Defending the Cheeseburger

There is an internal debate I find myself dealing with quite a bit lately. I find myself searching for answers to something I'm beginning to think is impossible to answer, and also probably useless if there were an answer...but of course I will run it over in my head until my inevitable psychotic breakdown...

I wonder if the ultimate goal of listening to music is to understand 100% of what the artist was trying to put forth, and then realizing you completely relate to what they are saying without doubt. Or is the goal to project your own feelings onto a song, be it lyrically or by the mood your getting, and then find complete relativity regardless of what the artist was attempting to put forth. Don't get what I'm saying? Neither do I, but I am going to try and elaborate regardless.

Certain artists seem to pertain to one theory or the other I have come to realize. Take an artist like my favorite artist, Devin Townsend. Known for his absolute honesty and matter-of-fact delivery of lyrics, I find myself being able to relate to what he is saying in a creepily amount of situations I have been in. I feel at this point I am comprehending pretty much exactly what he is trying to say and relating to it, and the payoff is always awesome. I have never been let down by Devin, Cheeseburgers and farts and all. A lot of people took the Cheeseburger metaphor as immature and stupid, and I can definitely see why. But to me, it seemed like the perfect metaphor for questions without answers in life, and once again I feel I connected with what he was saying. A dead serious subject masked behind complete ridiculousness, something the Dev pulls off better than anybody in my opinion.


Then on the other end of the spectrum, we have a band like Blut Aus Nord. Their second most recent album 777 Sect(s) is one of my favorite albums of 2011, and I haven't the slightest idea of anything they are talking about...at all. They mentioned something about a parallel universe and some mystical guy being trapped or something or other, but it goes without saying they don't really care if you understand it or not, so why release it? Well, in my case it had nothing to do with the vocals or lyrics, I look back on the album from a purely instrumental standpoint. The way the riffs were repeated and new touches were thrown in after every repetition made the album seem to always be hiding something just on the horizon. And the climax of the album was absolutely one of the best payoffs I have experienced in music. Every emotion was covered in this album and there isn't even a name for the one released during the finale. So the real question is, did BAN intend for me to have this reaction? Or did I just luck out?

I don't know the answer to this, and that makes the mystery all the more intriguing for a band like BAN. People know hardly anything about the members or even what they look like, and they are known for rarely doing interviews and pretty much never posting lyrics. However, I was able to make some pretty deep connections to the album based on my own imagination, so I somehow managed to:

A. Forge a deep connection with the album regardless of the artists intent...
B. Listen to the album and possibly get exactly what the artist intended me to get out of it...
C. Further confuse myself by even thinking up this stuff in the first place

So in the end, I end up right where I started thanks to thinking too much.


I'm beginning to realize that the answer to this question, and the answer to most questions I force on myself, is that there is no answer sometimes. They are all just one of Devin's Cheeseburgers, and to put it similar to the man himself: I wouldn't know what to do with the answer if I found it, and it more or less wouldn't change anything anyway.