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.