Actually, no, wait, no, fuck that. I hate cockroaches. Mostly because after my grandmother's death, we had started spending the summers, about a month's worth of 'em anyway, with my grandfather at his house in Datça. The other reason was that as I was going to a private school, so would my sister, as our parents never did something for one that they didn't do for the other, and we were barely scraping by as a result. It was free accomodation, and the most distinctive quality of the once-pristine beach (spitting distance from the house, sand nice and white) was the presence of cockroaches.
I don't like insects, but cockroaches are a different kind of horror altogether. And Datça was a haven for those suckers - worse still, the source of the neverending barrage of cockroaches was a storm drain near a neighbor's garden, and he refused to have the garden disturbed to take care of what actually was a sanitation problem. My grandfather didn't help. He was an entomologist, a legendary professor in Turkey, and he held nothing but fascination for those infernal things. Sure, he took care of one if we screamed for him to do so, bless his heart, but ultimately, he rarely ever saw insects as we did.
The house is gone now, sold after my grandfather's Parkinson's and dementia began to pick up speed, but I remember turning it into a game - we would bet on how many days it'd be before we got scared shitless by a cockroach.
How is all this relevant? For one, the album I am about to talk about was one of my favourite things that summer, in part because I discovered with it that albums can have seasons. It's kind of like synesthesia with me, just not the whole nine: albums can have seasons, or times of day. Instruments or songs can have colours*.
So colour me surprised when I laid down on my bed, put the headphones on, got the cassette booklet, and ran through it. That's how Papa Roach's Infest got me shouting for something I would sooner kill than celebrate.
Of course, they were somewhat familiar. Wherever I had gotten my information from (I don't recall), I had downloaded an mp3 of Last Resort and had loved it. But the full experience of Infest was something else. There was something very dirty about it, and not just the cover - the sound was dirty. The album felt like picking dirt from between my teeth. Polished, but still maintaining a garage aesthetic at times, the sound itself was like a punch to the gut delivered on demand: painful, but you asked for it. Consider the tamer songs like Binge, Between Angels & Insects, or Tightrope, and they were slower, but no less punchier. Of course my favourites were the harder and faster numbers like Infest, Thrown Away, Snakes, Blood Brothers or Dead Cell. Snakes was so badass at the time that it was my second favourite.
My first? Why, Revenge, of course. From its opening hit, the guitars during the verse, the way the chorus seemed to confirm my own theory on love ("can't live with, or without"), to the pure hip-hop bridge... but the lyrics got it. The destructive force of love, expressed in the violent revenge of a domestic abuse victim, likening her to a Godzilla-like behemoth that, in my mind, was preparing to devour New York. From the depths of the ocean to the concrete kingdom, in pain and hungry to inflict it.
I might add that Thrown Away set my standard for "going out with a bang." If you're not gonna go out on a somber note, then wreck your shit on your way out.
Coby Dick* was a big factor in me digging this. As an aspiring rapper/lyricist*, I was impressed by his delivery, his rhymes and his in-your-face, vicious punches. Pick a song, any song, and there's at least one quotable. Perhaps my favourite was Blood Brothers, where the chorus kept moving from periphery to center, just to say "It's in our nature to kill." Then again, Dead Cell's "Plug 'em in and then turn 'em on - process the data, make yourself the bomb" always conjured up the image of a cyborg suicide bomber. How appropriate, as I was no stranger to suicide bombings, terrorism, or science fiction. But it also spoke to something else in me, the feeling that as I processed more data, learned more, observed more, I was getting more irritable (yes, that wasn't because I was a hotheaded teen, exactly, but I didn't know that then.) I was like that, "He don't know what he's doing, he just keeps getting by."
Besides which, Broken Home was a masterpiece in my view, especially the ping-pong delay guitar bit that kicks it off, its lonely-but-furious-about-it attitude... everythin. While I didn't learn what the title meant until the Bratislava years, having witnessed some inter-parent conflicts, I carried sentiments similar to those in the song (I hadn't seen nothin' yet.)
I perceived my father as cold and distant, not abusive as Coby Dick depicts it (perhaps not explicitly, but it's heavily implied.), but generally absent and uncaring. It wasn't grounded in observation, to be sure, but what the hell did I know?
Infest is another member of the 2000 brigade that has stood up to the test of time, in that, if I listen to it today, and I did while writing this, I can still derive the same amount of enjoyment from it as I did the first few hundred times around.
*Footnote: 1-Recently, while trying to compose a song, I kept thinking with every VST preset I tried that the lead I was looking for had to be "greener" or "a bit less green" than the ones I was trying, one after the other. I found it, and it was similar to one I had used in another song, which was a sort of aquamarine blue-green.
2- Why the fuck he dropped this name I never understood. Although Jacoby Shaddix is
3- It never became more than that aspiration, mainly because I began writing not to make it into a song or anything, but to have written it. Writing for myself didn't mean that I wasn't a lyricist - I just had no songs to put 'em on, which, to me, is not that big a deficit.
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