Across the Sea of Faces: Music and the Roar of the Crowd

For one reason and another I've been pondering crowds quite a bit over the last week or so. I'm fascinated, actually, by the dynamic, present in various art forms, where a crowd is used not as a symbol of accompaniment but of isolation. Like, check out Will Eisner's iconic cover for his graphic novel Invisible People:

I love everything about this cover. The stark lights and darks, the way everyone is turned away from you... it's a perfect indicator of the isolation and inhumanity present through the rest of the comic.

This is nothing new, of course, but when it's done well it can be a quite powerful effect. In particular, if you can convey the sensation of being a part of a crowd and isolated, rather than simply talking about the sensation of being alone in the crowd... well, that's a powerful effect.

It's hardest to pull off, I think, in music. Oh, it's easy to convey the sensation of being in a crowd--we have a long history of live recordings that are specifically designed to put you in the audience. In rock music, in particular, the goal is to capture the sensation of being in that mass of humanity, galvanized by the performance on the stage.

So how do you take those techniques and use them to make the individual listener feel isolated somehow?

Let's dig into that question and look at the way the roar of the crowd adds to a song's atmosphere and message.

Strapping Young Lad--Hope



Let's start heavy.

Strapping Young Lad's "Hope" only uses the sound of the crowd briefly at the beginning, but the use of the crowd sets the tone for the rest of the song's content. In fact, this is a song where the sonic qualities are far more important to its overall effects than the fairly simple lyrics.

The two things the song hinges upon are that crowd roar at the beginning accompanied by that opening riff, and the long section in the middle of the song of just relentless, repetitive grinding. This is a song of palpable rage and bitterness, and the roar of the crowd highlights that bitterness by highlighting the alienation from that crowd.

The constant binary set up in the song is one of the singer (Devin Townsend, of Ziltoid fame) from an unspecified "you," although the crowd sounds at the beginning suggest that the "you" is meant to be the crowd itself. It's certainly in keeping with other songs on the album--most notably "You Suck," an energetic and catchy song all about, surprisingly, how much you suck (and also how much your band sucks, your girlfriend sucks, SYL sucks, and just about everything else sucks).

There's a kind of all-encompassing fury here at the plight of the speaker, who seems to be at once caged and omnipresent, a thing of compressed, diamond-hard anger. "I am what I am," he screams, "because I have no hope, no faith in your hope!" It's a weird thing to sing after the opening. It feels like a song about isolation, but it's juxtaposed with the crowd noises and the melodic intro that sounds like it was custom made for live shows. The scene seems to be one of a band telling its audience to its face how revolting it is.

There's a real antipathy here. And that antipathy emerges in the grinding midsection of the song. This bit goes on for far too long. It's repetitive, sonically torturous, a musical equivalent of a repetitive stress injury. It's perfect. Like the long outro for The Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" it goes on for an agonizing time frame, abusing its audience, pushing the listener to the breaking point.

The combination of this sensation, completed with the disorderly conclusion of the song juxtaposed with the the earlier crowd-pleasing, singalong melody bits, creates a sense of alienation between band and audience, a codependent, destructive relationship that, paradoxically, you have to be invested in--you have to perceive yourself as fitting somewhere in the dynamic between crowd and band--in order for the song to have the greatest impact.

The sound of the crowd is the vehicle for finding yourself somewhere in the song's logic, precisely so that you can find yourself pushed away by it once more, and away from other humans as well.  

Collide--Human

 

The crowd flows throughout "Human" as a kind of backing drone. It is a muted roar, accompanied by muted humming tones that carry the whole piece. The effect is one of constant accompaniment.

This accompaniment has the effect, though, of emphasizing the overriding sense of desolation and emptiness in the song. The constant refrain in the song, the recurring question, is who will fix you when you're broken, who will catch you when you fall?

The oncoming personal crisis is inevitable, a given in the logic of the lyrics. It's not a matter of "if" you fall but "when"--that word choice seems very deliberate. And it's described in universal terms--we're only human, the singer whispers, we're all only human. The crowd responds, bringing to the fore the notion of that unity, the shared experience of isolation.

But to share isolation is a paradox, just like the paradox in "Hope" of being pulled into the dynamic of the song only to be rebuffed. It is to know that others feel what you feel but to find no comfort or consolation in it. There is no answer to the question posed by the song. No one steps forward, offering to mend your broken heart. There is only the acknowledgment of that experience of collapse.

Against this lyrical backdrop, the crowd emphasizes not the unity between singer, crowd, and individual, but the isolation between the three members of the trinity. This divide is most apparent halfway through the song, as the singer melodically moans, drawing the last word out at length: "Say goodbye, human." As her voice fades, you are left hearing only the muted hum of the crowd. The rhetorical "you" of the earlier lines has been, by the admonition to say goodbye, transformed to a very personal, and more than a little threatening, "you." By rhetorical I mean that replacing the "you" of the first few lines with "one"--i.e. who's gonna catch one when one falls--makes for... well admittedly an extremely awkward sentence, for sure. But it still makes sense as a thing to say as an abstract consideration of the human condition.

But there's no way to transform the imperative language of that last line into an abstraction. It is directed at the individual listener. The creepiness of that line is emphasized by the slightly metallic, inhuman sound of the vocals. Collide's music is often on the verge of the inhuman, filtered, manipulated, and sometimes overwhelmed by digital stylings. It is music that seems to be on the threshold of a radical break with the biological. In the context of "Human," that break feels deeply alienating, because it suggests that you have been abandoned not just in personal life but in the course of human evolution.

You are "only human."

And you have been left behind.
 
Pink Floyd--In the Flesh 




Really two songs, "In the Flesh" is the logical predecessor to both the previous examples. For Collide, the influence is tangible in their other homages to Pink Floyd's work (covers of "Breathe" and "Comfortably Numb," references in song titles like "Tongue Tied and Twisted"); for SYL the shared preoccupations are obvious. The same antipathy for the audience that drives "Hope" drives these songs. For Pink Floyd, however, there's a deeper political and philosophical statement being made about rock music itself.

"In the Flesh" roughly bookends the narrative of Pink Floyd's ambitious concept album The Wall. The first version introduces the central conceit of the album (and film). The story is of the rockstar Pink, and the album follows his slow descent into alienation from his audience and everyone else around him. Ultimately, this dramatic pulling away from humanity results in him adopting a sociopathic, fascist fantasy persona--the disguise that the audience must claw through if they want to find the genuine, wounded individual locked beneath a mask of authoritarian posturing.

The second version of the song represents the emergence of this new persona and the beginning of the violence the newly minted Hammer Army--his fans, now reenvisioned as a mob of violent authoritarian thugs--all too eagerly unleashes upon the world. The use of the roar of the crowd here is obvious. It is at once galvanizing and repulsive, echoing some of the latent contempt of SYL but still drawing the listener in via the draw of the roaring mass of humanity. It is all too easy--especially after an album's worth of misery for the lead character--to find the omnicidal rage on display here darkly alluring, even while being repelled by the fascist message.

And that's largely the point of the song and the point of the album. It's widely accepted that certain works can deconstruct the genre of which they are a part, exposing its dark underbelly and taking the logic of the genre to horrifying conclusions. The Wall is, among other things, a deconstruction of the entire rock genre, exposing the way in which the roar of the crowd and the charismatic figure of the rock star can combine to form a noxious, authoritarian dynamic.

The song must be engaging in its overblown theatricality for it to work. We might compare it to, say, "Be Prepared:"

 

I mean, I'm sure I'm going to horrify both Disney and Pink Floyd fans with this comparison, but I think it's important to recognize that both songs only function because they're at once horrifying in their violence and compelling in their actual musicality. They must be engaging for their threat to seem real, for the draw of the despot to seem believable.

And that's the fascinating line that the use of the roar of the crowd in the beginning of "In the Flesh" walks. The song invites us at once to feel the alienation that drives Pink's tortured psyche, the internal revolt against the logic of the crowd, and the draw of that roar, the seductive sensation of being swept away by something vaster than oneself. By using the same sounds as live concert recordings (not to mention actual live concerts!) Pink Floyd here deconstructs the entire scene, exposing the dark potentiality within.

Each of these pieces, then, makes use of the roar of the crowd in subtly different ways, but each uses the sound to highlight gaps of association between individuals and masses. None of them are particularly optimistic about the ways in which those gaps might be filled--one fills the gap with rage, another simply languishes in despair, and the last fills the void with a destructive, self-absorbed fantasy of autocratic power. Oh well. Not all narratives have happy endings, and this is just as true of music as any other medium.

But what these examples demonstrate is that any effect that can be introduced into a medium or genre can be modulated and manipulated by the savvy artist, precisely because these effects gain particular connotations that can be, with some work, upset and even reversed completely. When these games of reversal and overthrown expectations are played well, the results are deeply engaging.

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. Follow stormingtheivory.tumblr.com for updates, random thoughts, artwork, and news about articles. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.

Ziltoid the Omniscient and the Power of Metal

It's difficult, I think, to write about Devin Townsend, the musician from Canada who, for a couple of decades now, has been putting out some of the most consistently mindbending metal ever. Part of the problem is that Devin's music is all over the map, from the pure distilled rage cut with over the top comedy of his band Strapping Young Lad, to the weird broadway theatrics of the album Synchestra, to the stunning progressive rock soundscapes of Terria, to the dark folk rock of Ki, at turns sounding like it's choking on bitterness or dissolving in melancholy, to the triumphant, optimistic anthems of Epicloud, to the blistering, radiant thrash of Physicist, an album that started as a collaboration with Metallica's Jason Newsted (until James Hetfield found out and, predictably, threw a hissy fit), to... whatever the fuck this is.

In writing about Devin, then, I have to figure out where in his extensive and varied discography I want to begin. Knowing that I may introduce quite a few of my readers to Devin for the first time causes me to hesitate whenever I set out to write about him. There's so much difference between his tracks that I'm never sure where to best begin.

Which, in part, stems from a place of insecurity. I relate strongly to this music, and as a result I invest a lot of myself into the question of whether or not others accept or reject this music. I get defensive, get caught up in the act of proving that what I like has value, proving that I have NOTHING TO BE INSECURE ABOUT, DAMMIT! Metal is totally legitimate, and Devin is a wonderful artist, and no I'm not touchy about this at all! Pussy! I'll fight you!

I was pondering this, and the hypermasculinity that shows up a lot these days in geek culture (gamer culture, in particular), and the hypermasculine posturing in Metal, and I finally hit on the best way to approach Devin's music in an article here.

I'm going to write an article on an album about an alien who destroys the Earth when we give him a sub par cup of coffee.

No wait, wait, wait, I promise this will make sense by the end of the article, trust me. The thing is, Ziltoid the Omniscient, the album in question, is kind of semi-secretly about insecurity and power fantasies and how metal fans like me, faced with the threat of scorn or mockery for our admittedly often quite goofy music with bravado and rage. But at the same time, it's nothing as simple as a straight deconstruction or mockery of the genre. There's a lot in this album that reaffirms what makes metal great, despite or even because of its occasional goofiness.

That interplay between sincerity and self-effacing humor is what I want to get at with this article, and I think the best way I can do that is to lead you through the album and pick apart what's going on, and, as they say, what's REALLY going on.

Luckily, this whole album is on YouTube (and should be easy to find elsewhere if the video I'm embedding here ever gets taken down) so let's listen together as Ziltoid the Omniscient searches the Omniverse for the ultimate cup of coffee.



I love the beginning of this album. It's the best possible signal of where the album is going to go. Remember that formalists like me (when I'm wearing my formalist hat, anyway) really dig beginnings and endings, because they give the most pronounced signals to the reader of where the themes and ideas are going or have ended up. This is a concept at least a century old but I think there's quite a bit of scientific validity to it. I haven't done the extensive reading on this subject that I should (I'll save that for when I'm actually attending Grad School and it's my job, effectively, to do those sorts of literature reviews) but last I heard, we were finding that people remember not just endings but beginnings much better than they do middles. First and last performances tend to have an edge in competitions.

Anyway, we start with this giant, bombastic opening heralding Ziltoid's greatness, accompanied by the ludicrously over the top scream that punctuates the first metal growl of his name, and a declaration of his demand:

"Greetings humans, I am Ziltoid...the omniscient.
I have come from far across the omniverse.
You shall fetch me your universes ultimate cup of coffee...
Black!
You have five Earth minutes,
Make it perfect!"

All of this is intoned totally straightfaced, with a whispered reverb to give special emphasis to "BLACK," the color of METAL.

...Which is then followed by Ziltoid's cheery "Make it perfect!" You can practically hear the smilyface emoticon there.

That pretty much sets the stage for the album's bipolar tone--it jumps between totally sincere progressive metal epic affectations and ridiculous parody at a moment's notice. It's an album constantly undercutting itself, divided in focus. And unlike, say, The Dark Knight Rises, it's this interplay of humor and sincerity--these contradictory elements--that give the album its power.

I think it might be best summarized as an exploration of how absurd metal posturing can emerge out of, ultimately, a very real sense of pain and anger--narm that masks deep sincerity and struggle. It's about how we put on these airs of badassery to cope with pain.

And that comes out in the ostensibly triumphant first song, "By Your Command." This is sort of Ziltoid's great villain song where he declares his perfection to the weak and puny humans. Listen, though, to his monologue:

My command!
My dominion!
Memory, heart and all opinion,
Hide me, guide me,
Dry my tears,
Slowly taking back the years,
By your command,
By your command!

So, that's kind of weird. We start with the same self-aggrandizing bluster that we heard in the album's overture, but the screamed first lines are undercut by the melodically sung (internal?) monologue: "Hide me, guide me/dry my tears/slowly taking back the years..." Ziltoid here is already kind of tipping his hand as to what's to come. He's imploring, here, to an unknown listener for a way to hide or ignore his own emotional distress. He's suppressing that which makes him uncomfortable, and asserting his own dominance in a way that makes up for what apparently he considers wasted time.

Which results in him being the shittiest customer ever. Long story short, the humans give him the coffee he asks for, he hates it, and the result is a giant space battle ending with the destruction of the planet.

Yeah.

This is another place where the album should be totally ridiculous, but the music is actually poundingly engaging. It's forceful, bombastic, energetic, and catchy as hell. If this was just about being goofy it wouldn't be listenable more than a handful of times, but I can put this album on and rock out any time I want to, because the metal really is solid, headbanging stuff.

But again, Devin can't get too far in here without undercutting the epic atmosphere. Ziltoid, during all of this, makes two gloriously silly declarations:

"You have not convinced mighty Ziltoid,
I am so omniscient; if there were to be two omnisciences
I would be both!"

"Check this out!
I am the greatest guitar player ever to have lived! I am Ziltoid!"

The second bit there is accompanied by a gratuitously shreddy guitar solo. Ziltoid is just showing off his wanking powers, essentially (I'm getting that term from Devin himself--it's helpful to note here, probably, that Devin tends to not have a lot of respect for extraneous ostensibly impressive guitar solos). The sheer epicness of his solo cows the people of earth and the Ziltoidian Overlords are able to invade and conquer the planet, easily wiping out the stunned population.

This is kind of the ultimate metal power fantasy, right? The ability to destroy shit simply by shredding, to see all stand in awe, powerless before your ability to run a pick across a bunch of metal strings at dizzying speeds? And thrown in there is that refrain of "We're coming to your town!" Better be scared of us, squares! We're METAL! And we will fucking OWN YOU!

Like I said above, this wouldn't really work if the songs weren't legitimately entertaining to listen to. There's credibility to the power fantasy, in a way, because Devin plays so well. If he wasn't capable of pulling off that solo or writing a legitimately danceable metal tune, it would just sound like he's making fun of more talented people, or that Ziltoid is just a strawman parody with no depth. Ziltoid plays well, so it feels much more meaningful when he spouts something idiotic like the bit about being two omnisciences. It's kind of like Meat Loaf--if I didn't have some respect for the guy's music (at one point in his career anyway) it wouldn't have been so groan-worthy when he started incoherently spouting pro-Romney conspiracy bullshit. If you want to bring your hero low, you gotta build zir up a bit, yeah?

And Ziltoid's about to be brought low for sure.

See, it turns out that not everyone is awed by Ziltoid. Captain Spectacular, and his intreped crew, know Ziltoid's secret: he's a total nerd. He's a dork! A dweeb!

And once they know that, his guitar powers lose their strength.

The lesson here is that no matter how epic you are, no matter how badass of a metalhead you are, ANYTHING can undercut your power. ANYTHING can turn you into a wuss or a nerd. In fact, this is how masculinity reinforces itself: if the nonmasculine is seen as lesser, any display of nonmasculine traits becomes a sign of lesser personal value. Masculinity thus becomes a self-perpetuating spiral of shitty posturing and one-upmanship as each participant attempts to secure their identities against all threat. Being a metalhead works much the same way.

"Words are used for weapons," indeed.

This is another of those parts that weirdly fluctuates between sincerity and absurdity. It's hard to take the space opera declarations of Captain Spectacular too seriously, but on the other hand the music here is genuinely stirring and fascinating, no matter how many times I listen to it. (I must have listened to it at least 15 times or more in the past weeks while working on this article off and on...)

It's no coincidence, I think, that some of the most emotional moments on this moment are the ones that show the greatest vulnerability and weakness. Beneath this song about the destruction of the planet there's a cryptic kind of musing about time as an uncontrollable, destructive thing... interesting, considering Ziltoid is supposedly a "fourth-dimensional guitar hero," able ostensibly to escape time's clutches. And once more, as Ziltoid's fleet closes in on Captain Spectacular, we hear his menacing declarations undercut by a hint of needyness: "Comfort me, you know I'm right!"

Hyperdrive's meaning eludes me, no matter how often I listen, partly because I have a hard time figuring out who is meant to be speaking here. It almost seems like a transitional song, meant to build the mood, like an overture to the album's second act, as though the whole thing is a musical. (That'll be important in a moment).

Ziltoid confronts Captain Spectacular at the Benevolent Hive Mind of Nebulo 9 (which is fifth dimensional, if you're keeping track... not that I'm sure it means a whole lot). This isn't my favorite track on the album, but it does have an important impact on the album's overarching narrative. First, it marks Ziltoid's first true defeat--he is rebuffed by the benevolent hive mind and forced into retreat. Second, the nature of the defeat is significant. Ziltoid is essentially made to feel emotionally vulnerable. As before with Captain Spectacular, once you strip away Ziltoid's fascade there's a whole world of discomfort and adolescent awkwardness.

So, Ziltoid does exactly what you'd expect.

He decides to destroy shit.

What follows is one of the most intense songs on the album, and one of my favorites. Ziltoid awakens The Planet Smasher, and engages in what turns into a kind of battle of wills as the Smasher gives a long, somewhat abstract lecture, which concludes with his angry growl:

"Tell me what you want from me!"

The tension builds to this moment and then bursts as Ziltoid, with a brutal blast of drum beats, declares his aspirations for absolute power. The two begin a truly epic battle back and forth, as Ziltoid screams out demands for destruction and domination while the Smasher replies with the koan-like "bow to the valley below!" Initially in sync, they eventually sing over one another in a jumble of violent and increasingly frenzied outbursts. Ziltoid seems to get the last word, with the prolonged howl of the Smasher's name, followed by a repeat of Ziltoid's declaration of power...

...And then the song comes to a close with the Smasher revealing that his name is Herman (Ziltoid apparently never bothered to ask, the prick) and that he hates musicals. Ziltoid has overplayed his hand again, and revealed to yet another being that he sought to dominate that he is, in fact, a nerd. This is the most brutal part of the album, and the fact that the bringer of that brutality--Herman, who seems to take on the mantle of Metal effortlessly--can so easily dismiss Ziltoid is crushing.

Ziltoid, plagued with doubt, seeks out the Omnidimensional Creator, who turns out to be a totally self-assured, stoned-sounding bro. Note the difference here between Ziltoid's ridiculous statements (like his "two omnisciences" bit earlier) and the Omnidimensional Creator's ("Long time no see! ...Although I see everything"). There's a hint of the self-aware in the Creator's dialogue, a hint that he's not taking himself too seriously, whereas for Ziltoid everything is deadly serious, even though to others he appears absurd.

Anyway, Ziltoid flips the fuck out and the Creator tells him to settle down, not unreasonably.

What follows is the album's moment of crisis, its great climax. The Creator unveils Ziltoid's past and true nature. And what we find is... well, effectively what we've been talking about all along. The lyrics are poetic and not as literal as maybe we would find useful, but we can suss out some meaning if we take careful note of some of the recurring themes. Once more we seem to be receeding back in time as the origins of Ziltoid's bluster becomes apparent. Initially, of course, he resists and we get another sort of battle of wills as Ziltoid rejects the clarity brought on by the Creator. In the midst of all that is one of my favorite lines (one that my sister and I recite to ourselves when frustrated or irate) in the entire album: "I'm Ziltoid! I don't give a shit! I live above Earth in a big rocketship!" I love the off-rhyme here, particularly. This is Ziltoid's attempt to secure his own performative identity against all encroachment--he repeats his name again and again, hanging desperately onto it as a signifier of his own power, but as the repetition of "The horror, the horror!" suggests, even that identity has become deeply uncomfortable and suffocating (as such identities must).

Unable to resist any longer, we see into Ziltoid's vulnerable, emotional core--the part of him that fears harm. Over top of this pleading voice we hear an echo, gentle at first and then forceful, of the recitation of his name and title that begins the album. In vulnerability, the music suggests, are the roots of bravado.

While the music goes instrumental here, let's talk a bit more about the sincerity of the album. This album would be dramatically different as a deconstruction if this section wasn't so gentle, so sympathetic toward Ziltoid. But it is, ultimately. Devin, as a metalhead, understands the plight of Ziltoid as someone hurt by the world, someone who needs the posturing swagger of metal to armor himself. Ultimately, the fact that his need becomes a trap does not discredit the need itself, exactly--his emotions are understandable and portrayed as such.

So, having been revealed as a nerd, revealed as an individual who fears harm, who needs comfort, the Creator reveals the final truth of the album:

We're all puppets. Puppets to our neuroses, to our weaknesses, to the roles and personas we design for ourselves to compensate for our perceived shortcomings...

Oh, and Ziltoid is also a literal puppet.

Yeah, he's a hand puppet.

"INDEED."

Devin, even here, can't help but add that element of self-aware humor into the album. Even at the point of highest emotional resonance, he can't resist adding in one more joke. Which I guess we can read two ways--as another kind of self-deprecating mask ("Don't hit me, I'll hit me," maybe), or as a way of lightening the mood and telling us all, as the Creator does, to maybe chill out a bit.

I'll leave that up to you to decide for yourself, though.

And actually, I don't want to over-interpret this last song. There's some part of me that resists reading this section too closely, some part of me that sees this last song, "The Greys," as fundamentally personal. You've got to decide what to take away from this album, and how to view Ziltoid at the end, whether with mockery or sympathy.

There's one last thing to consider though, one last plot twist.

The last song fades out, we hear a babble of voices, and a voice, now singing to itself, is interrupted as another voice cuts in and begins berating the singer (a waiter at some high-end coffee shop) for not working harder.

Hm.

This album ranks for me among the most compelling metal albums of all time, mainly because of the mutability of that ending. In some ways, it seems a deconstruction and satire of metal, but, like much of Devin's other work, it is so successfully heavy, so engagingly brutal, that it's hard not to see it as a celebration of the very thing it seems to deconstruct. (And I'm using deconstruct both in the pop term of breaking the genre down to its component parts to show where it falls short, and the more literary sense of the discovery of oppositions and their reversal within the narrative.) I don't think it's a coincidence that this album, fraught with uncertainty, came immediately after Devin released the very last ever Strapping Young Lad album, and directly before the creation of the Devin Townsend Project, a series of four albums exploring different musical interests and influenced. (One of the four is the dark folk album Ki and another is the soft, new-agey Ghost; neither, clearly, is particularly metal.)

It might be best to judge Ziltoid alongside Devin's most recent album, actually--Epicloud, which is stuffed full of songs about emotion and vulnerability, but marries that emotion with the bombast and authority of metal:



"Time has come to forget all the bullshit and ROCK." Sounds like a reconstruction to me. And it sounds like a pretty good way of closing off this exploration of an album that can't seem to quite make up its mind, but is paradoxically all the stronger for its indecision. Because ultimately this isn't an album trying to reconcile disparate, contradictory ideas and failing, it's an album about the act of trying to reconcile disparate, contradictory ideas and failing. The fact that the album can explore those ideas while still remaining engaging, brutal, entertaining, hilarious, and a blast to sing along with confirms for me the lasting power of Metal.

Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. Follow stormingtheivory.tumblr.com for updates, random thoughts, artwork, and news about articles. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.