Keepin' It Funereal: Maximum Death Rock

The Reaper responds to his doctor's
suggestion that a low-dosage SSRI
might help allay his tendency
toward overly morbid thoughts.

Every week, when I go see the shrink about my Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Chronic Premorbid Depression, he asks me to fill out a questionnaire.  This information enables him to track and quantify my mood over the previous seven days and determine whether or not it's trending in the right direction.  Then we talk about the results.  It's not like on TV.  We don't discuss my dreams, or my sex life, or my mother, or whether I dream about having sex with my mother.  He doesn't give a fuck about that shit.  He keeps it Cognitive.  Anyways, it's the same set of questions every time and one of them is this:

Recurring thoughts of death?

0.  Not at all
1.  Sometimes
2.  Frequently
3.  Most of the time

Dr. Snuggle-Bum's patients adore him,
but his colleagues have voiced
concern about his outdated
Freudian methodology.

Surprise, surprise, frequently or incessantly occurring thoughts of death tend to be deemed a bad thing by most mental health professionals.  Such thoughts add points to your shitty-mood score and will elicit a raised eyebrow and a earnestly-voiced inquiry about whether you're thinking about going softly into that dark night.  This is partly because suicidal patients are a pain in the ass.  The I-Hate-Myself-And-Want-To-Die-type tends to make blubbering late-night phone calls to his therapist's home and, if Dr. Don't-Do-It ducks him the way his friends and families do, he or she ends up feeling all guilty, worrying about whether the little crybaby's gonna pull a Cobain on him.  This is also bad for business.  Let's face it, after the Hippocratic oath, the most important thing for a doctor to keep at the forefront of his or her mind is this:

Dead patients don't pay their bills...

Cromwell: B'gosh, Charles, old boy.
A necrophiliac I be not,
but damn it, ye look good in there.

Sometimes I wonder, though, if our culture's squeemishness about the other side, which often manifests itself in a full-on, tight-lipped terror of it, doesn't go a little overboard.

I mean, hell, we dress our corpses up in party dresses and pump them full of chemicals so they look good enough to fuck, instead of like the rotting sacks of meat that they actually are.

When Fido wanders out into the street and gets his asshole driven through his brains by a speeding minivan, we tell the kids he "went to live on a farm," rather than show them his smashed and mangled body and teach them a lesson about why it's not a good idea to play on the fucking road.

And pretty much all of the world's major religions have as their selling point: "Death?  Hey, don't worry, little dudes.  We gotcha covered.  All we want is your life in exchange."

The Lord will reward me
for my fashion choices.

And that's the thing.  What people think about death often dictates how they live their lives.  For a lot of people life is just an audition for the eternity that comes afterwards, and they'll do pretty much anything to pass it.  They'll refrain from masturbating.  They'll kill Moslems.  Fuck, they'll even dress like an 17th-century Puritan if they think they'll be rewarded for it in the world to come.  People want their lives to mean something other than they do, I guess, and the only way to do that is to have it be about the one thing it's not: Death.

And, to a certain extent, that's okay.  Let's face it, Death is fucking interesting.  In fact, along with Life, Love, Beauty, Truth, Sex, and God, Death is on the short list of things that are, always have been, and always will be worth thinking and talking about.

Psst.  Hey, Gents.
For future reference...

By the way, this list, though perhaps not exhaustive, is pretty much the same for both men and women.  I've noted, however, that some women tend to replace the "sex" entry with either "chocolate" or "shoes:" a sad fact that probably has less to do with some sort of sweet-toothed vapidity in the fairer sex than it does with the lackluster cocksmanship and anatomical ignorance of their menfolk.

Anyways, here's a parting thought:

I wonder whether the world wouldn't be a far better place and our lives far more joyful and interesting if everybody just cowboyed the fuck up, looked the reaper in the eye, and faced the following terrifying, but nonetheless, quite probable possibility:

When you die, you're just fucking dead.

And then lived accordingly.

Anyways, here's a few of my favourite songs about that night without a dawn.



Son House:  "Death Letter."

Fuck Robert Johnson and his Satanically-inspired skills, Son House is, in my humble opinion, the best of the old-school Delta Country Bluesman.  Here, House gets a letter informing him that the woman he loves (not his wife, by the way), is dead.  This is a haunting, ghoulish tale of anguish, fear, loneliness, and a deep sense of sinfulness.  Maybe the greatest song ever.

Nas: "Life's A Bitch (And Then You Die)."

As a white, middle-class dude from the Canadian suburbs, it would be kind of ridiculous to suggest that Nas is somehow "strumming my pain with his fingers," so to speak.  I mean, none of my peeps are "doin' years in the hundreds," and those that "never made it" aren't dead, they're just still living in the 'burbs, which, come to think of it, might actually be worse.  Still, the message of "Life's A Bitch" isn't all that far off from my own philosophy of Affirmative Nihilism.  This is how you live when facing death is a part of your everyday reality.  Maybe then you actually fucking go for it, protect your neck in the meantime, and "puff a little fly" at the end of the day to celebrate, or forget, or whatever.  Because, let's face it, Nasty Nas is right, "you never know when you're gonna go."

Richard Wagner: "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Gotterdammerung.

Despite being a rabid anti-semite, a remorseless philanderer, and, like Hitler, a vegetarian, Richard Wagner was still the most gifted and important composer of the late nineteenth-century: proving, along with Miles Davis and Martin Heidegger than being a genius and being a fucking asshole are not mutually exclusive personality traits.  On a personal note, the pompous douche in me has always hoped that Wagner's elegy on the death of his superhuman Nordic hero-saviour would be used at my own funeral.



Bauhaus: "Bela Lugosi's Dead."

A great post-punk hymn on the death of Death or, at least, of its most well-known pop-culture personification, Bela Lugosi.  What's interesting about the song is that there's absolutely no sadness in it.  It's more of a triumphal black mass, a kind of  necromantic "Candle in the Wind" without the weak-assed, boohoo, I-would've-liked-to-know-you-but-I-was-just-a-kid shit.  Through death, Bela lives forever: "Undead! Undead! Undead!"