40 Lashes – Cheer On
I’m afraid that most societies were built on discipline, brute strength and herd mentality. How else could you have convinced so many people to stay together for so long? Societies, even successful ones, aren’t the place for tall poppies.
Because of that, most of us are hard-wired and brainwashed into hiding ourselves, taking out of eyesight how we really feel. Bands like 40 Lashes and the emo and nu-metal groups that inspired them think that this is a real waste.
What else should songs be about if not those things that make you feel the most emotion? And what kind of person would you be if you’ve denied yourself the opportunity to feel truly terribly sad when you needed to?
“Cheer On” by 40 Lashes isn’t without humour or hope for a better day. But what this lush-sounding, but aggressive track really thrives on is emotion that’s been bottled up and finally allowed to escape. It helps 40 Lashes bring in a colossal amount of passion, and it might make listeners wonder why they ought to bother with anything else.
Sipul – Eating a Reuben Alone in a DMV Bathroom
AI isn’t after your job as an artist and wouldn’t know what to do with the opportunity if it got it. Sure, it can come up with more songs and in quicker time than an army of Max Martins.
But what about? Well, everything else that typical, meat-and-potatoes songwriters ever decided to write. And, nothing else. Since nothing interesting ever happened to it, unlike Sipul, it has no clever observations or jokes to make.
You’d like to think that your favourite musicians suffered a little, lived intensely, and jotted some of those ideas down while they were busy doing all of those things that you can’t if you’re dead.
It’s the things that you never think would make it into a song that turn out to be the best ideas for songs. Sipul’s “Eating a Reuben Alone in a DMV Bathroom” is a bizarre retelling of a real story placed over a rock beat and slashing punk power chords. It might make you sick or happy to be alive. Either one’s fine. At least it’ll make sense to you. The AI, on the other hand, is left scratching its circuits and trying to write songs by The 1975.
