As Dr. Sexson already knows, I am obsessed with music especially the band Acid Bath. The combination of Sammy Duet's music and Dax Riggs' lyrics has consumed me for a many years. It is through music, which I am very familiar with, that I organize concepts and ideas. I was able to categorize and understand mythology by putting it in terms of music and found Acid Bath to be highly mythological. In order to fully understand new material I often have to internalize it and relate it to my existing knowledge base. As a result I live in a world where art, music, and literature collide; in this place these mediums are unified and form my understanding and knowledge. By embracing my obsessions and obsessive tendencies I've found that everything else simply falls into place.
In James' blog he wrote: "I cannot help but find the tendrils of romance in every existing story I see." Similarly I cannot help but see mythology and romance in everything I hear, read, and see. I think that once we realize that literature is not just about books and poems, but the interweaving of music, mythology, psychology, and art (just to name a few), we finally begin to understand literature, especially romance, as well as ourselves both individually and culturally.
There are two gods we will not escape: Eros and Hades. Even though there is no actual death in romance the connection between Love and Death and Sex and Death weaves itself in and out of romance. On the topic of love, sex, and death my go to guy is again the lyrics of Dax Riggs:
Jezebel
Her throat is soft
Her lips are red
Her thighs are white
Her heart is dead
Jezebel
Red rope
Burns around her wrists
Her blood is cold..like a serpents kiss
Do you love your whore?
I like to hear you beg
She crouched down in the corner with her head between her legs
Jezebel
Broken glass and dirty needles
Soul erosion truth
Electric god
Our superman found dead in a telephone booth
Shards of teeth
Ice pick abortions
Orgasmic death so warm
Lets die screamin'
Black goat semen
I can't hear you whisper "conform"
Hearts will stop and brain cells pop
Apocalyptic high
She screams bloody murder as they chop off her fingers
So this is how it feels to die
But it's ok
Yeah everything's ok
She was screaming about conspiracy
Talkin' about taking sides
I was masturbating, just contimplating
The cold love of suicide
Hearts will stop and brain cells pop
Apocalyptic high
She was screaming bloody murder as they chop off her fingers...
So this is how it feels to die
When it comes to Acid Bath the lyrics are only a portion of the experience. The music ranges from some of the heaviest fastest metal riffs you can imagine to soft acoustic ballads that at times have moved me to tears. Throughout it all Dax uses his voice as an instrument. His juxtaposition of beautiful melody and guttural screams blended with Sammy Duet's unmistakable nightmarish growl takes the initiate into the underworld, the above world, and all streams of consciousness in between.
The Bones of Baby Dolls
Flower girls play lover
Grave games in the courtyard
I heard her screaming like a radio
Mary lou left marks on you
She just screams at the moon
The kite string pops
I'm swallowed whole by the sky
We smoke the bones of baby dolls
Techno-liquid screaming meat
Heaven's cold beneath my feet
Cyber love the anti-man we make love... because we can
Virgins play where the bayou's blue
Barefoot (and bloody) eatin' mushroom stew
Work for pay and pay for freedom
Fuck 'em all, we don't need 'em
We smoke the bones of baby dolls
Love, sex, death, blood, the mother, the cycle, the virgin, the whore, the rapist, the goat, the hero, mythology; it's all there along with modern cynicism. At times Dax's lyrics seem anti-romantic, in this I see the same disdain that many of my classmates have expressed toward the genre of romance and the simplistic tales we are reading. I find the supposed condemnation of love (in the lyrics) to really be a celebration of romance. The clear connections between love, sex, and death move these images beyond the mythological and into the realm of the fantastic; the realm of romance.
Venus Blue
Creeping like frost
As slow as grave moss
Like drowning in dry oceans of bone dust
I taste the wreckage of crumbling faces
I know the pale thing in the darkest of places
I remember blood from the thighs of the mother
As everything is eaten by another
How much more must we bleed her
I cut their throats while they slept
I wept
I peel back my skull for you
Yes I do
Slow desolation like a funeral procession
The lovely one screams like she's caught between stations
I eat the razor, a mouthful of God's flesh
Sweating this blackness,
I am shitting this cold death
Love is rotting on the vine
Crumbling in God's sunshine
I am dying all the time
Point me at the sky... sky
How much more must we bleed her
I cut their throats while they slept
I wept
I peel back my skull for you
Yes I do
DEAD VENUS BLUE
I taste the wreckage of crumbling faces
I know the pale thing in the darkest of places
Mythology, folktales, fairy tales and archetypal imagery. I believe that Dax Riggs understood more about literature in his early twenties than many college graduates ever will and certainly more than I ever will. Even though in his later works, post-Acid Bath, Dax failed as a poet (in my opinion); it is the imagery of this poet and his band the continues to deepen my understanding of literature and myself.
New Corpse
The pagan flames burn through the night
Everything's mine
Blackness my whore I bleed the light
Everything's mine
I know my time is coming soon
Everything's mine
Miles of bone lay on the ground
It's all mine
In remembrance of warmth would you shit on me?
I am the new corpse paling beneath the shade tree
You can't give me what I need
Picking at scabs with ambition to bleed
You're mine
The war machine moves forward lifeless
Everything's mine
We feed larvae with the blood of our martyrs
Everything's mine
We burn the flames of the funeral carnival
Everything's mine
I am death walking up in a coffin
It's all mine
I eat the eyes and pray to see
the emptiness inside of me
I eat the brain and pray to know
anarchy of fallen angels
I want to be the enemy
The hero is dead
I put the newest hole in his head
I want to be the enemy
The hero is dead
I put the newest hole in his head
Bleed for me, we were born dead
Falling chunks of flesh
Ejaculating sickness
Everything's mine
Your new corpse is beauty
Dying on the inside
The ocean, the sea, and the dead shore are all recurring themes in Acid Bath lyrics. It occurs to me that I threw myself into 'an ocean of alien mystery' when I was a teenager and it is only now that I approach 30 that I am beginning to understand what that means.
Yesterday I read a chapter and a half of Frye. In addition I read James, Oranda, Jennifer, and Aaron's blogs. These are all great blogs and those of you who haven't read them I courage you to do so. While getting my long awaited Acid Bath tattoo (not my first band tattoo, I already have TOOL and Megadeth), I read most of Grimm, parts of Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know, and thumbed through my anthology of children's literature feverishly trying to find a story to displace (and thanks to my tattoo artist find myself on track with that assignment). As I lay there reading and periodically discussing what I was reading, music, art, and life with my artist and others in the shop, I found myself in that place--where worlds collide and bleed into one another--and very much at peace.
The tattoo is a reworking of an old Acid Bath t-shirt logo for a song called Dr. Suess is Dead, it features a rather frightening depiction of a Grinch-like figure holding the skull of the Cat in the Hat by the spinal cord in one hand and the flower seen above in the other. It was all just so damn perfect I had to write about it, because....
"The dream sea has been poisoned
Stoplight flashes me red
Innocence sufficated in it's sleep
Dr. Suess is dead"
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