There Is No Alternative: Facing Death With "Hallowed Be Thy Name" by Iron Maiden
There Is No Alternative: Facing Death With "Hallowed Be Thy Name" by Iron Maiden
Drumming Upstream 21
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Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each of them as I go. Once I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 459 songs left to go!
This week I learned “Hallowed Be Thy Name” by the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden. A year ago today, at the time of writing, I published a letter about Iron Maiden and adaptations of the science fiction novel Dune. In that letter I said that I’d have occasion to talk about Iron Maiden a great deal very soon. That occasion has finally arrived.
The first year of Drumming Upstream had to end with Iron Maiden. In September 2015, shortly after Liking “Hallowed Be Thy Name” on Spotify, I wrote an essay for Invisible Oranges tracing the changes in Iron Maiden’s sound through their drum parts. What I didn’t mention in that piece is that I felt confidant making sweeping claims about Iron Maiden’s drummers because I had spent the previous few years learning every Iron Maiden song on drums1. So in a sense Iron Maiden were the first subject of an embryonic form of Drumming Upstream.
Now, you’ve waited patiently in your cold cell long enough. Time to up the irons and chime the bells…
Side A
“Hallowed Be Thy Name”
By Iron Maiden
The Number of the Beast
Released on March 22nd, 1982
Liked on August 7th, 2015
Do you remember when you first knew that you were going to die? I do.
I was eight or nine years old, laying down in the backseat of my parent’s 1994 Ford Taurus. We were on the Jackie Robinson Highway driving back to Brooklyn from my uncle’s farm in upstate New York. The sun was down. A cassette of Irish folk songs played on the tape deck. Just as we crossed beneath the overpass on Cypress Hills Street, the singer of a particularly slow and mournful song2 sang with blunt specificity about the day he was to die. It wasn’t my first introduction to the concept of mortality, but that night flat on my back watching the glow of street lights flash across the roof of the car, I felt the full gravity of the fact for the first time. I am going to die. My brain will stop producing thoughts. My senses will stop picking up stimuli. My consciousness will vanish. I will cease to be and my body will rot.
I have never stopped thinking about this fact. It lurks subterranean under every train of thought. One wrong step and I’ll feel the ground open up beneath me. If it comes on fast enough I get physically nauseous, but usually it arrives slowly and passes at the same speed. I have no idea how common this experience is. I’ve only ever spoken to one person about this phenomenon, and he knew exactly what I was talking about. Maybe you do too.
“Hallowed Be Thy Name” is the closing track on Iron Maiden’s third album, 1982’s The Number of the Beast. The Number of the Beast is a pivot point in the band’s career. It is their first album with singer Bruce Dickinson, who’d go on to sing on all but two of their albums since. It is their last album with drummer Clive Burr. Both Burr and Dickinson played in Samson before asynchronously joining Iron Maiden. After leaving Iron Maiden, Burr bounced around in a few B-tier rock bands until multiple sclerosis forced him to quit drums in the 1990s.
The Number of the Beast is also the pivot point between Iron Maiden, scrappy upstarts and Iron Maiden, globally famous metal band. It is the album that took them out of dingy rock clubs and on the path to sports arenas. If you’ve attended an Iron Maiden show since 1982, regardless of the size of the venue, I’d bet $6.66 that at minimum you heard one of three songs from The Number of the Beast: the title track, “Run To The Hills” (boy, am I glad I’m not writing about that song in late November) and “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.
There’s also a decent chance you’ve heard “Hallowed Be Thy Name” at a metal concert even without Iron Maiden on the bill. Heavy metal doesn’t have a Real Book, but if it did “Hallowed Be Thy Name” would be near the front of it. Machine Head covered it. Dream Theater covered it. Even Iced Earth covered it, as if swagger-jacking their logo and mascot from Iron Maiden wasn’t enough. This is how I first heard the song, as a cover on the last track of Cradle of Filth’s two-disc compilation album Lovecraft & Witch Hearts.3 I borrowed the record from a friend of mine in the first week of high school because I thought his Cradle of Filth shirts looked cool and scary. I listened to it in my room with the lights off, a self-consciously self-serious setting that only a 14 year old could stage earnestly.
The window in my childhood bedroom opens onto the apartment building’s fire escape. For extra security the window has a lockable gate that obscures the outside world behind a network of metal bars when closed. Under such conditions what fourteen year old boy wouldn’t get a chill down his spine when Dani Filth shrieked “Take a look through the bars at the last sights/Of a world that has gone very wrong for me”? I made a mental note in the darkness to seek out the original with haste.
“Well, it’s a bit morbid” Steve Harris, bassist and songwriter of Iron Maiden, said of “Hallowed Be Thy Name” in an interview from 1982, “but it’s about a prisoner in a death cell”. I find this quote funny for the same reasons I find a lot of things about Iron Maiden funny. It’s funny that Harris felt the need to specify that the song is about someone waiting out a death sentence in a prison cell when the first lyric of the song is “I’m waiting in my cold cell”. Harris is just as literal recapping his own songs as he is recapping classic literature in his songs. It’s also funny that Harris specifies that this song is morbid when his band is named after a medieval torture device.
Jokes aside, I get why he made the distinction. Plenty of Iron Maiden songs before “Hallowed Be Thy Name” are about death and dying. Usually though, the protagonist of the song is the one dealing out death. Their second album is called Killers after all, not I’m Being Killed. Paul Di’anno, the band’s singer before Bruce Dickinson, spent most of Iron Maiden’s first two albums singing about stalking and killing people in the streets or running away from cops after stalking and killing people in the streets. The band, marketing geniuses from the jump, put their zombified headbanger mascot Eddie murdering then-current British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the cover of their first single.4 That’s right Kathy Griffin, you owe at least a Christmas card to Eddie the Head.
These early, gritty, grimy, fits of murderous rage set to blister-enducing guitar parts were enough to earn Iron Maiden a record contract with EMI. They were enough to make Iron Maiden famous in Japan. That would have been enough for lesser musicians, like me, but Iron Maiden had their eyes on bigger prizes. They replaced Di’anno with Dickinson, whose theater-precise diction and muscular vibrato5 made him a better fit for the bigger stages the band were growing into. No longer content to court controversy with British conservatives, Maiden took on all of Christendom at once by putting the devil himself on their album during the high of Satanic Panic. In a sly acknowledgement of their ambition, the cover of The Number of the Beast makes it clear that Maiden are no one’s servants. Eddie towers over ol’ Lucifer, pulling his strings while the devil manipulates the sinners below. The Beatles might have been bigger than Jesus, but Iron Maiden aimed to be bigger than Satan.
Bruce Dickinson was the perfect singer to make that dream come true. Born perfectly situated between the high school quadrants of nerd, jock, prep, and punk, Dickinson maintained Di’anno’s rough & tumble tone but backed it up with theatricality that carried to the cheap seats. For much of The Number of the Beast Dickinson sings with giddy mania, turning Harris’s songs about historical bloodbaths into Saturday-morning-cartoon explosions of energy. For as tough and violent as their songs were, Dickinson’s delivery kept Maiden bright, colorful, and fun.
The exception is “Hallowed Be Thy Name”. Though it’s built from the same One Weird Trick (music theorists HATE him) that Harris used to write Iron Maiden songs for his whole career, “Hallowed Be Thy Name” has hardly any of the jocular exuberance that defined the band to this point. It isn’t their first long song, but it’s their first song to feel long, and the first to weaponize it’s lengths to thematic ends. “Hallowed Be Thy Name” slows Maiden’s trademark harmonized guitars to an appropriately funereal pace, replete with ominous church bells. Even when the song picks up its mood never improves past melancholic. In such a somber setting even Harris’s clunky lyrical voice takes on genuine gravitas. Here is a man tripping over his words as he takes the long, cold walk to his demise, sounding every bit as rattled as you’d expect.
Since we’re talking about “Hallowed Be Thy Name”’s lyrics, let’s go back to that Harris quote from 1982. Harris describes the song’s narrator as having “had these strict beliefs all through life, and then with about two hours to go, he’s not really sure”. For all of the hubbub about their supposed Satanism, Harris has long written from a not-so-subtly Christian vantage. The devil on Number’s title track is a source of fear and temptation, by no means a positive force in its narrator’s life. I mean, the guy even tries to narc on the devil in one verse. “Hallowed Be Thy Name” puts this perspective to the test, illustrating a believer’s crisis of faith in the final hours of his life. “Don’t I believe that there never really is an end?” the narrator asks himself as tears pour down his face, “If there’s a God, why has he let me go?”
I was not raised religious. My Mom was raised Catholic and my Dad Protestant, so I picked up a fair amount of Christianity by osmosis, but we never went to church except for funerals. On the Jackie Robinson Highway that night in the late 1990s I had a vague notion that a Creator Of The Universe existed, but no scaffolding about an afterlife or metaphysical moral order had gone up around that notion. So when death-consciousness found me, there was nothing stopping it from taking up full residence in my mind. It has sat there, untamed by the off-chance of heaven or the soft damnation of reincarnation, ever since. I’ve never experienced the crisis of faith Harris wrote about because faith never had the space to compete with the uncomplicated fact of my death.
By the end of my freshman year of high school I had moved on from Cradle of Filth’s cover of “Hallowed Be Thy Name” to the real deal, sparking an obsession with Iron Maiden’s music that has never ceased burning. I’d also gotten my hands on The Stranger by Albert Camus. In it, a Frenchman named Meursault living in colonized Algeria finds himself on death row after murdering an Algerian for reasons he can’t articulate even to himself. A priest comes to read his last rites and offer him a chance to make peace with God. The typically apathetic Meursault goes apeshit at the suggestion and accosts the priest through the bars. Afterward he feels something close to acceptance about his quickly approaching fate. Beyond the point of hope “for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world”6.
Harris’s narrator finds no such peace as he approaches the gallows pole. Though he shares Meursault’s lack of regrets he doesn’t cross over into acceptance. In the song’s first verse he asks whether this death sentence is “just some crazy dream”. By the next verse, he concludes that the whole of his life has been “a strange illusion”. His final words in the song, and we must presume of his life, are a desperate affirmation of his faith in the face of this illusion. “Hallowed Be Thy Name” he screams at the void. He receives no answer.
The final words Harris offered about “Hallowed Be Thy Name” in that 1982 interview were meant to be lighthearted. “Well, I mean, I never want to be in that position!”
Steve, I hate to break it to you, but you’ve been in that position your whole life. All of us have. You put us all in that position by never specifying why the subject of your immaculate heavy metal song is on death row to begin with. It doesn’t take an MFA to conclude that this march to the gallows is a metaphor for being alive. All of us wait in the cold cell of an indifferent universe, unsure of when the bells of death will start ringing loudly in our ears. There isn’t a soul alive that won’t have to reckon with their regrets before pulling back the veil on life’s illusion. What makes “Hallowed Be Thy Name” so powerful is that you addressed this most universal of dilemmas from the point of view of someone who, even armed with every mental preparation for their end, still reels with emotional vertigo at that end when it arrives.
You also made it powerful by surrounding those words with 7 minutes straight of perfectly composed music. Maybe we should dig into that a bit more….
Side B
“Hallowed Be Thy Name”
Performed by Clive Burr
80 Bpm / 103-113 Bpm
Clive Burr passed away at the age of 56 in 2013 from complications of the same multiple sclerosis that forced him to stop playing drums two decades earlier. In the years after his diagnosis, Iron Maiden made a point of helping him out, playing concerts to raise funds for MS treatment and privately hooking him up for tickets any time they played shows nearby. In an interview before his death Burr said he was proud of his work with the band and would even watch old footage from the three years he played with them to cheer himself up when he was glum.
I think that’s mighty big of him, considering his account of his split from the band. According to Burr, he left the American leg of “The Beast on the Road” tour following the death of his father. Iron Maiden called up Michael Henry “Nicko” McBrain, at the time drumming for Trust, to fill in. After the funeral Clive Burr tried to rejoin the tour, only to be told that Maiden were sticking with McBrain.
When I described Iron Maiden as marketing geniuses on Side A, I neglected to mention that they are also unapologetic careerists. I guess I figured that went without saying. No other metal band has made as much of their branding as Iron Maiden, unless you’re one of those people who are aware of Kiss but haven’t listened to them yet. Iron Maiden have sucked every morsel of merchandise out of their mascot Eddie. Figurines, video games, soccer jerseys, Christmas ornaments, bottle openers, etc. A tour doesn’t go by without a live album, and Greatest Hits compilations arrive as frequently as new studio material. Iron Maiden shirts are ubiquitous among rank and file metalheads and clout-cashing celebs alike. Iron Maiden’s out to get you and your wallet.
From a business perspective, I can understand why Iron Maiden preferred Nicko McBrain. Clive Burr is a good drummer with some very particular strengths. Nicko McBrain is an all time great. McBrain’s drumming is more fundamentally sound, more varied in its style, and more consistent in both tempo and volume. The band were already seeing their upgrade at the front of the stage pay off spectacularly, it doesn’t surprise me that they’d pounce at the opportunity to try the same behind the kit.
Doesn’t make it any less of a dick move though, especially because Clive Burr is not Paul Di’anno. He was not holding Iron Maiden back from being a bigger band. I can’t even say for sure that the band is better off without him, even though I think McBrain is the better drummer. The two are just too different to rightly compare.
“Hallowed Be Thy Name” gives us the full Clive Burr experience, all of the good, all of his rough edges, and every grey area between. From the drummer’s perspective, “Hallowed Be Thy Name” falls neatly into three acts: the solemn, spacious intro, the determined mid-paced middle, and the ecstatic double time climax.
The first act is the shortest and least complicated. For the first minute of “Hallowed Be Thy Name” Harris and Burr hammer out long whole notes in time with a tolling bell. They don’t quite keep to the tempo guitarists Dave Murray and Adrian Smith establish in the song’s melody, but the lurching downbeat only adds to the song’s theatricality, as if some hooded figure is wrestling a massive rope with every strike of the bell.
After Dickinson lays out the stakes, the band picks up the tempo. For the next three and a half minutes they hover between 103 and 108 bpm. Burr leaves no 16th note unplayed. On Maiden’s first three records Burr displays some superhuman hand-speed, laying into his hi-hats like a sped-up disco record. He plays something similar for the first half of “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, adjusted for its slower tempo. I always assumed that he played these chugging cymbals with both hands so that the groove would flow smoothly into his fills. Turns out he was crunching out all of those notes with one hand! No wonder the time wobbles here and there. Still, even with all of this exertion, Burr’s groove is rock solid.
Clive Burr is a pivot point in metal drumming in the same way that The Number of the Beast is a pivot point in Iron Maiden’s trajectory. He played with the relentless pace of the American thrash bands that followed in Maiden’s wake, but his touch on the kit doesn’t resemble the younger generation’s at all. Burr plays like a British Invasion era drummer with more blues in his diet than metal. Even on songs like “Hallowed Be Thy Name” that aren’t necessarily swung, Burr can’t help but shuffle his way through his parts. Compare the covers of I linked to above to Burr’s original. Burr’s playing is way closer to say Stevie Wonder or Clifton James than Nick Barker or Mike Portnoy’s jackhammering.
This latent blues shuffle really pops out in “Hallowed Be Thy Name”’s second half. After a break in the groove for an ominous descending guitar melody (I always imagine this as the moment the narrator sets his eyes on the gallows in the courtyard for the first time) Burr leaps into double time. That this sudden shift into a boogie-worthy Bo Diddly beat doesn’t tear the song’s grave seriousness to shreds is a miracle of songwriting. In addition to highlighting his old school sensibilities, this double time solo section shows us Clive Burr the speed demon. In the Classic Rock interview I linked to earlier, Burr says his “abiding memory of recording The Number of the Beast is Steve telling [him] to slow down”. Burr does a good job of holding himself back for most of “Hallowed Be Thy Name” but after the solos wrap up he can’t help himself. Every time the band hit that Big Band style turnaround before the climax, Burr jacks the tempo up to 120 bpm. No cover I’ve heard recreates this lopsided rhythm, which doesn’t surprise me since it’s objectively sloppy. Still, I find the speed-up charming, and those spikes in tempo never fail to get me excited for the song’s true payoff.
After Murray & Smith finish up their solos, the two guitarists return to the song’s main guitar riff, harmonized in thirds. Despite cropping up twice earlier in the track, this moment never fails to pin me to the floor. It defies logic that just speeding up the drums should make this melody so riveting when it returns, and the deeper I dig into the song’s structure the more this moment baffles me.
Earlier on Side A I mentioned Steve Harris’s One Weird Trick. I’ll try and put it in words as straightforwardly as I can for the folks unfamiliar with music theory lingo. Every riff on “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, and many, many, many other Iron Maiden riffs, are based on moving from the tonic chord (i.e. the chord that sets the key for the song) down its relative major and back up again. The tonic chord and its relative major (in this case E minor and C major) are, through a quirk of math, almost identical. All Harris has to do is change one note in the chord and the entire mood shifts. Because the chords are so similar, any melody that fits over the tonic will 99% of the time fit just as well over the relative major. Doubly so if it’s harmonized by say, another guitar.
“Hallowed Be Thy Name” exploits the hell out of this harmonic shortcut. There are roughly six different melodies in the song (some of them are combinations of each other, so the counting gets tricky) and all of them are based on this movement from tonic to relative major and back. Over and over again, Smith & Murray move in sync on a melody while Harris rises and falls beneath them. You’d think it’d get old, but somehow it never does. Instead, it only gets more powerful as the song goes on. I have a theory as to why. Technically speaking, this “E minor - C - D” chord progression never resolves. The notes lead into each smoothly, but not in a way that ever feels finished. The drama and tension keeps rising forever without relief. This is why the this chord progression is so popular in video game soundtracks as battle music7, or why it’s served as the backdrop for pop melodramas like “Edge of Seventeen” and “Livin’ On A Prayer”.
But no one has used this chord progression more effectively than Maiden. Because no band writes guitar leads as righteous as Maiden. I don’t just mean righteous in the Bill & Ted, teenage dirtbag sense. I mean that there’s something genuinely virtuous about the emotion Maiden evokes with this trick. Consider that the guitars don’t change with the bass line. Instead, even as the ground opens up beneath them, Murray & Smith stay locked together, as if matching eyes across a great divide, steeling themselves no matter what may come. Their resolve never wavers, no matter how intense the vertigo.
Which is why, even after playing along to “Hallowed Be Thy Name” dozens upon dozens of times (and listening to it what must be hundreds of times by now) I still get goosebumps and sometimes even tear up when that main melody comes back around. You can even watch it on my face when the part hits me like a ton of bricks in this cover:
A few notes on my performance. Despite cracking jokes in the footnotes about how little Iced Earth added to their cover of “Hallowed Be Thy Name” I did my best to replicate Clive Burr’s parts exactly as he played them. I did play the hi-hats with two hands though, because I mean, come on, if even a drummer as skilled as Mike Portnoy is playing this part with two hands, I think I can get away with it. Work smarter, not harder etc. Besides, I love how good it feels to roll right into the fills and back without breaking the sticking. I also tried to emphasize the funk latent in Burr’s playing. I think it’s a missed opportunity for the whole genre (and the world!) that more metal drummers didn’t take this “disco but harder” style and run with it. Well, when you want a job done right….
I did, however, diverge from Burr’s part once the song kicked into double time. I found it was easier to keep up with Burr’s shuffle if I doubled up the snare every now and then, and I couldn’t resist sneaking in some of the lightning-quick doubles on the kick that Burr’s replacement, Nicko McBrain, is so fond of. I’ll have a lot more to say about McBrain and his stupidly fast right foot eventually. These minor changes felt justified given that every drummer, Burr included, seems to play this section differently night to night.
You’ll notice I looked over to my laptop a few times. Since “Hallowed Be Thy Name” definitely wasn’t recorded to a click, this was my way of following along with the band’s fluctuations in tempo. If we were playing the song in person (call me, Steve) I’d instead keep my eyes on the bassist so that we hit those big downbeats in sync.
For this cover I wore my Powerslave bootleg from Minerva’s Booutique. Like a lot of metalheads I caught a bad case of tye-die fever during lockdown, and this Iron Maiden bootleg is easily my favorite of the shirts I’ve picked up since. God damn, I love Powerslave so much. But not as much as I love “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.
In fact, let’s mosey over to the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard to find out exactly how much I love “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
A while back, sometime in late 2020 if I had to guess, my bandmate and old friend Oliver asked me what makes a song metal. This is not the first time I’ve been asked to define heavy metal for a non-fan. Usually the question comes loaded with incredulity, leading me to answer with a provocatively grandiose tone or needlessly specific musicological detail in order to prove the question is worth taking seriously. I’m certain I’ve ruined Oliver’s day with these kind of answers before, but something in the way he asked this time felt more philosophical, more “what is best in life” than “what are you doing with your life.” So I decided to take a more roundabout approach.
To determine what makes a song metal, I imagined in my mind the perfect metal song and then broke it down to its essential elements. The answer I gave went something like this: “a metal song has an insistent rhythm, usually powered by a chugging low-to-mid range instrument, is in a minor key, and is either directly about or deeply informed by the specter of death”.
The song I imagined wasn’t hypothetical. It was “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.
“Hallowed Be Thy Name” is the best Iron Maiden song. It uses all of their signature musical tricks to earn a pathos that they’ve never approached since. Iron Maiden have written plenty of great epics since 1982, two more of which will show up in this series, but all of them rest in the shadow of and would not exist without “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.
“Hallowed Be Thy Name” is the best metal song of all time. No other metal song so perfectly nails the sweet spot between totally absurd over-the-top juvenile thrills and as-real-as-it-can-get human drama. There are other metal songs that will contend for this throne throughout the series, but few of them have the purity of form and function that Maiden struck on “Hallowed Be Thy Name”
“Hallowed Be Thy Name” is the best song of all time? Shit, maybe! When I’m listening to it I sure feel like that’s the case. If you ever find me listening to “Hallowed Be Thy Name” and ask if its the best song of all time, first I’ll start screaming all of the lyrics in your face, then I’ll push my back into yours while playing air guitar, hoping that you’ll return the favor, and then, drenched in sweat, I will tell you “yes”. In the sober light of day? Man, I don’t know.
For years I’ve thought that “Earthmover” was my favorite song. Now I’m not so sure. “Earthmover” doesn’t have two out-of-this-world guitar solos. It doesn’t have righteous harmonized leads. It doesn’t have Bruce Dickinson turning “yeah” into a five syllable word.
Best song ever? Maybe. Top spot of the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard? Without question.
“Hallowed Be Thy Name” by Iron Maiden
…and with that, the first season of Drumming Upstream ends. For the rest of the year I’ll cover my favorite pieces of art in the mediums technically out of my purview. Movies, books, video games, that kind of thing. I’ll also try to out-do Spotify with my own version of their Wrapped feature. Thank you all so much for joining me on this ridiculous journey, and I hope you’ll stick around for the next batch of covers in 2023. Until then, I’ll be waiting, as I always have, in my cold cell. Have a nice week.
I’ve repeated this weird boast for years now, so maybe now I should clarify that I only learned a handful of Maiden tunes well enough to match the quality I’ve aimed for in this series. It’d be more accurate to say that I “got the gist” of the rest of the songs in their discography. I don’t think this makes my younger self a liar, but it does mean that my standards these days are higher.
For the life of me I cannot remember any specific lyrics that I could google to find the song in question. “Sad Irish song about dying” does not narrow the field in the slightest. I know both of my parents subscribe to this newsletter, so uh, hi Mom & Dad, if you have an idea about which song this might be, sound off in the comments!
Power ranking the covers: 1. Cradle of Filth (did the most to make the song their own, and are spiritually the closest to Iron Maiden’s “exciting adventures for naughty British boys” ethos) 2. Machine Head (solid, kinda bland, update of the song for modern metal fans. The obligatory half time break could have been way worse). 3. Iced Earth (hopelessly devoted to recreating the original, as you’d expect. For a band whose singer is literally a cop, Iced Earth sure love stealing stuff!) 4. Dream Theater (Dream Theater).
Please enjoy this interview with Bruce Dickinson, Steve Harris, and Clive Burr on British TV where a drag Margaret Thatcher gets revenge with the help of a studio audience. Hearing Burr talk excitedly about breaking into the American market breaks my heart for reasons that’ll be clear on Side B.
I need you to watch this ridiculous short film Samson released with Bruce Dickinson in which their impossibly strong roadie battles security guards in felony-orange jumpsuits who communicate entirely through burps.
I’m quoting from the Matthew Ward translation. I’ve also seen this line translated as “the benign indifference of the universe”, and while I prefer the Ward translation overall, that phrase is my go-to when talking about the end of The Stranger.
Nobuo Uematsu will eventually show up in this series, and boy, if you think this entry is overwrought, buckle up.