HARD 26 April 2019
Rather unfortunately whenever we played this song live in Doom Cookie it was preceded with an erection quip. "Quip" makes it sound urbane.
This is a Doom Cookie song. This whole fucking opera is about Doom Cookie. It's the central conceit of the concept. The protagonist is a "character" like the protagonist in Jack Kearuac's ON THE ROAD is a "character" or how Stone Cold Steve Austin is a "character." When I was younger and I read novels it appeared to me that a young writer's first novel was essentially a diary with narrative overtones grafted onto it with Borg-like efficiency - clumsy and obtrusive. So 1993 could be viewed as a debut novel. Maybe it's the passion project that an artists gets to make after a great success. HAH! Everything's a passion project to folk who fucking work.
Doom Cookie, though. The way that 1993 works is we take a year in the life of a young man and follow him around. It was inspired by Richard Linklater's SLACKERS in terms of mood and feel. The function of this song is back story. It was written figuratively,but it works just as well literally. I like the idea of a young man floating around the rock and roll world nationally, drifting from place to place- or figuratively drifting from style to style as encapsulated by city. Here's the point I've been making my entire life. The differences in the types of music in the USA are fucking minuscule. MINISCULE I SAY! I'm not talking between grunge and metal, I'm talking between trance and bluegrass. Can I get an amen? I've always been puzzled by how regular folk approach music. Surely it's the only art form where people routinely hate, proudly, any output that doesn't correspond with a 3 year period when that person was coming of age. The arbitrariness of this prejudice is breathing insanity. Of course all prejudice is if you step back and observe it.
Deconstructing societal mores led to this long and rambling narrative I've been endeavoring to release lo this past half decade. It takes Doctor Who as it's main influence. Doctor Who can tell any story it wants, in any pop culture genre, thanks to the TARDIS. That function here is appropriated by the "song." The "song" is what unites the disparate story lines and characaters and genres of this narrative. The "song" makes this entire enterprise magical. As far as I can tell this has never been attempted. Maybe that's why it's so hard to get people to understand it. These essays are helping. They're functioning as a mental Tetris for me - much like psychedelic experiences fom my younger days. It's as if I'm stepping out of day to day existence and arranging these blocks of information in the story that they want me to tell. The blocks are the songs DUH!
This is why the trail run is so important. It helps alter consciousness so as to heal wounds dealt by the world of subsistence. It's why the human race found drugs for fuck's sake. It's funny how the absolute worst drugs are always the legal ones and how the drugs that inspire art and questioning are always demonized. Funny, right? If you keep along the deconstructionist path eventually everything loses all meaning it once had. That's the exhilarating part of it. Which reminds me of a thought I had out on the trails yesterday. Friedrich Nietzsche may have been a profoundly different man if he listed weights and ran in the woods. It may have given him the confidence to say the shit he only wrote about. You know what that would have made him? The Stone Cold Steve Austin of his time.
So here's to yuh!