en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ Thu, 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 Thu, 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 60 http://www.audioscrobbler.net/data/webservices http://www.last.fm/user/PuzzleShift/journal The Last.fm journal for PuzzleShift. Last.fm journals are a place to talk about all things music. http://www.last.fm/user/PuzzleShift/journal/2007/04/10/w4l_something_died_and_i_miss_it Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:56:16 +0000 http://www.last.fm/user/PuzzleShift/journal/2007/04/10/w4l_something_died_and_i_miss_it I just spent two hours editing band description entries for Project 86, Stavesacre, Embodyment, and Zao. You know what makes me happy? For some reason, Zao is listed on last.fm in all caps. I have yet to find another band anywhere on this site that is listed in all caps, and it seems so appropriate to me that Zao, of all bands, are capitalized. I read my stats and it goes "Tom Waits, Level, Gorillaz, ZAO" and I think "ZAO - hell yeah, ZAO! ZAOOOOO!!! " and I throw up the horns. Damn straight. And if you don't know who Zao is, just know that they are a venerated metalcore band that will rip you to pieces like nothing else. Every time I listen to them I end up feeling like I got punched in the head, yet, at the same time, I also have the distinct sensation that I had just experienced forty minutes of perfected chaos, and it is beautiful.

Anyway, back to bands and their histories.
There's something warm and fuzzy about having "insider" knowledge of a scene or a band and making it public, keeping the memory alive. I am fairly distanced from the Christian music scene now, and a lot of it is injection-mold-pressed plastic crap, but there has been a mysterious, shifting current of talent and passion and emotion (yeah, I just verbified "maze") through the belly of this beast since it was born in the 70s, and I have come into contact with it many times. Often it is subtle - you find a virtually unknown but freaking cool underground band almost certainly accidentally filed on a Family Christian Bookstore shelf, you happen upon a concert in some dirty downtown street church that blows your mind - but sometimes it breaks the surface and rears its massive, maned head, one example being Cornerstone Festival. And it leaves you with something exhilarating and almost tangible in your heart.
I experienced this most acutely when Project 86 was touring to support their second album, Drawing Black Lines, in 2000 and 2001. There was this incredible energy flowing back then; I could feel it. All across the country, there were young people like me who were in on everything. We knew what was going down. We didn't know each other, we only had a vague idea that we all existed apart, but you knew. We all knew. I'd have my parents drive me down to Chicago suburbs to catch Project 86 shows and as soon as I walked into the venues I'd see everyone with their Living Sacrifice hoodies, their Stavesacre shirts, their Zao tattoos, and, although they were all strangers to me, I knew them somehow. We were all part of something incredible that was bubbling up and would burst through the dead skin of mainstream pop-culture at any moment, and we would change the world. This band was drawing to itself people who wanted to change the status quo, people who wanted to think beyond boundaries, people who wanted to push the limits of cookie-cutter Christian subculture and bring about some new thinking like a boot to the head. They got on stages and screamed out against the plastic culture, the Christian infighting, and all the internal struggles in each of our souls that kept us all from being a true community. I felt it all in my heart, something like that thrill you feel when the roller coaster peaks and drops into the first big fall. There was something incorporeal creeping through all of us, and it followed this band (and others) across the country in overheated vans each day, past fields of corn and over lazy rivers, through mountains and blizzards, along coastal highways and through barren deserts, and then settled down among the punks and the metalheads and the youthgroup outcasts at these shows in Elgin, IL, in Deep Ellum, TX, in Orange County, CA, and countless other small cities and suburbs across the nation, and it infused us with anticipation of something. We didn't know what it was, but we knew it would be good. We knew we would make our mark on history. We raised our fists and distorted our faces as we screamed along until we were hoarse every night, waiting for the revelations of tomorrow.
And then it all dissipated.
The stories are different for each band, but Project 86, for their part, got snapped up by a major label, developed bad blood with the indie Christian label they had been on, got screwed over and then dumped by said major label, and then ran back to the relative safety of the CCM market, changing their tune from "let's question the tripe that we have been raised on, be real to the world, and crack some skulls" to "play along nice, now; that was fun while it lasted, but let's be realistic here". I buy more music now than I ever did, and go to more concerts than ever before, but that feeling, that energy, is gone. Of course it is still exciting; of course I still scream along sometimes, and try to endure the mosh pit despite my bad neck, but I no longer feel that intense connection to the experience, that almost spiritual moment of the real. Many of those bands from seven years ago have broken up now, some have changed lineups and ideologies, and countless new bands that follow the latest fashion and scene trends have risen to take their places, and I wonder how much of it was all just something I had been inadvertently fed - if it was something that I didn't realize and the other fans didn't realize and the band didn't even realize, that it was all just an inevitable moment of solidarity in our rebellious youth, all of us gathering around the flag of whichever armchair hero we had been given by the greater powers behind everything in the material world, our youthful passions set up to exhaust themselves on a fruitless cause set in motion by "The Man". Or maybe we all just grew up a little bit, and lost part of the battle against time and against the death of "faith like a child".
I miss it all now. I miss that camaraderie between complete strangers. I miss that tingling shiver that ran up my spine when I exited the venue, ears ringing, and looked out at the wet pavement and dim street lights and dead trees and parked cars and felt like my perspective had shifted. My face would form into a sly grin as my sweat cooled and my heaving lungs caught up with themselves, and I knew that everyone sleeping in their dark homes and apartments in the city blocks just over that river at the end of the block would wake up tomorrow expecting just any other day but that something would have changed in the world, some new power would have strengthened its hold on reality, and that those people would go about their routines with something akin to the sense that they were being watched by someone unseen. "Something is different", they would think, and they would cast their eyes about suspiciously for the rest of the day but eventually dismiss the feeling when they got home at 5:30 and turned on the news.
I wonder if it was all just an accidental tapping in to that universal mystic wonder in all of us, that desire to truly be a hero and do something incredible and leave a mark and change society as we know it. We all have it, somewhere inside us - the desire to matter individually and the desire to belong to something collective that matters, along with a knowledge, conscious or not, that there is something unknown but beautiful just beneath the context of our little human realities. I still happen upon the feeling, in much smaller doses, occasionally. Sometimes at church when I feel especially close to my small spiritual family, I get the sense that we have the power to invoke great change. Sometimes I meet a fellow music fan and our stage of excitement elevates as we discuss favorite albums and memorable shows and a little bit of that old magic comes back, the two of us knowing that between us is a secret colored by cranked up bass that shakes your internal organs and condensed sweat dripping from bare AC pipes running across the open ceiling of a dingy brick building in a crappy downtown district and those empty one dollar water bottles being crushed under four hundred stomping, kicking feet. "Yes," we think, "I know. I was there, too. Maybe not in the same building or the same town, but I was there with you. We were going to do something incredible".
I hope it comes back one day, in one form or another. It may not be with music, but I hope that it comes. I hope that we somehow struggle enough to come together even just for a moment, a moment in which our friction ignites something new and lives are changed irrevocably and the world we live in finds itself facing an inescapable bit of truth revealed.]]>