"No Life 'Til Leather"

Symphony Of Destruction Pt. 2

Music.

Music has forever been quite the contradicting piece of art. "Contradicting, how?" one may ask, and that one would be correct in their assumption that the statement makes at least less than a fraction of the sense it should. See, dear children of light, music in itself cannot be contained into a simple graph or list, nor a bowl or cargo container. It is a phenomenon that persists in its unwillingness to be defined clearly or put under a category. For what is music? Is music just a few soundwaves traveling the air and into our happily strung out ears, eager to catch each and every bit? What is a note sheet then, if not music as well? The un-hearable noise our minds produce, the symphonies encased within our skulls? No one but us can hear them, yet they're as real as me OR You. Music is a spectrum. Music is, forever will be and almost always has been - from the very first days of the Teekaz tribes conquering the land's various land and air and sea beasts, their war-drums sounding aloud across Terra, to the modern days of Lungmen's underground hyperpop artists producing various noises that they insist upon being actual music. No matter what the scale, the tone, the notes - it is all to be poured into this one, endless ocean we call music, for this form of art, much alike all others, can be diagnosed with the terminal cancer that is "being subjective". Long gone are the days of telling someone to turn down their thrash metal racket, for it should not be considered musically attractive at all to the weary ears, no. These days, the one yelling would publicly be wronged out by the masses for disturbing the peaceful spirit of artistic expression and subjectiveness, no matter how loud or distasteful it might be. Whether it be noise created by the 30s' famed "Noisemaker", the wail of an endless guitar solo drawn out by the one they call "Newmaker" interrupting a Leithanian symphony of carefully strung together graceful sounds, a band of Sarkaz globetrotters carrying off with their war drums and flame-spewing instruments of misery towards glory and victory, it is all to be accepted and loved under the very same name -

Music. It is all music. Everything is music.

And music is beautiful.

...

W's never been much of a musician. Hell, find me one musically inclined soul in the deepest pits of the Scar Market's steel prison cells and I'll sew my mouth shut forever. Nothing ever came of the Lost Souls who were wrangled like cattle, maybe besides the one-off unusual rattle of a metal mug slid across the iron bars lining each cage, accompanied by the silent gaze of the twin moons shining high above. Misery stricken symphonies, the long nights spent staring up at the black, black sky, the desert heat, the cracking of whips and clanking of metal - overboiled rice and rotten water. Those are no conditions for an aspiring musician to thrive, not at all. No way for her to spread out her wings of creativity like she had always wanted to. No way for her dreamed up chorus of devilish imperfectionists to sound aloud - the "people" who wore masks with slits for eyes and leather wraps around their wrists. Who spoke in grunts and commands, who obeyed the one above or nothing at all. Did most of them even know who they were serving? No. Did they hurt the ones under their right to property? Of course. That's who these homeless musicians were. Property. Bones and meat, cogs in a machine, labor and energy - the cheapest of the cheap, may I add. The eldest, the youngest, the bright and dumb, the ones with black, greasy hair that rolled in waves of turmoil and draggled behind the devilish corpses with their every step towards a destination unknown, and the ones who sat at night and counted stars, for they simply had nothing else to do. There, our tiny musician sat, in her own little corner of the shared cell she's grown to once call home. Feeling claustrophobic, like the walls were closing in, crimson horns poked the rigid bodies lying at her feet, snow white hair fell over her eyes, and yet she gazed.

She gazed at the blurry lights high above, the cloudless wild prairies of astrological wonder, dark plains of utter nothingness she knew she'd never be able to reach, for there was nothing awaiting for her in the long run. There was no long run, just a quick trot from the womb down to the grave, hurried and subtly encouraged by the cracking of whips and shuffling of cash being exchanged for living flesh.