Don't hold me back, this is my own hell: Depression and Godflesh's Streetcleaner

About three months ago, I was officially diagnosed with some bizarre hybrid of clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. It's been an issue of varying severity for a couple of years now, but only became crippling to the point of interfering with every component of my life earlier this year. Before this, my innate disbelief in life's meaningfulness was nothing more than a theoretical consideration. However, as things unfolded, this once-a priori knowledge began to consume every facet of my being. Alcohol went from a fun escape, to a slightly worrisome crutch, to an absolute necessity. My demeanor exponentially diminished from decreased passion for things I once loved, to neutral indifference, to active disgust at the thought of waking up. The only meaningful relationship I've ever been involved in imploded overnight. I stopped eating; and on the rare occasion I did get to sleep, I typically woke up prematurely in order to expunge a cocktail of booze, blood, and bile from my intestines.

So what the fuck does this have to do with Godflesh? During one particularly awful night, after a few weeks of flirtation with suicidal ideation, I decided to mix a rather dangerous concoction of drugs and alcohol. I woke up in the early morning completely unaware of where I was or how I got there, walked home, bought more booze, and came the closest I ever have to making the final leap. Before I knew it, it was 11 AM, I was nearly 20 beers in, and I'm speaking to my concerned counselor, who contacted me after a missed appointment for that morning. Somewhere along the line, I was transferred to what I assume was a suicide prevention hotline, which insisted on sending someone out to my house to diffuse the situation of the gun resting in my lap. I assured them everything was fine and granted them permission to periodically call both myself and my therapist throughout the day. This moment was undoubtedly the lowest I had ever been, so I made the decision to blast Streetcleaner at full volume.

Why I thought it was a good idea to listen to what is certainly one of the most venomous, scathing criticisms of any positive outlook on the world at that point in time bewilders me, but I'm glad I did it. I used to scoff at the notion that altered states or a deficient psychological orientation could further illuminate a work when contrasted with experiencing the work under “normal” circumstances, but Streetcleaner has never made more sense to me than it did in that moment; and each subsequent listen has been an attempt to capture whatever it so lucidly communicated to me that morning.

The prevailing interpretation of Streetcleaner seems to be that it's an iconic ode to misanthropy, agony, and absolute contempt for pretty much everything in the world. In some sense, that's true. It's hard to draw any other conclusion when one is confronted with the atonal, mechanistic, cyclical sound of the album, or when one examines the despondent, sardonic lyrics to “Like Rats”, “Life is Easy”, or “Streetcleaner”. However, failing to go the next step in dissecting just what one should take away from these aural condemnations of moral purity is a fatal error. Yeah, the world is shitty and life generally sucks. Nevertheless, we were thrown into this world and forced to live in it; and instead of blindly reveling in negativity as so many people tend to do in the case of Streetcleaner, we can embrace the senselessness of any ontologically significant meaning or pervasive positivity in life by treating masterpieces like this as meditative aids in coping with all of the bullshit.

If one views the album under this “meditative” framework, a clear schematic between two different types of songs within the album emerges that engenders an active contemplation of the repugnant external and the tormented internal. However, before delineating those two broad classes of tracks, I'd like to briefly touch on the meditative aura that permeates the entire album through the interplay of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. Building upon the style so perfectly showcased on tracks like “Avalanche Master Song” from the debut EP, the rhythm section of bass and drums persistently align in recursive patterns for extended periods of time. Over this rhythmic foundation, Justin Broadrick will typically mimic the bass line for a few phrases until introducing wailing vocals and free-form dissonance on guitar that very seldom resembles anything other than cacophonous feedback. Furthermore, aphoristic lyrics are sparse yet meticulous in their placement; and at times it seems as if the song titles themselves are mantras further supplemented by a few lyrics. Consider “Christbait Rising”:

Don't hold me back, This is my own hell
Christbait, Slugbait, Rise and bring you down
Christbait Rising, In your own mind
Christbait Rising, Bleed dry mankind

The 7-minute song itself consists of an intro that is later subtly transformed as a bridge, two main phrases that proceed alternatively, and a dirge-like outro. During the first main phrase, the first two lines of lyrics are bellowed twice, and the next two lines are roared at a higher, more violent pitch. Following this, the second phrase proceeds with vocal silence only being broken to drearily moan the command “RISE”. Much like the entirety of the album, the main allure of this track is its uncanny ability to disorient the listener and cause them to get lost in the hypnotic composition. In meditation, the notion of spatialized temporality (think “clock time”; see Bergson's Time and Free Will for an excellent treatment on the inherent limitations of viewing this as the ultimate standard of “time”) drops out and a spatiotemporal hour may pass in spite of seeming like a moment or an eternity. Such is the effect of the undeniably brilliant “Christbait Rising”, and the album itself when treated as an organic unity.

Earlier, I spoke of two classes of songs that each track more or less falls into. One seems to be a diagnostic sort wherein the external world is scrutinized by a frustrated Broadrick, whereas the other concerns internal dialogues of self-hatred, gloominess, and an insatiable death wish. I examine the first class by briefly examining the two songs I feel embody it best, “Like Rats” and “Locust Furnace” (the latter of which has a companion track in “Life is Easy”, which I only mention because I would feel uncomfortable with not giving it a nod for its wonderfully haunting, nihilistic depiction of human life).

You breed, Like Rats

Breeding
Stylized
Deformity
Don't look back

Breeding
Fade out
Lies
Deformity

Stylized
Deformity
Don't look back
You were dead from the beginning

Perhaps the most unique aspect of this song is the inter-thematic relationship that is established between the rough, percussive guitar riff that opens the song and is played during the first line and the considerably more upbeat riff that accompanies the “Breeding” and “Stylized” stanzas. The first riff and the four words that correspond with it feel as if they're coming from the darker part of Broadrick's mind, whereas the more descriptive lines, while still dripping with vitriol, possess a more sarcastic tone. It's as if the song is expressing disgust at the nature in which most of us senselessly proliferate, then light-heartedly poking fun at the notion of goodness that many people seem to have successfully convinced themselves of. Call it puerile if you'd like, but it's an earnest denunciation of a species that, in spite of possessing “superior intellect”, manages to commit unspeakable atrocities on a daily basis on a multitude of levels, even in the age of postmodern “enlightenment”. Also, it's impossible not to shout along to the first two lines. See for yourself (yours truly in the Portal shirt, at Maryland Deathfest 2012):

While the album opener decries the mindless copulation of humans, the closer is much more dismal in its depiction of Earth as an inevitable grave for anyone that has ever existed or will exist.

The earth, Froze up
One dead, Pale world
And you'll swing, From the reaping hook
And you'll die, By a reaping hook
Locust, Locust
Furnace, Furnace
Corruption, In the goat herd
Flesh crumbles, In the real world
Silence
Barren
My furnace
Appealed
The locust furnace
Earth, Earth
Furnace, Furnace...

Perhaps more of a noise-rock song akin to Cop-era Swans than industrial metal, the subdued violence of this song intensifies the sagacious quality of Broadrick's declaration that we'll all be put on display as parasitic insects to “swing on the reaping hook” after we succumb to death by the very same object. The tone of this song is what fascinates me the most. It contains what are arguably the most apocalyptic and deranged lyrics of the album, but it's almost certainly the most serene. This tone anticipates the manner in which the second class of songs I described excels.

While the above songs paint a picture of a dreary world unfit to live in, the title track and “Mighty Trust Krusher” illuminate the paradoxically life-affirming bent that makes this a complex work beyond philosophically empty misanthropy.

Vision, Escape
Vision, This feels right

Hell, Is where I lie
Now take the power, When we all die

We all die

After an unsettling sample from serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, the tempo of the song picks up to what could very well be the fastest on the entire album. A sense of urgency typifies this track, which is further enforced by the noisy guitar leads that are interspersed throughout. Following this, pitch-shifted vocals add an extra layer to the oddly empowering overtone of the lyrics. The way I choose to view this song is as one of an inner dialogue wherein the fatalistic worldview painted by songs like “Life is Easy” and “Locust World” is viewed as a source of power, not a source of self-destruction. Being cognizant of the basic state of the world we're forced to live in is the first step in simply accepting that bad things happen a lot and they probably aren't getting better any time soon. Note the emphasis of the word “right”, which almost seems to be taking an epistemological stance by asserting a positive truth-value as opposed to a normative ethical claim. In spite of the fact that it might not feel the greatest to admit, the truthfulness of Streetcleaner's worldview is the sensible one that will lead to getting the most out of this planet.

I need this, I need you
On your knees
And we'll pray
Together now

Effortless
Mighty Trust Krusher

I need this, It's in my heart
I love you, My trust is evermore

Hate me, Tread on me
And you taught me, and finally slay me...Now

The cryptic style of these lyrics eludes any concrete interpretation, but a general view can certainly be ascertained if one looks closely enough. The first stanza emerges amid a dissonant intro, with Broadrick desperately pleading to this “mighty trust krusher”, ostensibly in the face of inner turmoil catalyzed by the ugly world the other diagnostic tracks describe. It's the most thematically positive of the songs on the album, but it's one of the most musically jarring and challenging. I've always taken this as a reinforcement of the album's masterful aesthetic of harnessing, in a quasi-Lynchian way, the stream-of-consciousness process of the subject's inner mental machinations.

Make no mistake, Streetcleaner is a work of uniform unpleasantness. However, a smart guy named Spinoza once said that “all things noble are as difficult as they are rare”, and the contents of this album are no exception. In confronting the bleak decrepitude of Godflesh's magnum opus head-on, one emerges a stronger, better person in the face of tumultuous inner uncertainty about an undoubtedly ugly external world. I know that whenever I feel like life isn't worth living anymore, I disappear in Streetcleaner for a short amount of time and realize that things are shitty, but not that shitty. 

Assück- Misery Index: On Hopelessness and Futility

“About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: “The Problem of Socrates”

Assück's Misery Index is one of the most widely lauded works of the grindcore canon, and rightfully so. If one approaches this masterpiece with a critical eye, it becomes overwhelmingly evident that its sonic and lyrical components organically fuse to create a venomous 15-minute dissemination of the modern world that represents the apex of what grindcore had been trying to say since Napalm Death started lambasting anything and everything wrong with the all-consuming nihilism brought about by our post-modern, consumer capitalist world on From Enslavement to Obliteration. However, on Misery Index, Assück sees no light at the end of the tunnel, and the mere suggestion of any hope in our ugly existence, even on a theoretical level, is absurd. Where their 1993 Anticapital was an acerbic fist in the face of corrupt modern government and our increasingly fetishistic attitude toward the technology that will eventually consign the human spirit to non-existence, Misery Index takes things a step further by delineating the “prostitution in everything wrought under the sun” and claiming that “only futility is eternity”. With 17 songs in 15 minutes, the album acts as a brute symphony comprised of diverse micro-movements that is over before you know it, though you lose yourself in it and come out a wiser person when the music (like our utterly fucked world will, in due time) comes to an end. In short, the album is a deeply psychological work that has a simple message: our romantic notions of what is possible as a human are ill-founded as well as biologically untenable; and this is the source of the omnipresent suffering that becomes increasingly amplified as we become increasingly “enlightened”.

While the album is a very complex work, the essence of it is quite simple and is embodied in the structures of the songs themselves and the dialectic of the (utterly brilliant) lyrics. The music alternates between phrases of unrelenting blasts overlaid with spiraling riffs that disorient the listener and mid-paced phrases that include staccato-heavy riffs complemented by vocal delivery of aphorisms that exemplify the thematic basis of each track. Take, for example, “Corners”:

“Time does nothing but work against me. I wake alone and walk alone between the walls that insecurity has built around me. Forced into circuits, into circles, into cycles. I find all my refuge in corners. It's the only place where things meet.”

The first three sentences are repeated twice during two initial breakneck passages, the second of which is a subtle alteration of the first. The effect on the listener is one of intense introspection regarding the existential terror of temporality, and the song's climax is the acceptance of finding solace in finality: the only place where things meet. A companion track is found in “QED”, which examines the senselessness of our lofty pursuits of unattainable ideals:

“Dare to speak of hope and aspiration. These are foul words, manufactured idols and the bait of lemmings. Only futility is eternity. Only one sunrise will tell.”

Since the advent of pre-Socratic philosophy, humanity has deemed itself a privileged species capable of attaining an understand of absolutes that simply don't exist (see: the first lines of “Dataclast”). Each metaphysical epoch has had a different supposed understanding of this. The Platonists saw it in the world of Forms, which only humans were capable of ascertaining any knowledge of. Medieval philosophy saw all absolutions as emanating from God, and, taking heed from Aristotle's conception of nous, saw humans as the only beings capable of understanding (or, to use Aristotelian terminology, participating in) these. Then Descartes came along, ushered in modernity, then everything was seen as an object that could be fully dissected by science to obtain its true essence. Kant comes along a couple of hundred years later and proclaims the absolute thing-in-itself a part of the acausal noumenal realm that certainly exists in spite of the fact that we can't know anything about it. Then something interesting happens...

It could sensibly be argued that modernity was shattered at the advent of Nietzsche. Absolute morality comes into question, the death of God is pretty obvious, etc. Shortly after Nietzsche, physicists discover that we're a speck of cosmic dust in a possibly infinite universe, quantum physics fundamentally uproots our conception of the smallest and most fundamental components of the world, and Gödel shows that even fucking arithmetic eludes our complete understanding with his monolithic incompleteness proofs. The omnipresence of uncertainty is best captured in one of my favorite Nietzsche lines, where he proclaims his distaste for virtually every previous Western philosopher: “I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity”. Don't try to systematize existence, because shit is fucked. So, where does this leave us? As “QED” would suggest, nowhere; and we just have to fucking deal with it and wait for the inevitable end.

A byproduct of the discord between humanity's highest aspirations and its realistic capabilities is a worldview typified by cognitive dissonance that further exacerbates the inherent misery of existence. Humans are profoundly hubristic creatures, and we could certainly use some humbling. Consider “Unrequited Blood”:

“When will we concede that there is an absolute significance deficit in the concept of the human being? That rape is indigenous to our existence and that already we can never and will never be able to pay the debt of blood upon this land. Burn alive all humankind. Burn it at the stake. Burn it as retribution for its blatant defilement of itself. Burn it for its never ending void of purpose. Burn it on principle alone.”

A succinct summation of the album's philosophy on the whole, this blasting song is permeated by dissonance throughout: a fitting aural complement to the harsh acceptance of nihilism that the lyrics flesh out. One thing that strikes me is the subtle use of the word “concept” when referring to human beings. Think again of the chasm between the grandiloquent conception of what it is to be “human” and the molecular reality of us being hunks of organic matter that happen to possess consciousness, whatever the hell that entails. In spite of the seemingly boundless nature of our mental faculties, racism exists, rape culture is a serious thing that many people seem to have no problem with, the majority of people are avaricious, wasteful, amoral, and indifferent to the widespread suffering of others, and oh yeah, we view everything as a tool for our own purpose (see Heidegger's treatment of tools in Being and Time) and don't bat an eye at destroying everything around us. Paradoxically, this is a “blatant defilement” to both our biological selves in our incessant denial of what we really are, and also a defilement of our fictional, idealized picture of ourselves that is continually perpetuated as we pretend to advance yet ignore the fact that suffering and a lack of purpose in life hasn't disappeared.

To make things worse, we're all a part of the problem. You are, I am, and Steve Heritage is. We find an affirmation of this in “Reversing Denial”:

“I can no longer deny or disavow that there is a part of me that is part of it. A process regenerated by process reciprocating godhead apparatus that never ends. A grip that wrenches and discards threadbare. A piece of that which I abhor.”

As much as we would love to be the exception to the rule, a corollary of the all-encompassing dread that defines our base existence is that no matter how “enlightened” we claim to be, we're still a part of the issue in some way. This further engenders the futility of existence, and while there are many causes and ideals you can exalt in order to keep the hopelessness at bay, this very hopelessness is in fact the only true cause to champion due to the fact that it seeks to do nothing other than negate all other baseless notions of certainty, as “Sum and Substance” will tell:

“And if at any time it should fall, I will raise and carry the banner of hopelessness and lead its war. I would die in theater for that which itself is infallible and undying.”

Again, Misery Index is, in my humble opinion, the definitive grindcore release. It systematically dismantles the notion that we can be absolutely certain of the perplexing world around us, explicates the relationship between human suffering and these ludicrous ideals, and illustrates how we're all a part of the problem. In doing so, it hits a raw nerve of our basest existence. I would try to conclude this properly, but I'm fucking drunk and nothing means anything anyway, right?