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Better living through Chemistry - Queens of the Stone Age

Hey guys, it's been quite a while since Silco’s Song of the Week aired, but I'm happy to announce that I'm back with analyzing this old man in my way again: Through music. My latest artwork was showing Silco using Shimmer for the first time, capturing the exact moment he understands that if he wants to live long enough to reach his dream, suffering will become part of his everyday existence.

While I was drawing that, I was listening to Queens of the Stone Age’s Rated R (big favorite) and “Better Living Through Chemistry” is easily one of my favorite tracks. And of course it absolutely screams Silco and Shimmer.

“The blue pill opens your eyes, is there a better way?”

Whether you read the “blue pill” as blissful ignorance or artificial enlightenment, both interpretations land perfectly in Zaun. Piltover takes the blue pill choosing not to see what’s happening beneath them. Piltover just doesn't “look away", they choose not to see the full consequences while still benefiting from them. Shimmer flows upward as much as it poisons downward, so corruption runs both ways.

Zaun, on the other hand, doesn’t have that luxury. For them, Shimmer is desperation, a way to feel strong, to matter, even if it’s only for a moment. An even if it costs them everything: mind and body breaking down, people turning into something barely human. death.

A new religion’s prescribed to those without the faith

But that “new religion” line hits even harder. Because in Zaun, Shimmer isn’t just a drug it’s a belief. It’s survival. It’s power and salvation. For people who have nothing else, it becomes everything. Shimmer becomes exactly that: a religion for the forgotten. Not because they believe in it, but because they have nothing else to believe in and Silco understands this better than anyone, weaponizing it for power while fully aware of the price it demands.

He doesn’t just distribute Shimmer. He builds a nation on it.

“A hero holding a knife, and blood is not enough Is it too late to go back? Is it too late to go?”

Silco already crossed that line. So much blood was spilled, but it was never enough to change the system or to free Zaun. And that’s exactly the point where he shifts and where he stops believing that sacrifice alone will ever be enough.

So he starts thinking beyond revolution and into control. Because if the world won’t change for you, then you force it to and somewhere along the way, it stops being about what’s right or wrong. It becomes about what’s necessary and ultimately about surviving long enough to actually see that vision through, even if it means reshaping yourself into something unrecognizable.

“There’s no one here And people everywhere You’re on your own”

Silco is surrounded by people: Followers, chem-barons, Sevika, Jinx. But loyalty in Zaun is conditional. Silco built a following, yes, but it was always fragile and tied to the cause, never to him as a person. Sevika didn’t choose Silco, she chose Zaun. The second he would’ve failed that vision, she would’ve replaced him without hesitation.

Like waking up in a world where everyone else is still asleep, Silco believes his vision is the only real one, the only path to Zaun’s freedom. And that kind of clarity isolates you.

That’s his reality: Power held together by necessity, not trust. In the end, he dies alone. No revolution rising in his name, no city mourning him. Just a man reduced to a villain, his dream carried forward by others who won’t even acknowledge what it cost him.

“Let’s see if I’m hearing this right, you suggest I should take A never-ending supply to carry out the dead”

Silco’s entire existence becomes dependent on Shimmer, not just physically, but politically as well and there is no version of his plan that works without it. It's the foundation: The thing that keeps him alive, that gives Zaun the strength it was always denied.

“Your idols burn in the fire, the mob comes crawlin’ out I’m reclaiming my mind, destroying everyone”

To Silco, destruction is liberation. From Piltover and from the version of himself he calls weak. He’s willing to burn everything. In S02 E08 he admits: “I thought I could break free by eliminating those I deemed my jailors.” Bnd that kind of freedom costs everything.

This is Silco at his core. Reclaiming his mind from his past. From Piltover’s control. From the version of himself that he calls weak. And in doing so he’s willing to destroy everything. Because to him, that destruction is liberation.

"Better Living Through Chemistry" is about what people turn to when faith fails them and what they build in the absence of hope. For Silco, Shimmer is the price of survival, of power and of a dream that demands everything. And once paid, there’s no such thing as going back.

The Pot by TOOL

Gods, this one hits like a punch straight to the gut. The Pot is sharp, sarcastic, furious and so perfectly Silco-coded. TOOL's songs are discipline disguised as chaos. Control hidden beneath distortion which is exactly how Silco operates.

My friend @silsnake has published an amazing analysis about how much prog rock fits to Silco's character (read HERE). It’s music built like a strategy: Complex, meticulous, refusing to give easy satisfaction. It makes you earn the release. Silco would appreciate that. He’s not impulsive: he’s deliberate, precise, the kind of man who sees five steps ahead while everyone else reacts to the first. Progressive rock isn’t about rebellion. It’s about mastery. And mastery is Silco’s entire identity.

So why TOOL?

TOOL are architects of tension. Every song feels like a moral labyrinth — heavy, complex, philosophical. Silco would find comfort in that. In the structure, in the chaos that still makes sense. He’d admire TOOL’s brutal honesty. Their lyrics don’t flinch. They call out the corruption of religion, government, power — and that’s Silco’s entire creed. A man who’s lost faith in everything except his own vision.

So let's dive further into the song:

The Pot is a song about hypocrisy. About those who judge others while drowning in their own filth.

And isn’t that the tragedy of Silco? He despised Piltover’s hypocrisy but built his empire on his own. Preaching freedom while enforcing control. Condemning lies while weaving them into every deal.

“Who are you to wave your finger?”

Right from the start, The Pot calls out hypocrisy and that’s exactly where Silco’s mind would lock in. The line “Who are you to wave your finger?” could easily be aimed at the topsiders of Piltover.

They point fingers at Zaun for its crime, addiction, and chaos all while building their pristine empire on Zaunite labor and blood. They outlaw shimmer but depend on the power it provides. They condemn what they created.

Silco would smirk at that hypocrisy. Because who are they to wave their fingers? He knows corruption when he sees it. He embodies it, but at least he owns it and uses it to reach his goals.

“Eye hole deep in muddy waters”

Piltover swims in its own moral filth, eyes deep in the muddy waters of exploitation. They claim purity, but their foundations are rotten. They call Zaun dirty, while their own hands drip with shimmer profits and discarded lives.

“Rob the grave to snow the cradle”

That’s Piltover in one sentence. They rob the grave of the dead and the forgotten to keep their cradle pure. To keep their world stable and clean. They burn the evidence and pretend innocence.

And that’s exactly what Silco rose against. He saw the system for what it was a beautiful illusion built on oppression.

“You must’ve been so high.”

That line, repeats like a taunt, could almost be shimmer itself talking back. Piltover looks down on Zaun’s addicts, but who’s really addicted here? The shimmer user seeking escape or the topsider obsessed with control and purity?

Silco understands addiction better than most. He weaponized it, yes, but he also lived it. His whole life was one long high, and every fall cost him a piece of his soul.

If Silco ever allowed himself a moment alone this is what would play. Not for pleasure, but for clarity. TOOL is uncomfortable, dense, unrelenting. The kind of music that forces you to confront what you are.

He’d sit in the dark, the bassline humming like a heartbeat, eyes fixed on the river outside his window. Thinking of Piltover’s towers reflected in the water.

Because that’s the truth of The Pot: every judgment, every illusion of righteousness, eventually comes back around. The river always reflects what’s above it.

And in Zaun, reflections have a way of looking you right in the eye.

Reckoner by Radiohead

Since I am one of the lucky fellows who managed to snatch Radiohead tickets, I had to drag them into one of Silco’s song analyses. But honestly, the thought has haunted me for a while. Every time I listen to In Rainbows, I can’t help but picture Silco.

Not only do I think he’d play the album endlessly on a crackling gramophone in his office, but another gut-wrenching thought hits me every time: Silco probably never saw a rainbow in his life. Born in Zaun’s shadows, he lived and died under smoke and shimmer. Rainbows? Those belonged to Piltover skies.

So why Radiohead?

If there’s any band Silco would gravitate toward, it’s Radiohead. Their music carries that mix of melancholy and depth, experimental yet intimate. They’re existentialists at heart, always reaching into the wounds of being human.

That balance between fragility and innovation, their refusal to stick to one sound, their ability to make pain feel transcendent - all that mirrors Silco perfectly. He too is a man built on contradictions: broken but commanding, scarred but visionary.

In Rainbows is arguably Radiohead’s most intimate record. It’s emotional, poetic, and heavy with reflections on love, death, and the inevitability of separation. The title itself, In Rainbows, is about obsession: thinking beyond where you are, chasing something just out of reach.

That’s Silco to the core. Obsessed with Zaun’s freedom, with reshaping the Undercity into something more than Piltover’s dumping ground. The bitter truth? He never got to live in the world he was trying to build. Just like rainbows, it always shimmered just out of reach.

Reckoner is the perfect Silco song because it captures the paradox of his life: power built on fragility, devotion ending in loss. It’s not a song of conquest, but of reckoning — with what you can’t keep, what slips through your fingers, what you leave behind.

“You can’t take it with you.”

Silco was born in nothing, and he died in nothing. But in between, he reshaped the world. His reckoning isn’t gold or empire, it’s the ripples he left, the daughter who carries him, the city forever changed by his existence.

“Because we separate like ripples on a blank shore.”

Piltover and Zaun. The river dividing them, yet binding them. Silco lived as the embodiment of that paradox: separate, yet inseparable. Good and evil blurred. Just ripples, crashing into one another on the same shore.

Reckoner isn’t just a song about separation, it’s about transcendence, about dissolving the self into something greater. Silco, in his twisted way, always sought that: not for himself, but for Zaun.

Writing this while listening to In Rainbows hit me harder than I expected. Radiohead has that way of slipping under your skin, and with Silco in mind it was almost unbearable. Reckoner especially feels like the moment where everything cracks open. The weight, the surrender, the acceptance that nothing lasts, and yet everything leaves a mark.

Silco was never about glory or permanence. He was about devotion, about shaping something that would outlive him, even if he couldn’t carry it with him. Reckoner isn't a song about triumph, but of surrender. He knew he couldn’t take anything with him—no crown, no city, no legacy untouched.

Maybe that’s the cruelest part: the man who never saw a rainbow carried an entire world “in rainbows” within him.