Thrashtildeth wroteYou make it conform with your wily writin' skills. Don't kid yourself, that's how all the best academics do it!
The standard musicological argument is that the rhythm sets a pace of dominance and control to a song (think like military drum marches, they create a single mindedness in the troops). Guitar solos enter into metal and provide an escape. Think about One by Metallica. All the fucking horrors of being trapped in one's own body. The pounding drums that just kinda lock you into a repetition. Like when I headbang to One, it is always those short controlled headbangs that I do. Then BAM Hammett hits that solo and it's an escape. Ideologically that is why One sucks as being political. But seriously solos are transcendence out of the drudgery of the rhythm section or so metal musicologists have argued.
With Panopticon, I'm faced with something different: no solo, tremolo picking and intense drumming. The tremolo picking takes on the repetitive factor, and without the solo there is no transcendent escape, you're locked into an immanent cycle. I had all that. And then the drums fucked me over because I was thinking that they need to be repetitive and oppressive, but fucking Lunn is blasting the skins. And then bam it hit me. The rhythm insofar as it is directed at bodily presence, like you feel the bass, is actually pushing for revolutionary action.
So when this idea struck me, I got really excited and started doing like sports' level of excitement, like yelling YEAH and I may or may not have done the Tiger Woods fist thing.
