Input Update: May 2022
What I've been what I've been reading, playing, and zoning out to
You may have noticed that my publication schedule has been thrown off course the last few weeks. Blame tour, blame COVID, blame me. The next entry of Drumming Upstream is coming along nicely, but in an effort to get us back on our regular Monday schedule this week I cooked up a shorter Input Update. Luckily for me, I was still able to remove a song from the Liked list. Turns out I had somehow added the same Nine Inch Nails song to the list twice, years apart. With that redundancy corrected I’m now down to 471 songs. That means that when I knock out the 10th entry next week the increments of ten will line up. Neat!
What I’m Reading: Paradise Lost by John Milton
After recovering from COVID and returning from the two dates of the April tour that we could salvage, I was hired to play drums for another musical theater gig in the Bronx. This meant another long commute and another hefty English Lit classic. My 10th grade English class assigned me a few sections of Paradise Lost and I made an earnest attempt at the time as an aspiring metalhead to appreciate it. However reading along to Cradle of Filth lyrics had not adequately prepared me to crack the rhythm Milton’s meter. On the second attempt I had a much easier time, and burned through the poem in a week. I won’t waste your time with a summary, the basic beats of Adam and Eve getting evicted from Eden are about as well publicized as a story can get. This is where Milton’s rigid adherence to a poetic structure helped hook me. The extra work that it took to keep in rhythm kept my mind from retreating to my preconceptions of the story. I had to stay with the words on the page at all times. Focused this way, it was easier to experience Paradise Lost as a particularly obtuse fantasy novel.
Approached this way, Paradise Lost had plenty of surprises for me. I knew by reputation that Milton’s Satan was practically a charismatic lead, a reputation earned almost immediately in the poem’s first book on the merits of a rousing half time speech from God’s most petty hater. I did not, however, know about Satan’s ultimate fate in the poem. After engineering humanity’s mortality, Satan retreats to Hell only to find that he and his crew1 have been transformed into serpents, their cries of victory reduced to hisses of agony. This twist genuinely horrified me. The imagery alone is nightmarish, but even chilling is the implication that in God’s universe there is no such thing as getting away with it.
I was also surprised to learn that Satan had kids, a daughter Sin and their incestuous son Death. These two barely show up in Paradise Lost except to build a bridge from Hell to earth. Still, they make quite an impression. Fresh off of finishing Dark Souls I couldn’t help but see them as a prototype for Quelagg and Gravelord Nito respectively. Oh what’s that? Yeah you read that right, I beat Dark Souls.
What I’m Playing: Not Dark Souls
This is actually less impressive than it sounds. When I last said that I was months away from finishing the game, it turns out that I was actually standing at the doorway to final boss. Oops. Within an hour of testing positive for COVID I had learned all of Gwyn’s tics and earned the game’s good-ish ending. Dark Souls doesn’t have much of a narrative, instead the events of the game take place between the end of one narrative and the beginning of another. Your job is to do the dirty work of restarting history so that the husk of a kingdom that you’ve been stalking through for the last 40-or-so hours can return to its former glory. Whether this is a good outcome for the world is never clearly stated. Sure, avoiding an age of darkness sounds good on paper, but the corrupted remnants of the last cycle of history are uniformly a hideous and hateful bunch. There is no catharsis in “linking the flame” just a sense of having played your role in a world largely indifferent to you. Forgive me if this observation is still trapped in the video game criticism of the early 2010s but this light touch points to the question of whether your character is truly in control of their fate far more effectively than the overt fourth-wall-finger-painting of say, Bioshock.
So yeah Dark Souls is a good game, but it is also an exhausting one. I have every intention of playing its sequels, both literal and spiritual, but I need to recharge on something less demanding. For now I’m plunking my way through Limbo, a puzzle-platformer with a spooky fairytale aesthetic. It’s fine, nothing special. The sort of thing that you can play absentmindedly while waiting for video files to finish uploading.
What I’m Scrolling Through: This Band Isn’t Real
Speaking of things I do absentmindedly, I’ve caught myself scrolling through the twitter account @ai_metal_bot, which generates band names, album titles, and album art for fake metal albums. The results range from genuinely awesome to hilariously clumsy, with a few cases of the outright bizarre. Mostly though, the albums that the bot cooks up strike me as plausibly real, the kind of albums that I had to sift through for hours back when I worked for Invisible Oranges. Some albums are so spot on that I can practically hear their advance singles. This one? Swedish power metal. This? Immolation worship. HM-2 distorted death’n’roll. Doom metal with super modern production and lots of orchestral elements. I could do this all day.
What does it say about heavy metal that a machine can so accurately spit out approximations of the genre’s surface elements? On first blush maybe it should make us (i.e. people who make and listen to metal) a little uncomfortable. Are we that easy to replicate, are we so predictable as to be copied by machines? Look, I’ll always advocate for weirder less conventional heavy metal of all types and kinds, but there’s no reason to think of “This Band Isn’t Real” as competition. Instead I like to think of it as a mirror. It is nice to see that metal’s identity is so durable that even an unthinking set of code can show us what we look like. The tropes that this account has picked up on rule. If anything, it should prove to us that there are still plenty of brutal riffs left to be mined.
I considered hammering out a couple hundred words about the movies that I’ve watched lately but frankly I don’t have much to say about them yet, or in the case of one of them much to say at all2. There will be many more words next time around, when I tackle a song by one of my favorite bands for Drumming Upstream. For now I am happy to be back on schedule. Thanks for reading, see you next week.
Milton actually uses this exact word to describe the rest of the fallen angels in Hell, a choice that renders the poem’s opening unintentionally hilarious in 2022. Might as well have called them his homies.
The Northman is not a good movie.