of Victims and Killers

I found myself contemplating music this afternoon, while driving. I had the windows down, (the sparkly pink glitter-glue on my hand-made mothers day card had yet to dry, you see), so naturally I had to turn the radio up to compensate for the wind volume, and something about the act of doing so sent me into an interesting direction of thought. I had been dwelling on the fundamentals of the 80s and 90s, as I often do, and how to better identify and communicate what the quintessential elements of each were, and how they directly contradict each other, and I noticed a pattern pertinent to something much more significant than the music.

This pattern is one which I think represents a much deeper element; a driving force not just for music, but for creative thought itself, rooted in the very core paradox of basic self awareness. The fundamental distinction and trend that I noticed was that most 80s music was rooted in self congratulations, or ownership over life, while most of the 90s music was rooted in life’s ownership over us. While the 80s generation sings about knowing who God is and going to hell to party, the 90s generation sings about being a lonely peon high school outcast, helplessly and humbly begging questions of the universe; a little group it’s always been, and always will until the end…hello? hello? The distinction is simple, but only represents a small trend in popularity, as songs of both mind-sets are present in all generations to some degree.

I believe it to be rooted in the broad and ancient concept of dualism, or the duality of man. Two opposing and opposite perspectives from which the mind can perceive the world; the first is from that of a victim; the self conscious knowledge of smallness and insignificance, at the mercy of the whims of fate and cosmic events beyond control or understanding; the second is from that of a killer; a self sufficient and superior angle whose perception of life is that of a small and contained zoo of sorts, almost too boring to bother with beyond the practice of moving things around simply to exercise one’s dominance over it for sport. It’s no wonder that most feel good music is rooted in this perspective, as gluttonous self gratification is at the root of the killer mentality.

I am not sure that both can be achieved at once, though shifting back and forth between the two is no chore, at least for me. The concept, however, is rooted at such a depth of the human psyche that it’s beneath my ability to manipulate, and as such I often find myself helplessly tossed back and forth from one to the next and back again. I find it ironic that although the perspective of the killer is by far the most enjoyable to experience, it breeds nothing significantly redeemable or useful, while the angle of the victim has been the fountainhead of almost every piece of man-made beauty in existence…as though the man on his knees, reaching for God, is somehow able to reach higher than the man sitting on his Lion’s chair, peering down at at the petty and mundane world.