Hey, ho, let’s go!
Welcome back! This week we’re gonna talk about inspiration. Not why we write, but how we get ourselves ready to write. You all have a reason why you write that I’m not gonna understand, and you don’t necessarily have time to tell.
Reading Assignment for this class: “Savior”
In today’s reading, “Savior” from Reality of the Unreal Mind, Vol. 1: Teardrop Road, you read how I became a writer. But now we’re going to talk about the factors I look for when trying to prepare myself for a writing session.
“Wild Child” by W.A.S.P.
Blackie Lawless
This guy’s name was actually Blackie Lawless. I choose to believe that. I choose to believe that young Blackie played T-ball in the early ’70s. I choose to believe that his family’s name was Lawless. He had Grandma Lawless. Grandma Lawless was a sweet woman, perfect dinner rolls, Southern Baptist.
Do you see what I’m doing here? You’re a writer. You were scrubbed clean by the door. It’s our job to believe this kind of thing. It’s our job to believe the stage name. Suspension of disbelief is exactly what we do.
In the video we’re about to watch, you get to see Blackie Lawless all grown up. He’s hung up his cleats from his T-ball days and now he wears fake sawblades on this arms, his hair is not right, and Mr. Lawless never plays his bass.
My kids and my wife are used to me being overly dramatic, so they’re fine with it. Your reader will not be.
Depending on genre, your reader will expect less melodrama. They will expect “the sink.” They need to be able to sink into the character and the situation.
They will not experience the sink if the book is too melodramatic, because those will just not be emotions they’re capable of sympathizing with. They will not sink into the character. They won’t feel what the character is feeling.
Essence of Diluted Music
Repetition, overly dramatic symbolism.
Who’s the girl? Why the fire? Where’s he going? None of it makes any sense.
In Blackie’s age of music videos, there was a list of things that needed to be in your heavy metal music video in order for it to be recognized as heavy metal.
- “Wild Child” by W.A.S.P.
- “Shout at the Devil” by Motley Crue
- “Looks that Kill” by Motley Crue
- “Dream Warriors” by Dokken
It all became formulaic. If you have X, Y, and Z, then you are 1, 2, and 3. This is why everybody talks trash about genre fiction. I could write the same book over and over and over again as a fantasy writer, and it would all sell. And romance is the same way. If you’re writing genre fiction, you have to find a way to break the formulaic, and the best way to do that is with:
- Meaning
- Symbolism
- Allusion
- Political climate
- Theme—the meaning the writer is attempting to suffuse their work with (I work in the themes of hope vs. despair. True darkness and the people brave enough to fight it.)
These things will change a normal sex story into more than just a romance.
It’ll change a fantasy book into a statement. (Why are we writing? We’ll get to that. That’s later.)
All the heavy metal videos of the ’80s had similar imagery, and it became a recognizable feature.
- Generic
- Nonimpactful (Is that a word? I’m not sure that that’s a word. Is that a word?)
Writers create words all the time:
a. Pandemonium, Lucifer’s castle in Hell, John Milton
b. Tintinnabulation (that so musically swells from the bells, bells, bells), Edgar Allan Poe
In your story, I want you to create a word. Do not define it. It should be something like nonimpactful. It should be something like pandemonium and tintinnabulation, where we do not need a definition, context clues do all the work for us.
Vague Band Name, W.A.S.P.
It was rumored to stand for We Are Satan’s People, or We Are Satan’s Prophets. In the end, it didn’t matter what they were or what they said they were, because their music was generic and it didn’t say anything. W.A.S.P. will come up again, but it’ll be months from now.
The symbolism is so generic, there’s no inspiration here. It only provided corny entertainment. I knew it was fake. The whole thing was about production value. How much would it cost to have this video in the desert at night when the pyrotechnics would really pop, vs. the day, when you wouldn’t need lighting equipment? I had to buy into the lie in order to enjoy the music. And I knew Blackie Lawless was not what true badasses look like, so I had to lie to myself. I grew up in gangland Milwaukee—true badasses don’t wear plastic sawblades on their forearms. True badasses may be flashy but they’re not overly dramatic. My suspension of disbelief cut down on my enjoyment of the song.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana
On September 10, 1991, when this song was released, we had never seen anything like this in our lives.
My son, Rayph, at age six, saw the ocean for the first time and said, “Why does anybody live anywhere else?”
My child, Willow, at age four, saw the ocean, ran up to it, and roared in its face.
First time I saw the ocean, I was fifteen and it was Nirvana.
They were wearing the same clothes as me. I was not a rich kid. I had hand-me-down clothes. And all of a sudden, my hand-me-down clothes made me the most well-dressed kid in the entire school.
It had cheerleaders. The bassist was alone and on his own. The drummer had no time for me. And the singer had a message. That was the first time I saw the ocean.
Watch the bassist. He moves like his instrument. He is off in the darkness, completely divorced of the concert. And he is swaying like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.
The drummer, every time in every video I had ever seen, the drummer was interacting with the camera. This drummer has no time for the camera. He is in the music. He has no time for me.
This video, and the videos of the other alternative rock groups, completely slaughtered the hair band movement. It was as if they had taken Cinderella, Lita Ford, Warrant, all of these hair metal bands, lined them up in the street, and shot them all in the head. After “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Evenflow” by Pearl Jam, nobody wanted hair metal anymore.
In this video, the ominous feeling of dread is real and tangible. Each band member is alone in the music. So as a 15-year-old kid in 1991, I was alone in that music, too. And I did feel like I was inside the music.
Singer/Lead Guitar
- He carries the weight of the content (lyrics)
- He carries the face, walks around, the camera’s on him
- He carries the attitude
- He is the lead man
This is your main character. (I hate the word protagonist.) They have to carry the entire story. They bear that burden. Everything happens around and because of them. It’s the same thing with the lead singer of Nirvana in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And you can see the burden of that play out.
At first, he’s fine. He’s singing. Everything is cool.
As the crowd becomes physically dangerous, the main character moves closer to them, where a foot can catch him and destroy him. I thought about this a lot, why he would get that close to them. At first I thought it was just because of the production and that it meant nothing. But this is after the music has climbed, it’s starting to peak. He walks up to the group and just stares as they’re pushing and pounding and screaming and flipping, completely encased in the music. We don’t get to see his face, so what could be happening here?
He could be daring them to touch him. But that doesn’t work because it doesn’t seem like the character he’s portraying.
He could be looking down upon them with a feeling of power, like look what I made you do, look how I made you feel. But he’s not on a stage and he’s dressed like them. He’s just as chaotic as them, and so is his music.
I think it’s envy. I think the singer envies the fact that the crowd can just get lost in itself. He wants to be enjoying the music instead of creating it.
This isn’t a literature class but I want to say it anyway. When you’re analyzing a piece of work, any piece of work, you have to take the entire piece and look at all of it. Example, of course it’s not a power trip. He would be on some kind of stage looking down on them. Instead he’s in front of the bleachers and some of them are looking down on him. It has to be envy. This singer eventually took his life. Part of the reason was because he didn’t like his music, but everybody worshipped everything he made. He had a list of people he thought were better than him and those people were getting no respect. So as we look at this video and analyze the meaning of the writing here, we can see that in the context of knowing the main character’s fate, that this moment as he looks up on the crowd, what could he be feeling? Envy that they’re enjoying music he’s not enjoying.
This is backed up by the fact that after he’s created the music, he’s made the crowd go crazy, he’s so disgusted with what he’s created that he is slamming his instrument on the floor. Right here, as he slams this instrument and he destroys it, from an analytical literature standpoint we can say that his fate is being played out even here in his debut.
He becomes fascinated during the solo with the head of the guitar, clawing at, pawing at the top of the guitar.
He becomes a hulking, bouncing monster.
In the end, he has lost his mind and smiles a madman smile.
The band is out of control but in a way that is real and emotional. Unlike W.A.S.P., the lyrics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” have to be studied.
The Janitor is the generation before. The generation before is not cleaning up the mess they left behind. He never takes the mop out of the water. He makes himself look busy. He keeps the same time as the bassist (the pendulum) and the drummer (who has no time for me).
The bassist and the drummer of any band keep the time for the rest of the band. If you add the Janitor, what you have is a generation before us that is ticking and swaying at the same speed as the rest of the world (song), and not cleaning up his mess.
At the very end of the video, the Janitor is sweeping. But you’ll notice that nothing he’s sweeping is actually being swept. He’s running the broom across the floor, but nothing is coming up. He’s pretending to clean up a mess while the dunce of my generation watches, unable to do anything about it.
Notice the Janitor is frowning. Notice his facial expression. This Janitor is in misery.
In this one bit of symbolism, we have the frustration of an entire generation coming to power, knowing the generation before it is not cleaning up the mess they left the world in. I could write a ten-page paper just analyzing the Janitor.
The cheerleaders transform from simple movements to complete loss of control. The symbol on their outfits is the anarchy symbol. They lose all semblance of order. All of them are moving on their own. The cheerleaders display the beginning of my generation’s individuality, loss of conformity, the individuality of our music and the way we saw the world. This video right here cuts us free from what came before us.
They go from boring girls to insane women. Lose touch with their minds and the plans and training they’ve been given. My wife was a cheerleader. (I look like a guy that would be married to a cheerleader, don’t I?) There were a few things she had to do, kicks, punches straight into the air, cupped hands. Clapping with cupped hands makes the clap louder. Everything a cheerleader is supposed to do is being done in the beginning of this video, only without any passion:
- Clapping with cupped hands
- Choreographed movements
- Not pictured here, but hoisting one of their own above the rest
I think the cheerleaders in this represent mainstream music (W.A.S.P. formulaic). We’ve got the band, I’ve already talked about. We’ve got the crowd, which is the youth, the people who will fall in love with the song. We’ve got the janitor, which is the generation before. The cheerleaders are mainstream music. At the coming of Nirvana, the music industry is predictable, everybody’s been trained, everybody’s doing exactly what they’ve been told to do. As the video ramps up and things start to get crazy, the music breaks into something:
- Unpredictable, the cheerleaders are all moving separately
- Sexy, by the end, the cheerleaders have become a new wave of music and you can see in the last image you see of them, her head is thrown back, pom poms in the air, absolute celebration.
Music has been changed forever and she is the symbol of that reality.
They are taken over by the extremes and expressions of their physical bodies. Cheerleaders completely lost in the moment symbolize Generation X, a generation that often gets completely lost in the moment. We’ll talk about the marmot later.
This video and this song are visually overwhelming. Emotionally impactful. Intellectually, I carried it with me. And I still find myself coming back to it decades later.
But We’re Talking About Inspiration
We’re not even really talking about Nirvana, we’re talking about inspiration.
For me, W.A.S.P. did nothing, it was a flash. I liked the song. The video had cool images, that’s it. Inspiration level 2-3 out of 10. I created nothing of merit in this era of music.
Inspiration for Nirvana, 9-10 out of 10. I created Break on Through, The Eyes of Gus, The Crawl for Love, Grandma’s Blankets, Finding my Way, Bobby’s Song, and Mind of Mark.
There is a “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in your past. Something you haven’t looked at for a very long time changed the way you thought forever.
- Scott Hatteberg, Oakland A’s, Sept 4, 2002, Moneyball home run, changed the way baseball teams were built forever.
- Love’s bag description (see Class 1)
Maybe you once saw a girl struggling to find something in a bag like Love’s bag and that had an impact on you.
Something in your life had as big an impact on you as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had on me, and you could talk about it forever. And you could think about it forever. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit in September 1991. I wrote a book, Desperate Gaze, March 2022, and the entire time I was writing it, as inspiration I was watching “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
There is a source of inspiration in your past that continues to this day to visit you as you are walking through your day, week, month, year. You keep coming back to one thing.
Writing Assignment
Due in 3 class periods: four pages on what that inspirational moment is for you. I just gave you at least four pages on “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The least you can do is share just as much with me. (After all, we are in this together. Hey, ho, let’s go!) I want to know what has blown your mind. What do you keep coming back to? If it’s Blackie Lawless, I apologize.
Reading Assignment
Reading Assignment for next class: “The Prince of Darkness” chapter from Teardrop Road.
Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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