Parts & Labor - Mapmaker
No, you know what, Mr. Narrator? I don't have to follow your rules. I can do another album if i feel like it. Call me Happy David Gilmour, 'cause i'm not feeling lazy anymore.
Have you ever wished that there were such a thing as catchy frantic pop-punk buoyed by electronic gobbledygook instead of power chord chugging and strumming? Jangly guitar melodies with total drum and distortion cacophony behind them? A Devo/Merzbow collab? Well, i've got Parts & Labor's Mapmaker from 2007. I'd say their brand of noise rock is pretty close. It might be the only good album i've heard from the decade of the naughts. What does that have to do with the price of cheese, i mean higher education? I don't know. Nothing. I mean, we were talking about real people vs corporate functions, trying to understand why it's so hard to keep track of the real cost of living in a technologically advanced society, how the little guys and gals get swept aside for the sake of not having to constantly dodge those 40-ton dinosaurs as they heart-attack and die above our heads, and earthquake us into oblivion when they collapse, 'cause we just assumed those crazy titans of industry knew what they were doing. We assumed the world would rearrange herself to do the same for us. Damn you, totally unrelated coincidence! How do you keep doing it to me? How do you make random crap i bought last week so relevant? Hold on...
... ok, i just reread my own book, and reminded myself of that subplot where we just avoided all these problems for the last 52 years. Yep, nothing new under the sun. Maybe Nixon 4.0 will do a better job in 4 or 8 years (i seriously doubt it). Also keep in mind, at no point in that book did i defend Kennedy or Johnson, i was simply pointing out that Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, and Trump were absolutely, categorically, undeniably, and vomitously not the "answer to our prayers." They weren't even just a band like Mastodon. They were nastier than the nastiest Bradley Whitford characters. They set us back decades every single time, because their ideas and theories were outdated, completely lopsided, and in a lot of cases blatantly descriminatory.
Let me give you some examples. The mission statement of police and law enforcement is noble and justifiable, but quite a lot of the things police officers do on a daily basis are counterproductive at best, homicidal at worst. 90% of lawsuits are childish garbage, meaning the few actual important cases don't get proper judicial review and consideration. All 50 State governments are such absolute garbage that the federal government has to actively prevent them from bankrupting/imprisoning their minding-their-own-business citizens, and/or bulldozing their neighborhoods to build bigger highways for their downtown financial center/recreation expansions, while garbage businesses with money to throw around get rewarded for undercutting innovative startups and family shops. Trust me, a whole bunch of people would ecstatically farm, garden, and raise animals way out in the country if they were actually paid decent money to do so. Hand me a tractor and some in the meantime grocery money, i'll plant whatever kind of edible food you want to eat 4 months from now, and drive it straight to your house the day after harvest day. Build me a greenhouse and i'll grow tomatoes and bananas all year long. Pay me to stay home with the chickens and i'll give 'em away, they make more of themselves than i can butcher in a weekend. By all means make the reward for success bigger than failure, but don't look a farmer in the face and tell him it's his own fault that it rained too much or too little so he gets to be homeless now. Don't pretend that the map is more important than the land, that the nation is more important than half its people, that this whole reality is anything more than a false facade. There's more to life than right or wrong. Building bigger and bigger fortresses of solitude and fighting bigger and bigger wars over who gets to dig in the mines for shiny rocks is a pitiful and pointless form of existence. It might take a few listens, but this album is pretty straight to the point once your brain wraps around it. I highly recommend it.
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