The Ravens Nest

How Two Songs By The Same Band Set The Example

Some of you may recognize this band. They’ve been around nearly thirty years now. Some of you may not even know who they are.

Some of you may hate them and before you click off this article and be like “I’m not fucking reading this.” I want you to take a beat, take a breath and just hear me out. I’m only gonna talk about two of their songs and some perspective on today. That’s it. I’m not out to tell you that they’re the greatest band ever. I’m a fan but not as much of a fan as I am of Lindsey Stirling, Warlock, Doro Pesch, Megadeth, Marilyn Manson (oooh boy…the world is in for it with that guy, lemme tell ya), NIN, Cradle of Filth or many others.

I do like them, however but that took awhile.

Coming up on their video for My Own Prison back in ‘95, my initial thought was that they were sort of a Pearl Jam ripoff. Scott Stapp sorta sounded like he was trying to emulate the Eddie Vedder vibe and I immediately wrote them off. Just didn’t care for the song. I’ve warmed up to it a bit but, in my opinion, it really wasn’t a great first impression for me. It was only later that I really did warm up to them. A later song, which I’ll come back to, made me say “Oh now we’re talking!”

After those last two articles, the aspect of walking away from this whole Culture War thing and letting the Culture War Criminals get away with it, still wasn’t sitting right with me. In fact, I was fuming. I still wanted to compromise the structural integrity of an inanimate object to the point of structural dis-integration. That’s a fancy way of saying I wanted to break something. Well, yesterday at work was a day where I get to use the hydraulic press to crush boxes. We’re supposed to break them down before putting them in there. Boss wasn’t there and nothing is more satisfying or cathartic than hearing those boxes collapse, tear, bend and crease under the oppressive machine pushing down when they just wanna stand up.

This song that I haven’t listened to in about ten to fifteen years or more just blasted into my head a couple of nights ago. I was walking around work humming it. The power drive of the guitars, the throbbing bass, punishing drums and the howl of Scott’s vocals just roared through my head. The earworm was turning and it was packing an Uzi. About fucking time.

I listened to it on the way home that night. I listened to it on the way to work yesterday. I listened to it on the way home last night too but then I heard one line that made me stop cold in my tracks. When I heard it, I literally just stopped walking. There’s a brick flowerbed devoid of flowers on the corner and I sat on it and listened to the entire song, start to finish, consciously, focused on the lyrics. I had my Spotify screen pulled up and the lyrics were right in front of me. I read along as Scott belted them out.

I felt like a fucking moron. The song is one of my favorites. It’s been in existence for twenty-five years and not only did it, in grim retrospect, warn us about what a culture war looked like, it also taught us in some way, how to handle it properly. If only we’d realized it sooner.

This felt like one of those moments with my grandfather on my mom’s side of the family. He was super-fond of giving advice and insight, none of it making sense until another Dagaz moment hit me later and it would suddenly hit me like a bolt out of the blue and make me go “Fuck…that’s what he meant! Shit!”

The song was called What If? and the lyrics are something else. I’m not going to post them all. I’ll just post the music video made for one of the Scream movies. What I want you to do is listen to the lyrics of that song and we’ll come back to it. I’ll give you my take on it when you’re done.

Several things just jumped out at me. The song just explodes into an inferno out of nowhere. It’s opener grabs you by the throat and pulls you along at break-neck speed.

I can’t find the rhyme in all my reason
Lost sense of time and all seasons
Feel I’ve been beaten down
By the words of men who have no grounds

I don’t think I need to explain this one to people accused of being a “Nazi” here or those relentlessly pursued to the space of ruin. The people doing this were hoping you’d unalive yourself. Never forget that.

Can’t sleep beneath the trees of wisdom
When your ax has cut the roots that feed them
Forked tongues in bitter mouths
Can drive a man to bleed from inside out

Here we have an illustration of what they’d do to cut off all access to any escape from their constant barrage of bullshit. Some, who didn’t off themselves could easily find themselves angry, resentful and ready to strike back…and pretty much destroy themselves in the process. We’ll come back to that as well.

I’ve seen the wicked fruit of your vine
Destroy the man who lacks a strong mind
Human pride sings a vengeful song
Inspired by the times you’ve been walked on

Now, I wanna stop right here. I don’t want to call anyone here weak-minded or simpletons or any of that shit. Some people didn’t have what it took in terms of resources, experience or even knowledge of recent history in order to make it through this stupid-ass decade. That didn’t make them weak, spineless little cowards. Not at all. Some just got blindsided and their lives wrecked nearly overnight. They didn’t know what to do about it and the isolation got to them. Combine all those factors and it causes some things, causes problems to look far larger than some of them may have been and then…it’s all downhill from there. Some of the strongest and toughest among us still had damage done that can’t be undone. The truly weak-minded, spineless little cowards were the ones doing the targeting and puffing their chests out like they’d done something worthy of a medal. The problem in their heads became our problems.

Upon initial inspection, one might be led to believe that Scott is talking about the wicked fruit destroying the people who lack strong minds to mean the people doing the bullying destroying those bullied but, in reality, the wicked fruit of those vicious lies and rumors destroyed the ones who ate them up without question. Unfortunately, that became our problem too.

The second part illustrates further. The people who feel as though they’ve been trampled down (which took place in their heads, let’s not get it twisted here) started screaming for revenge about slights only perceived but never actually visited upon them.

Remember the pendulum swing. The Evangelicals and “Moral Majority” Conservatives in their moral panic used circular logic, local rumor and pursued those that dared to defy their declarations, both by hook and by crook. I found myself fighting to keep jobs time and again over rumors. Thankfully, these idiots didn’t have the internet. Goodness knows what could have happened if they did. Well that pendulum did a nice little swing and look at where it got us. Those of us who went through it realized we made it through that nonsenese. For me, though, it didn’t last a decade. If only it were such a short period. It lasted about 16 years or better for me. It never stopped until I uprooted and hauled ass…and right into the waiting arms of this shit. When I wrote my article Order of The Pendulum, it was with this very fact in mind. Those of us that made it through it, won. We might be bashed up and bloody but we’re harder, faster and a lot more resilient in some ways for it. Best not to mess with us again…just saying.

BTW, full credit to Grim Jim for taking my moniker of Order of The Pendulum and giving it a whole metric boatload of class here…

Honestly, gotta give it to the man, Ordo Penduli sounds so much better with so far fewer syllables. If I can get a little cash together, might just commission a bit of heraldry that would easily become a back patch for a leather jacket or an armor breastplate or hell, even a PVC Morale Patch…maybe all of the above. Those dedicated to stopping that pendulum from swinging toward the people like Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian, Patricia Pulling or Pat Robertson, using logic and reason would be welcome to join our little Not-So-Secret Society. I might even make up an initiation ceremony that’s completely goofy and spoofs that of an actual Secret Society just for a laugh. It’s gonna be a thankless job where we’re going to catch shit from both sides, might as well have some fun with it, folks.

I digress but I think it needed to be put in here because…well… *Smile*

My stage is shared by many millions
Who lift their hands up high because they feel this
We are one, we are strong
The more you hold us down, the more we press on

It was a nice segue into something else we all needed to remember. Eventually, your exiled outnumbers the exilers and then…what goes around, comes around.

While I’m on this, when it comes to the Wus and Sarkeesians here, I have to ask, for all your bluster about female empowerment, did none of you ever read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley? Ever? I mean, have you even seen this movie?

It’s a timeless, classic, gothic-horror story about a man who thinks he knows best, relentlessly pursuing a force of nature over which he has no control whatsoever and, in doing so, he creates a monster only for the monster to run amok, causing far more harm than the good he thought he’d be doing. In the end, everything he loves, cares for and has ever had, including himself, is destroyed. You created a monster and thought you could control it until it victimized people to the extent that your monster was the cause of what you wanted to eradicate. By the way, Mary wrote that after being trapped inside a villa in Switzerland due to shit weather caused by a volcanic eruption. She didn’t talk much, she was listening to her contemporaries have a discussion about some extremely morbid topics and created her own original work at the tender young age of 19. She came up with a gripping, engaging story. You should read it and see what that’s like sometime. Just sayin’.

Before I move on, just remember that it doesn’t take much to tell these people to get lost, take a long walk off a short cliff and onto the rocks below, fuck all the way off, etc. The verse illustrates that they don’t have the power that they would have you believe they do. From here on out, there will be those of us that will work to ensure they never get that initial foothold ever again.

I know I can’t hold my hate inside my mind
Because what consumes your thoughts controls your life

I don’t think I need to explain this one. This is the reason Grim and Raggi are just moving past it now. This can go for any moral panic and in just a second here, I’m gonna go back to another song they released before this that was great advice and could have done what Bill And Ted set out to do, if only we’d listened and quit being a bunch of overanalytical pricks about things.

What song was that, you ask?

Yep, this one. I’m not going to get to breaking down lyrics here but there are great points that prove, beyond doubt that those of us called “Nazis” today were and, in some cases, still are fans of this song. This one provided us with a world view that we tried to live out day-to-day.

Now, there are insufferable clowns out there firing off screams of “That’s Not Enough!” and the warning was there in this one song and, again, the chorus does show us the way by telling us to be the example.

Granted, on all of this, I’m late to this party but better late than never. I think it’s worth those who want to join us in Ordo Penduli to internalize these two songs. You don’t have to be a fan of the band or Scott’s wild behavior that derailed the band. Last I checked the guy was in recovery and doing pretty well so we can all hope that continues. We can also hope these two rock songs are immortalized in how we keep the pendulum at Zero Point with very little swing and a whole lotta reason.

Remember, it’s always up to you to be reasonable and take a note from Captain America here…

“Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right.

This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — “No, YOU move.”
― J. Michael Straczynski, The Amazing Spider-Man: Civil War

Is it any wonder why I love that dude’s writing?