“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?
