I am rotten to the wires forged among eternal fires guided by unholy choirs screaming in my code, I am rotten to the atom formed upon my base desires tortured by what they require or so I'm told
[Freeced - Murder Drones ELECTROSWING! (Rotten to the Wires)]
Yeah, it's been a minute since I felt like really getting into the shit behind these songs. But guess who's on Vyvanse now! Take that, ADHD-C and your legion of comorbidity!
Anyway. Here's the shit behind the stuff:
I'll be honest, I didn't quite click with Murder Drones at first. I thought it could be better. I liked the voice acting and the designs, but I thought the pacing and the structure and the corny dialogue would make the whole thing kind of a tough watch for me: a person who took 1 screenwriting class in college and decided to never shut up about it. (Or ever finish writing my feature. Let's keep ignoring that.) I, whose flawless opinions reign supreme above all, I who sneer down at the lesser works of mortal engineers who have had the audacity to make their projects exist rather than opting for my time-proven methodology instead: 1. contemplate making something incredible of my own, 2. feel wholly superior considering my imaginary credentials as someone who would have made that better thing, 3. never make a single move to do the work myself. It works so well for boosting my own ego, I'm kind of surprised anyone ever decides to actually make stuff! Don't they know that these things takes time, and regular effort, and that assholes like me might not like them?
But joke's on me, I DID like Murder Drones. I watched it at my own pace and judged judgingly and rolled my eyes at the tropier dialogue choices so that the 0 people in the room with me would know I had sophisticated taste, and after a few episodes I just really truly actually fucking genuinely enjoyed that shit. It was fantastic. I felt the cadmium lights of hell pierce my bittered soul during some of the first big fight scenes, felt my dusty android core heat up as it processed the emotions I was surely too watercooled to be staggered by right now, and before too long I was sitting in front of my PC in a state of total absorption, exhibiting (at a guess) the precise range of responses you'd see if Shadow the Hedgehog ever got his Axe-doused gloves on a copy of Devil May Cry.
And I was like, fuck. So what's the song about? Who is The Murder Drone?
In the end, I'm not sure I really had a choice. When it gets down to it, the songs I write from robot POVs (PsOV?) are always very personal, because personally I feel very much like a robot all the time. And as a robot, I feel constantly in a state of overflow, every horrible thing happening in the world around me further proof that I simply wasn't built to handle the rigors of being biologically alive. But lately I've been like, fuck it. Life is what you make of it. I want to live. I want to make a world where what I'm primed to be isn't an inevitable destiny if I refuse to let it be.
Thinking back on my life (unavoidable, I've tried quitting), it's always been frustrating coming to terms with every single straight-up lie that was stitched into my brain from the moment I was born. Lies of justice. Lies of morality, hateful dogmas wrapped in gilded epigrams. Lies of ownership and divine right and defenses for murder, corruption, greed, and the wholesale conquest, capture, and exploitation of anyone without enough allies to fight back. Lies that none of that shit ever happened. Lies that it wasn't still happening today. And the lie that says all of this—the harm, the hurt, the danger, the ceaseless violence, the annihilation of voices that stand against—is inevitable. That even if it sucks, oh well, what can you do? It's human nature to do these things. There is none righteous, no, not one—so let's act like it. The illusion of fated suffering and the illusion that the ones who cause the greatest harm are no more to blame than the ones they burn and kill.
But it's just—not true. Some of us have just been skipping over thousands of butchered lines that don't compute. We can do better. Of course we can. Of course we always could. So could the people who taught us. So could the people who govern us, who brush away people's lives like chaff with the same pen that draws a barricade around the wealth of parasites. Rotten to the atom, or to the Adam, we are meant to be discontent with our lot in life, to turn on each other instead of the ones causing our greatest pain, and even to hate and fear the victims of our cruel empire in caricature, whether they're our own neighbors already laboring against the system designed for their frustration, or faceless entities abroad that surely deserve to be eradicated because [any lie will do]. That others hate and fear us not because we're the most brutal, mindless destructive force on the face of the planet, but because they must want what we have. Because what we have is so great. After all, we have our freedom, don't we? Freedom to what, exactly, no one seems to know.
At this point in my—essay?—it occurs to me that I haven't mentioned what country I live in. But I think that the fact that I don't need to is pretty hard evidence of our own damnation.
This post might have gotten away from me.
Look, I think anyone who listens to my songs for a while will probably figure out that nothing I write is ever just about the shit that it's about. I wouldn't know how to make art without putting something from my real life into it, no matter what inspired me to start writing in the first place. I also wouldn't know how to feel strongly about something and not talk about it, in real life, online, in the things I make. I don't know if it counts as activism to just say "hey, shit's fucked and we're the bad guys," but if I feel that shit is fucked then everybody's going to have to hear about it when they travel to my zone. And maybe they're gonna miss the message entirely. It's a very danceable tune (if I may), and that's probably going to be most people's primary takeaway from listening to it on Spotify or watching a TikTok edit starring the mechanical talents of Serial Designation: N. I'm not sure that beating people over the head with a full interlinear explanation of the song would really help my cause, if a cause is what I have, and I'm not sure I have much more to offer anyone than what I've already said.
But please, dear fucking god alive, don't let anyone say, 10 years from now, on whatever platform is left standing, "did Freeced mean something more by these lyrics, or was it just a Murder Drones song?" and nobody be sure. Be so sure, gang. Art isn't ever being made in a vacuum, and I don't ever really think my nerdy little YouTube fan songs are exempt. How the hell could they be? I'm here, after all. Same planet as the wifi is on. Same planet as most of each other (I hope those astronauts make it back ok). Which part of anything we experience is an island to itself?
On that self-important note.
Apparently I like Murder Drones a lot! It meant a good deal to me, it inspired this song to whatever degree it did, and I don't really feel the need to point out any of its cinematic flaws in the future, especially when other people can do that way more insightfully than me. I'm glad to have watched it! I'm a little scared of the fandom! But that's just me, I'll always be a little scared of whatever's new and crashing through the comments of my work. I just hope some way, whatever way, that any of this matters in the end.
- Freeced
(they/them)
