It was the late 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union had solidified in peoples’ minds, Bill Clinton was still President, and mainstream music (unbeknownst to 14-year-old me) was the culmination of various underground movements showing their most commercial, sold-out, and tasteless sides. Various bands took different styles of music and threw them together into some palatable concoction for masses of MTV-educated teenagers who were just finding the Internet in its first mainstream incarnation. The Internet was a place where people stratified themselves into various social cliques without realizing it, and bands were learning to use it to hype themselves to make money.

Hip-hop and the more extreme forms of metal started out as underground movements, but in the mainstream opportunists took the different styles and threw them together into a salable concoction, pilfering the aesthetics of both and mixing them together while leaving all of the substance to the underground acts. It created a sort of abyss: there were some seriously dangerous people in the underground, but most people remained at the surface level, listening to music for entertainment purposes and not realizing the social agendas behind the rise of the two styles.

Even in the mainstream, as teenagers we were inundated with the notion that drugs were mind-expanding, sex was to be had early and often, and dumb music-oriented cults were full of enlightened freethinkers. Musicians sold themselves to impressionable minds, creating larger than life personas full of impotent rage, copious amounts of drug use, and edgy self-destruction. Were we going to fall for it? Absolutely.

Money was made, CDs were bought, and people sent each other MP3s of the latest hyped up dross over file-sharing sites. But did you know that over-indulgence leads to slavery? That rebellion against society in the ways presented was just a way to make you powerless? That the people who were in charge found ways to appropriate the underground, to make it profitable and ensure that it was just a sociopathic freak-show that edgy teenagers went through as a rite of passage, their anger defanged by the harsh realities of substance abuse, mental illnesses, disease, and early pregnancy?

At some point a couple of airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, I think it was September 11th, wasn’t it? It seemed like everything took a darker turn after that, although it was already dark to begin with. The mainstream still went on, but more and more people splintered deeper into an underground that had lost all direction and potency, and the youth became even more lost in the process. Power was consolidated by technocrats; it was a time of anger, fear, and people either joined an outbreak of really dumb patriotism or splintered into various subcultures that found renewed strength on the spreading Internet, but which were increasingly divided by competing ideology.

At some point there was a really strong push in this chaos toward a certain, very ugly set of racially oriented gnostic cults. Fear broke down peoples’ defenses and they were looking for solutions. Did they find them? Yes and no. There were for sure many cults, but people found that they couldn’t muster enough power to do anything but inundate people with insanity. They formed alliances, feasted on peoples souls, but they couldn’t get anyone to actually do anything, and even if people did do something, it petered out as the system had built up its defenses and was prepared to hammer down any nail that stuck up. If someone jumped off the cross they were nailed to, they just nailed them to another one.

There was a word that people had for people who would tell the truth: martyr. Do you want to be hated? Blocked from getting a cushy corporate job? Have no friends? Wonder if someone is going to kill you at any given moment? Wander mental asylums or jails? Society had been divided into a dwindling supply of winners and a huge crowd of losers. If you told the truth, you were friends with neither.

The world needed a hero, but all it got was losers and opportunists who preyed on them, laughing all the way to the bank.