I’m Never Going Back
Death Waits — “Burn Everything”
I don’t regret anything.
Except everything.
— Death Waits “Burn Everything”
“The spectacular consumption that preserves past culture in congealed form, including coopted rehashes of its negative manifestations, gives overt expression in its cultural sector to what it implicitly is in its totality: the communication of the incommunicable.”
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
In 1975, Johnny Rotten scrawled “I Hate” on a Pink Floyd t-shirt and in this detournment, invented punk. At least, in one way of looking at the world, Rotten’s innovative graffiti became both the musical and political underpinnings of what would be known to the world as punk.
Musically, punk professed a refutation of everything before it, though listening today to bands like Sex Pistols and The Ramones, the glam rock dynamics of their sound are readily identifiable. Nothing comes from nothing.
Through the 1980s, punk grew, fractured, transformed and spawned noisy rock. American bands like Hüsker Dü and Pixies straddled the punk and rock divide, creating a new more listenable palate that rippled through the alternative music universe.
So what does it all mean in the 2020s when a search for “Death of Rock” reveals articles blaming Millenials and Gen Z for turning their backs on rock? Neil Young may have thought a lot about Johnny Rotten and rock & roll’s immortality, but almost 10 years ago KISS frontman Gene Simmons famously declared in Esquire magazine that “Rock is finally dead.”
Not every song review requires a 40-year backstory, but the whole groove of Death Waits drips in rock history, particularly the noisy rock born from American postpunk. At once Pixies, Nirvana and even Dead Kennedys, the music of Death Waits proves Gene Simmons completely wrong, especially on the title track of their recent album Burn Everything. Like punk and postpunk before them, Death Waits is happy to subsume its influences, but instead of breaking them into shards, they smash and shape them into tight sonic submission.
“Burn Everything” begins with a single clean riff quickly underlaid by a chonky fuzzy one. It’s deceptively casual, taking its time before the vocal kicks in after a 25-second intro. Burn it all, burn it down, Edward Masuda sings, winking at punk anarchy before proclaiming Let the fire consume this town/ This place is hell. We all have been there, we’ve all seen Blue Velvet, River’s Edge and Repo Man — those perfectly cynical, disillusioned looks at the American hellscape. Are Death Waits fashioning a new nihilism for a new postpandemic world? Maybe.
In his analysis of Samuel Beckett’s story “The Calmative,” Raymond Federman quotes Beckett’s narrator, standing precariously on the ledge of the roof of a church — Into what nightmare thingness am I fallen?
Remembering this postwar landscape through the lens of a global pandemic, we easily equate mundane daily existence with a living nightmare. Federman, though, is quick to mediate this image by reminding the reader that yes, while the narrator is referring to an immediate physical predicament, once we pull the perspective back and see the scene as a whole, the narrator is in fact Beckett’s fictional creation. “[Nightmare thingness] also addresses his puzzlement as a fictional creature made of words, as being trapped in his own fiction…”
This place is hell, it’s dim and cracked. Death Waits’s version of the nightmare is a bit less severe and imposing than Beckett’s. Grime and decay foment disappointment more than rage. It almost makes one feel warm and fuzzy.
But I got out, the song continues, a moment of reprieve from the apocalyptic nightmare requiring a firestorm of burning, …I’m never going back. It’s not only a narrative reprieve, as if Beckett’s unfortunate creature has climbed down from the edge, but also a twist on the punk mythos. Burn everything — the song seems to say, not because I need to escape — but despite my escape.
The narrator of “Burn Everything” could be a fictional character trapped in a mid-1990s nightmare movie like Natural Born Killers or The Crow, movies highly associated with a certain kind of popular soundtrack. Driven by Nine Inch Nails covering Joy Division along with The Cure’s “Burn,” The Crow soundtrack set the stage in 1994. A year later, NIN would contribute the track “Burn” and some others to NBK. The Cure has their song “Burn” in The Crow. Pyromania as a flat circle.
Thirty years on from those movies, Death Waits is not merely repeating the motif, they are adding to it, modifying it. Having gotten out of that dim and cracked town, the song continues And I don’t regret a thing, pretty standard punk, where you put your thoughts into direct action. But like the narrator of “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, there’s something more than destruction and loss. There’s regret. All of it.
And I don’t regret a thing, except everything.
The man known as Brightside hears Destiny call, and is eager for a change, but the lyrics trap him in an infinitely paralyzing loop — I never… Death Waits recognizes this this nightmare loop, and rips it from Brandon Flowers’s eager hands. They don’t miss anyone, except everyone.
So, yes, our hero has burned it all, burned it down. But now, alone, out there, he has to live with his memories and regret.
I’m never going, I’m never going back.
“Burn Everything” written by Edward Masuda, William Masuda, Erik Tokar, James Cain, Scott Middleton. Performed by Death Waits. Produced by Scott Middleton.
