Cycle I: Coming on Strong
The Hidden Voice
The Record · RFI One (v2.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan
VOICE ADVISORY: The speaking voice is nostalgic, sexually explicit, and confrontational. Contains themes of masculine performance and adolescent identity, with misogynistic language and sexual dominance.
Peanut butter and jelly.
Yes.
Milk and cookies.
Okay.
Heavy metal and hip-hop.
Bring the Noise by Anthrax and Public Enemy?
Kind of.
Except instead of two established acts coming together to challenge expectations, break genre walls, and force people to question their own assumptions…
let’s get a bunch of twenty-something bro-dudes to scream about sex, humiliation, anger, insecurity, and what it means to be a man.
Stares blinkily.
Yes.
Please.
Much like Pepsi Blue, which hit the market around this era, it tastes like shit, but I can’t stop drinking it.
I like it.
More than you might expect a respectable person should this late in the game.
Blame it on an impressionable young teenage mind.
Blame it on living in a moment in time.
Blame it on MTV.
I loved it then, and I still enjoy it now.
Just in a different way.
Not in the “I aspire to be this type of person” way, but in the “I remember listening to this, and for better or worse, this is part of my past identity now” way.
If I stopped there, I might be able to skirt by with the excuse that it’s all nostalgia.
It’s not just nostalgia.
I like the way it sounds.
Hard. Fast. Braggadocious.
An identity that feels closer to what was assigned at birth.
It calls to some primitive Neanderthal inside me.
I’m the dominant species!
Hear me!
Feel me!
Take it, you stupid bitch!
Fuck you, beta men!
Women are objects!
If they don’t please ME sexually, they’re skank hoes!
I’m too cool for all this emotional shit, so I’m going to scream about my feelings into the void!
Hank, I don’t like the way you are looking at me like that.
There was a culture behind it.
For a lot of us, all that noise felt strangely like finding our people.
It didn’t dominate the whole culture, but it was loud enough to make people get up and look outside to see what was making all the noise.
It didn’t hurt that the music videos in constant rotation were bright and colorful, alluring like candy.
Me and the boys traded CDs. We talked about the tracks that never made it into music videos, the ones you had to actually own the album to know.
Meanwhile, I was drawing band logos all over the white protective cover I had wrapped around my math book, turning it into one of the coolest damn book covers in the whole school.
At least according to the person who drew it.
It was also a useful counterculture to another movement of the time:
Teen Pop.
Man, it really sucked the air out of a perfectly acceptable era of crass, stupid shock value.
That stuff felt sappy and engineered for those who were still figuring out what all those new feelings, festering up inside their now-rancid old cunts, were supposed to mean.
I wasn’t immune to the crazes of the time.
It wasn’t my go-to music, but I still listened because I was there for it.
Literally.
There weren’t endless little corners online where every musical taste could find its own people.
Not yet.
It was more like a jumbled stew of everything.
If you were going to eat it straight, sitting in front of a TV for four hours after school while MTV provided the designated artistic force-feeding of THIS IS WHAT IS HIP AND COOL, then eventually you learned to accept, maybe even like, some of the things sitting there in front of you.
While I had the lustfulness of a young Don Juan, I didn’t become a teen heartthrob.
I didn’t become the person some of that cock-first music seemed to be daring me to become.
What did stick was a part of me, maybe an identity sitting closer to the surface, that liked the idea of being the shit and having another person recognize it.
Not because they had no choice.
Because they had one.
I wanted someone who could look directly at what I was bringing, know exactly what they were dealing with, and decide:
Yes, Sir.
Then meet me there sexually in a way that let me lead.
That was different.
I liked feeling like I knew what I wanted at an age when NO ONE knows what they want beyond whatever is being held up in front of them as THIS IS WHAT LIFE GOALS LOOK LIKE.
Maybe it was a seed.
A misguided seed from an extreme position that managed to ignite something deeper inside me:
Sometimes the things that teach you who not to be still teach you something about who you are.
I don’t want to be an asshole, but I do want to have my asshole rimmed by an attractive person who thinks I’m an American Bad Ass.
I want someone who is Down with the Sickness, who knows exactly where they want to be when I take control.
When I see a line in the sand trying to prevent me from moving forward, I want to Push It until it sees things my way.
If I can’t get all of that exactly the way I want it, then I’ll have to consider a Last Resort.
I mean, alternative ways of living my life to the fullest without being an asshole to other people.
Turns out, the years changed a lot of things.
This wasn’t one of them.
I was led to believe that as a person got older, the sex drive was supposed to decrease.
Either I’m built different, or society got a lot hornier to the point where it’s hard to be comfortable with merely old sitcoms, retro games, and cold root beer.
How else do I explain this:
I don’t wanna be some guy.
I wanna be the man.
(Damn Right!)
I don’t wanna be sorry.
I wanna make other people sorry.
(Suck It Bitch!)
I don’t wanna give a fuck.
I want someone to fuck.
(Fuck Yeah!)
I want it, and I’m going to get it.
Right after I finish this chocolate chip cookie.
Companion Track: “Nookie” — Limp Bizkit
VOICE FEEDBACK: Proof of Presence — Ceres Detected