Conor Oberst is the best living songwriter, and I don’t give a shit what anyone says about that statement. It’s just true, on its face.
You don’t have to like it, but this is peak songwriting.
I do not support the content, but the form is beyond reproach.
I hadn’t listened to the music in a long time, because I don’t listen to depression music, as a rule. I haven’t in years. However, during the Illness Revelations, when I was attempting to swallow my own soul and digest it and use the nutritional materials from it to build a new soul, I went and listened to some of it. There were multiple albums I hadn’t even bothered listening to at all. There were a lot of good songs.
This one hit:
I watched some live shows and noticed that he is drinking himself to death. At recent concerts, which are rare (at least on YouTube), he is bloated and falling down and slurring and forgetting the words to his songs. He only has women in his band now, and they are all mommies looking after troubled baby. Men will not stick around and deal with this shit.
It’s gruesome I guess, but it’s predictable and I don’t really care. I guess on a human, Christian level, I recognize it is a human tragedy. But bro, I’ve got my own problems, and if you want to write druggie depression music for decades and you end up a drunken mess with no meaning in your life in your 40s, then them’s the ropes. I guess you should have made better decisions?
Becoming a busted drunk at 40 isn’t difficult and it isn’t romantic. Anyone can do it. Drinking yourself to death in public doesn’t make it art – unless maybe you can make it shocking and violent, but I won’t go into that.
He’s a few years older than me, but he’s fundamentally “millennial music,” and basically invented “emo,” which was later repackaged, mechanized, and sold widely to great profit.
This concept of “the millennial at 40” is very interesting to me. Millennialism was so much defined by romanticism, which I’ve argued stemmed from boredom. (Romanticism is a natural result of boredom.) In order for something to be romantic, it has to be beautiful. If you’ve got money, you can be 40 and surrounded by beautiful (much younger) women. But you can’t be a beautiful fat drunk (or, at least, it is very difficult).
Typically, in normal circumstances, romantic men would find a home in religion, as it is the thing which encapsulates all beauty. But there is a strange rebelliousness in millennials, which became the norm, and then became tyranny. Go check Tumblr circa 2009. Modern tyranny is entirely composed of millennial rebelliousness: homosexuality, feminism, trannies, whoring, immigrants, brown people, “indigenous” rights, etc.
With Conor, you then have the fact that he’s a white heterosexual male, and therefore cannot really be a part of this new culture that was shaped in some significant part by him. At one of his drunken concerts, he starts ranting about elephants.
Jesus is always there, you know. He stands at the door and knocks.
At some point, within Godlessness, death becomes the only thing that is meaningful. Of course, religious people are also obsessed with death. Everyone is obsessed with death, and it’s just a matter of how you deal with it. Wanting to die is unhelpful.
These millennial issues need to be examined further, in great detail, as this has been the worst disaster in all of human history and it needs to be dissected in full – without blaming technology, frankly (this is much too easy).
However, today I wanted to note that two videos Conor made in 2014 showed today as the date after a disaster of some kind when an artificial intelligence (or maybe an alien race) is examining humanity and their downfall.
I liked the videos.
I sort of wondered if he would die today. You can tell in these live shows, even from 18 months ago, that he’s on the clock. You can’t stop eating and just drink all the time and bloat up maximally for very long, actually. Not more than 5 years, if you’re very strong. He’s not strong. He’s a whiny emo singer.
Today is his birthday, which is apparently why the date was chosen. But the year, I think, was related to a prediction of impending doom.
2014 was peak experience for the millennial. They were in their twenties, still attractive (most people were not so fat back then), they were living it up in an economic upswing, doing drugs and having a ball. And yet, they all sensed impending doom. Maybe the romanticism, hollow as it was, gave them the ability to sense the doom coming. Or maybe the doom was just obvious.
Regardless, the doom hath come, as was predicted.
Ironically, they had no idea they would be the ones to cause it. They thought it would be their hated fathers, in league with Dick Cheney and Billy Graham.
But no.
This is a totally millennial doom.
It is a gaynigger doom.
Vladimir Putin reminds millennials of their fathers: the ultimate opposer of gaynigger communism.
I don’t think millennials understand anything that is happening. Of course, I don’t think many people on earth understand what is happening.
Nonetheless, it is happening.
And, bizarrely, some of us may live to be sitting in a room with an AI analyzing us in order to piece together what happened in our heads during these years of doom.
Never forget:
We’re all doomed.
But the doom is what you make of it.