Content warning: some mentions of suicide, mental illness, cutting
This week, I decided to explore new musical genres. Normally I am a Motown, classical music, old school Phil Collins kind of listener, but I remember when I was in fourth grade there were these two kids who were older than me (high school aged). We attended the same homeschool and they both really loved this band called Korn. I remember she drew a cartoon comic strip of her cat, Daphne, doing various things. One part of the strip showed her over a toilet bowl throwing up, and another part of the strip showed Daphne with headphones on listening to Korn.
“Oh,” one of the students said. “I thought you said Daphne was listening to porn.”
My naive innocent 10-year-old brain didn’t register. What was porn, and what was this Korn that Daphne the cat was listening to?
I went through a print music CDs catalog (this was back in 2005) and saw a few albums. I was always intrigued by the album covers that had the Parental Advisory stickers on them. I never listened to a lot of explicit music growing up so finding out about these explicit CDs felt like I was encountering some forbidden fruit. As I perused the catalog, one CD album cover caught my eye. It was a dark twisted illustration of a young boy, pale as a ghost, staring in fear out at the viewer, holding a teddy bear with its head ripped off. A demonic looking rabbit was putting a crown on the scared little boy’s head, and a demonic looking horse was holding the head of the boy’s teddy bear. The album was titled See You on the Other Side. I was around 11 or 12 when I saw this album cover, and because I like weird art (this was around the time that I got into this short story collection by Tim Burton called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy) I went online and listened to a few samples of the songs on the album. I was too chicken to listen to the original explicit version of the album, so from what I can remember I may have just listened to the clean edited version on iTunes. Or, rather, a 30-second sample of the song “Coming Undone” and then deciding that heavy metal was not my cup of tea. The song sounded demonic and terrifying and it had lots of screaming and angry growling that sent chills down my spine.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I’m working on an unpleasant assignment at my desk, passing the time at my 9-to-5 office job. I decide to listen to Korn. I have a Spotify Premium membership, so why not? At first, I was reluctant to listen to Korn because I tried listening to “Freak on a Leash” and some other songs on their other album See You on the Other Side, which features another disturbing album cover of a group of kids following a young girl as she plays hopscotch and runs to jump off the edge of a cliff. I’m sure any fans of Korn or metal music reading this are just rolling their eyes and thinking, Well, DUH, it’s Korn. What do you expect? But again, as someone who didn’t grow up listening to the nu metal band Korn (or other groups like Slipknot and Seether) listening to this genre was a whole new listening experience. Here are the few metal albums that I listened to these past few days while handling a gruesome task (I do work in personal injury law, after all, so what’s a day without a bunch of scary photos of amputations?) I’m probably getting the release dates wrong for the following list, but it is 11:00 pm and I am very tired and have no energy to continue writing and editing at the moment.
- Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces: Seether (release date: January 1, 2007)
- See You on the Other Side: Korn (release date: December 6, 2005)
- Follow the Leader: Korn (release date: August 18, 1998)
- History for Sale: Blue October (release date: January 1, 2003)
- Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (release date: June 8, 2004)
There are a few songs from my listening experience that I listened to on repeat. One of them is a beautiful cover of “Careless Whisper” from Seether’s album Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces. I grew up listening to George Michael’s song “Careless Whisper” on the radio as a kid, and it was one of my favorite songs by him besides “Faith” and “Father Figure.” After listening to the entire album by Seether, I think I was better able to appreciate Seether’s unique style and personality that they brought to their cover of “Careless Whisper.” It gave the song a much darker gloomier feel to it. I also really like another song on the album “Rise Above This.” Growing up, the first song I heard from Seether was “Fake It.” It was around seventh grade when I was exploring new music on iTunes. I mainly started listening to this album because I thought the album cover art was interesting. The cover of Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces shows a young girl with jet-black hair showing her ribcage against a dusty background with what looks like an alphabet of hieroglyphics on the right side of her. Like I said, I loved a lot of twisted strange art as a kid, so for some reason, while I was too chicken to listen to the full explicit rage-filled albums of Korn and Seether, I had no problem looking at the creepy disturbing album covers.
I will say, I am glad I waited until I was much older and mature to listen to Korn and Seether’s albums. One reason is because growing up, I was never exposed to a lot of dark scary stuff. Sure, I loved Tim Burton, but I never watched Sleepy Hollow or Edward Scissorhands. Just the heartwarming fantasy drama Big Fish and the spooky but kid-friendly film called The Nightmare Before Christmas (I can’t also forget his film adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, which I was obsessed with as a kid.) Any other film that showed creepy dudes in white masks with holes in them or possessed toy dolls with red hair, overalls and a real penchant for killing people: forget it. As I got older and started to understand myself more, and also went through my own dark, scary painful stuff, I think I was able to understand why these guys produce this kind of depressing metal music. At first, I was worried that listening to the music would re-trigger me, especially as someone who has been in that dark nasty hell of major depressive disorder and is still recovering from quite a few horrible episodes. Especially since quite a few of the songs on these albums are about suicide and self-harm. When I first started listening to Blue October’s album History for Sale, I was worried because one of the songs on the album is called “Razorblade.” As someone who struggled with self-harm in the past, listening to this song was pretty painful, and I wondered if I was ever going to get through the album. Of course, if you don’t like an album or a certain genre, don’t pressure yourself to listen to it. Then again, listening to a different genre than I was used to exposed me to a new style of music that I would not have listened to otherwise. Weirdly enough, I got through History for Sale and ended up loving it. One of the songs on the album is called “Calling You” and I would hear it all the time on the radio, in the supermarket, at the doctor’s office, everywhere. But that was just one song. Listening to the entire album gave me more exposure to other songs that Blue October had written and performed besides that one song (even though it’s one of my favorite Blue October songs.) Listening to the full album helped me appreciate all of the blood, sweat and tears that went into writing the lyrics, which are so raw and personal and vulnerable, and rehearsing the songs with the band and then playing the songs multiple times on tour. I’m sure Blue October loves it; otherwise, why would they have gone into the music business in the first place? However, I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Justin Furstenfeld, the lead vocalist, guitarist and lyricist of Blue October, to write songs about mental illness, cutting and suicide. Even though we have more spaces where we can discuss mental illness, and even though more people are going to therapy, there is still that lingering stigma attached to having a mental illness. I think that is why hearing about the actor Robert Carradine’s suicide was so painful. Earlier that week when I heard he committed suicide, I was contemplating my own suicide, and I felt like I would never get out of that dark place where I just felt my life was hopeless and meaningless. And then I heard about Robert Carradine’s suicide, and I could not stop crying in my car during my lunch break. I cried while microwaving my lunch. I cried while in the parking lot trying and failing to eat said lunch without bursting into tears. I finally had to go to the public library and chill out with Lost Illusions, a novel by Honore de Balzac. I simply could not believe that the actor who played Sam McGuire, Lizzie McGuire’s dad in one of my favorite shows as a kid, Lizzie McGuire, took his own life. I also didn’t know that he struggled with bipolar disorder for decades. My reaction to Robert Carradine’s suicide reminded me of the profound grief I experienced in 2014 when I found out that the actor Robin Williams took his own life. I could not believe it. I thought it was a sick joke. But after reading more news, I realized that Robin Williams was actually gone. I still remember bawling like a baby when I saw Robin Williams laughing on the cover of TIME Magazine and the caption, “Robin Williams, 1951-2014.” I guess it was just hard because I had this naive idea that Robin Williams was happy because he was living this successful life as an actor and had an incredible career. But of course, actors at the end of the day are human beings with their own challenges in daily life, and Robin Williams had his own struggles with his mental health. Even though there is help and even though there are services to help people with mental illness, even just the action of asking for help can feel like an uphill battle. You may just not have the energy to do it. Or you may be dealing with family members, partners, or friends who discourage you from getting professional help or speaking honestly about your feelings. Or you may just feel like people aren’t going to care about what you’re going through, so why bother? It is hard to remember that there are people who love you, and that there is no shame whatsoever in seeking professional help for mental illness, whether it is for you or for a loved one, but even if you don’t think it’s true, the undeniable fact is that there will always be someone who cares about you and that you are loved inside and out.
If you or a loved one is struggling, there is a 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline you can call. This is a link with more information.
The Arts Are Life 