzed them in such detail before. You probably even spent more time writing this blog entry than was spent on writing the lyrics for the entire album.
Anonymous writes:Something also pedantic that bothers me, presumably if the propensity for an acceptance of the futility of life in heritable then it behooves anti-natalists who personally aspire to remove humanity from existence (a subset of them granted) to populate as prolifically as possible. Thus when the entire population reaches a consensus that life is not worthwhile appropriate action can be taken. Anything else surely, would just result in the selection out of the propensity not to reproduce (or at least its maintenance at a low level in the population).To the matter at hand – the death rate could potentially reach its “fullest extent” by way of analogy with a massive population increase of biologically pre-determined anti-natalists. Thus poising the humanity for self-assured extinction.This is probably off-topic, sorry, I have always been more a Cradle of Filth lyrics appreciator anyway….
Originally posted by anonymous:Something also pedantic that bothers me, presumably if the propensity for an acceptance of the futility of life in heritable then it behooves anti-natalists who personally aspire to remove humanity from existence (a subset of them granted) to populate as prolifically as possible. If it is an inheritable trait, then antinatalism is, indeed, a self-limiting phenomena. However, it seems unlikely to be an inheritable trait in that, everyone who has it has had parents, who, more likely than not, were not antinatalists, or would not have had their poor antinatalist child. However, perhaps it is inheritable by accumulation, so, for instance, maybe a man with some antinatalist genes marries a woman with some other antinatalist genes (they’re both a bit depressive, say, but they still have enough of a glimmer of life affirmation to accidentally conceive a child and to decided not to abort) and the child they produce has an accumulation of these genes, and is, therefore, an evolutionary dead end. Maybe.Pedantry aside, I still have a lot of sympathy for antinatalism. No one really seems to know whether life is any good. We seem to have to try very hard to imagine the good things, while the bad things are shoved in our faces daily and inescapably. Let’s imagine there is a benevolent centre to the universe, if we all went on strike and stopped reproducing, maybe it would say, “All right, all right, I’ll give you a clue what it’s all about. Carry on rutting and I promise you everything will be all right. And you know I’m telling you the truth, because of this incontravertible proof that I grant you now.” Now, let us imagine there is no benevolent centre to the universe… In that case, we’re really going nowhere, and quite gruellingly, and having to tell our children lies about progress, happy endings and so on. It would be better just to call the whole thing off. So…I’m tired of the endless not knowing. It seems to have gone on for millenia now, at least. If they tried to spin out the TV show Lost for that long, even the most dedicated fan would probably begin to say, “Enough, just tell us where the island came from, what it’s all about, why they can’t have babies, what happened to that girl that Hurley fancied, etc.”But the creator of the universe promises to spin his Lost, his Twin Peaks, out for eternity, only deepening the gratuitous mystery of it all in order to tease with the hope that some day all will be revealed.Reveal it now, or just let us fade peacefully into oblivion, I say.For some reason I was thinking about this poem yesterday:http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/essential-beauty/It's about advertising billboards. Apparently Larkin was fascinated by the idealised images on them, of happy, beautiful people with perfect lives. I find these images appealing too, in a strange way. Where do they come from? Where do they belong?At the end of the poem, a smoker is approached by ” that unfocused she/No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,/Who now stands newly clear”. And, then… “Smiling, and recognising, and going dark.”This is the end. And this is how I want to go. I want some angel from an advertising billboard to take me away to the world as it should have been, even if that world is of no duration, and only exists in my dying expectation of it.I played Morrissey’s The Never-Played Symphonies to a poet friend of mine once, and he remarked that the ending was the same as the ending of Larkin’s ‘Essential Beauty’:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6VWwqJgN8So… how is Stuart Anstis these days?
Anonymous writes:Thankyou for the Poem. I also am more sympathetic to the existential angst driving some anti-natalist theories than my post may have suggested.On the subject of your analogy to Lost (truly chilling to someone who drifted off in the first season!) – Would the best solution to a meaningless world, be the ability to make the meaning ouselves? this may be a sort of soft version of Nietzchean philosophy “Life as Literature” .. DIY meaning ..or maybe not.. I am not a philosopher.This sort of appeals to me, and I would expect it to appeal to someone much more creative than me, even moreso.This is sort of what you have done to some extent with your beautifully crafted aesthetic ending above.”Dusk and her Embrace” circa Anstis is the best CoF album .. haven’t checked out his electronic project yet though.
The meaning of life?Hang on, give me a day or two and I’ll answer you in full.
PS. I was going to write about linear time being the great problem in questions of meaning and purpose. I was also possibly going to write about innate motivation or something like that. I put this here to remind me in case I later have the time and inclination to do so.
Okay, to answer the question of the meaning of life… Perhaps ironically, given the above comments, I have found Lost to be more interesting with each series. The first series was well-designed fluff with attractive people on an island, but after that the writers began to introduce all kinds of great ideas. I still suspect it’s all just a tease, though.I have encountered the maxim, or, more usually, in fact, the advice, that you can make your own meaning in life, etc. Given the fact this advice is most often offered to offspring by their parents, I think it’s a cop-out, to which the obvious response is, “Yeah, well what meaning did you think you were making when you spawned me?” I’m not sure that I really believe it. Or, at the very least, it’s not as simple as some people make it sound. If I could ‘make my own meaning’ in life, it might be, for instance, that everyone is happy and beautiful and loves me, but it’s pretty damned hard to square that meaning with my actual experience. Even if I choose a more open-ended meaning, like, “Life is just a game; we’re here to play, have fun, and maybe learn some things”, it is, despite its flexibility, nonetheless far from impregnable. When the tide of doubt, loss, grief and fear rises, when, for instance, one contemplates biodiversity unravelling from a loose thread, taking the pattern of humanity with it, it’s hard just to shrug and say, “Oh well, life is just a game; we’re here to play, have fun, and maybe learn some things.” What fun is to be had in apocalypse? What meaning is to be gleaned therefrom except the utter purposelessness of existence?Having said all that, humans seem to return again and again to the question of meaning, and, since we are part of the universe, we might as well say that the universe returns again and again to this question. In fact, we do experience meaning. As you are reading these words, you will experience meaning in that my conclusion one way or another, or lack thereof, will mean something to you, even if it won’t be life-changing. We exist in an element of meaning. We can’t think about a thing without bestowing meaning of some kind on it, or rather, to think of something is to experience it through the element of meaning. Meaning exists. What drives people mad, though, is that meaning seems to be entirely relative to time and situation, and it is nigh on impossible to find some ultimate meaning. Lack of ‘ultimate meaning’ is something that people often take as an indicator that there is no meaning at all.I think that part of the problem might be this: When people ask, “What is the meaning of life?” they are asking a question made of words, and they expect a statement made of words in return. There is no statement made of words that can correspond to the meaning of life.Someone, I believe, once asked T.S. Eliot what he meant by the line, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day”. He replied that he meant, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day.”Perhaps, then, it could be said that the meaning of life is precisely life, the meaning of the universe is precisely the universe, and, most importantly, the meaning of everything is precisely everything.There is more to say…. There’s always more to say, but I am now temporarily tired of typing. I may write more about the meaning of life later.
Anonymous writes:”There is no statement made of words that can correspond to the meaning of life”This is also something I have sort of felt, to the extent that to ask the question may be meaningless. Ironically, in this context, something reminds me of Spenglers dictum to the effect that asking for a reason to procreate means the society the person doing the asking is in, is already on the downward slide. Maybe “we” as conscious enquiring beings are on the dwonward slide…To need a reason indicates something about the questioner and also, seperately life “IS” without our definition of reason.My working belief at the moment is that if there is something transcendental it is at least minimally a “constraint” ie we cannot do/achieve whatever we want, no matter how enlightened we become or how much we perceive reality as illusion. This is necesssary for existence/being to have something to work against (to sort of define itself)and the “constraint” could be anything, may eventually be defined mathematically – and is probably timeless. I am happy to be told this is all Crap or not novel though and anyway I have taken up enough of your time.I really appreciate your reply, I half suspected your first reply to be flippant and did not expect anything further .. thankyou for taking the time. (also apologies for my lack of paragraphs I include them but they are removed on posting :()
Originally posted by anonymous:Ironically, in this context, something reminds me of Spenglers dictum to the effect that asking for a reason to procreate means the society the person doing the asking is in, is already on the downward slide. Maybe “we” as conscious enquiring beings are on the dwonward slide… To need a reason indicates something about the questioner and also, seperately life “IS” without our definition of reason.Sorry for the late response on this. I’ve been thinking about this off and on recently, too.Thanks for your thoughtful reply.