By Andrew North
It’s the nature of things to go through a cycle, and before you start getting excited, no I’m not going to make a Wheel of Time reference. When we’re born we look weird and wrinkly and often smell bad. Roughly eighty years later when we’re one more bowel release away from a coffin we look weird and wrinkly and always smell bad. Or, in only a slightly different direction, when we become zombies we look really weird, maybe wrinkly, and I’m sure the smell will be damn near unbearable. So it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that the things humans create have such a circular nature. I don’t mean that they always end up the same, their evolutions just take them back around to parallel their beginnings.
Back in the early 1900's there were crazy folks like James Son House and Robert Johnson rocking riversides and midnight campfires with homemade guitars. They were people with real problems making a revolutionary form of music and all they had in the world was a suit and a shit-box instrument. It’s not that they were out to change the world with this music, it was just a way to make money, sort of, and get the problems off their backs for a little while. Music still serves that purpose today, the problems are just more trivial. It’s become more about having a problem and telling everyone about it than it has trying to make the problem feel better. People have forgotten that their supposed to sing the blues to get rid of the blues, not sing the blues to get them.
Now understand that I’m not referring to all music in a global sense. To be brutally specific, I’m talking about a certain demographic of pretentious, self repressing fucks who think that a problem constitutes a minor domestic dispute and the cancer they inject themselves with through cigarettes that they smoke to back their claim that they would rather die of cancer than live past high school. Here in the U.S.A. (because I’m just arrogant enough to believe that I have at least one reader overseas) we refer to them with two different names, and yes, they are the same type of person despite any minute distinctions they give to the contrary: scene and emo.
These people are a classic example of a cultural evolution that’s just a few steps behind another full revolution. At the moment the mainstream scene surrounding music inspired by negative emotions has been blown so far out of proportion that people can’t even remember why they started lying about cutting themselves at night. But all that’s needed to bring this music up to its next paralleling evolutionary step is a catalyst event to give people something tragic to sing about. Obviously this event should involve zombies. After Z Day all the problems will become legitimate and then the half assed “guitarists” who only learned to play to get attention will have something real to sing about. Where Son House sang about reading a letter of his wife’s death about a hundred years ago a Zombie-age blues artist could sing about shooting his undead brother after seeing him eat his best friend.
In a world polluted with zombies we will be back to the origins of the greatest music in America. We’ll be making our own instruments and jamming on them as loudly as possible in an attempt to drown out the incessant moaning outside. The only difference between what we’ll play trapped inside a two story apartment building and what Robert Johnson played after selling his soul to the devil, besides the inevitably large gap in talent, will be a matter of volume. Also our songs will be about zombies.
Music is an important part of human society in any condition. We use it as reigns and spurs for our emotions. It helps keep us sane, and that will never be more important than when the undead are banging on our doors. I’ve even written a song of my own in preparation for this event. It’s applicable to any generic three chord blues progression, which is simple enough for the billions of mediocre guitarists out there to learn. Or, lacking conventional instruments, banging random objects together in the closest thing you can get to rhythm will suffice, providing they actually make a noise. I leave it here for the public to use at an appropriate time.
Hot summer nights, they’re welcome around here
Hot summer nights, they’re welcome around here.
Now you don’t have to see me crying, ‘cause the sweat’s hiding my tears.
I got the Walkin’ Dead Blues, you can’t keep me underground
I got the Walkin’ Dead Blues, you can’t keep me underground
I’ve just got one more shot in my Magnum, and that door’s breakin’ down.
My brother is a dumb-fuck, went and got himself undead
My brother is a dumb-fuck, went and got himself undead.
But mother we won’t fight anymore, cause he aint got a head.
Oh girl you should be worried, there’s no escape that I can see
Oh girl you should be worried, there’s no escape that I can see.
You’ve got blood on your arm, and this last bullet is for me.
Hot summer nights, they bring the stink to this place
Hot summer nights, they bring the stink to this place
Now you don’t have to see me crying, ‘cause you’re eating my face.
I’m thinking of adding a verse that’s all zombie moans.
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