Team Black

I want to make up for lost time due to technical difficulties by posting twice today.  If y'all are following along day-by-day and you don't see a post later tonight, hold me accountable!

Part of the reason that I want to post twice today is that Project 86's third album, Truthless Heroes, was an album-long story about a person who seeks after the pleasures that I talked about last night: those instant and temporary pleasures that we use to avoid looking at who we really are.  Andrew Schwab, the lead singer, has said that Huxley's A Brave New World and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter were major influences on the album.  If you are at all familiar with those novels then you perhaps can imagine the lyrical contents of the album.  In a strange twist the Christian community basically shunned Project 86 after this album because the lyrics are not "Christian."  Personally I find the lyrics extremely Christian because they show us what happens when we turn away from God and refuse to look at ourselves and who we really are. 

I feel it necessary to explain the background because otherwise you might be really confused by the lyrics that I'm about to post.  These lyrics come from the song, "Team Black."  The "You" in the song is most definitely not God but the Devil along with his bag of temporary and ruinous pleasures.

"I don't even like the taste of blood
But it was all they had for sale today
And this is hunger that just won't go away
I was taught to drink my fill of you
You were taught to take take take from me

The more I taste the more I need
The more it (You) makes me ill
The more I taste the more I need
Need my fill of you

You are a sight for hungry eyes today
I am needing more of you inside of me
I am nothing more than what they've made of me
I was taught to drink my fill of you
You were taught to take take take from me

And when my objects become used
I throw them all away
And when I need another fill
I'll turn to you again"

If you go back and read my post from yesterday you'll see how well this song goes with "Cold and Calculated," among other P86 songs.  Like a cigarette, all the temporary and ruinous pleasures that beckon to us very rarely are isolated events.  Once we taste of the forbidden pleasures we need more.  And we will need more even if we acknowledge that they are taking from us our hope and contentment, even if we acknowledge that they are making us ill.

The last verse particularly troubles me.  When the objects of our pleasure no longer give us the high we once experienced, we throw them away.  Here is the rub, as they say, regarding slavery.  Our selfish hearts demand certain pleasures and so we gather together "objects" to help us attain those pleasures.  In the case of drugs we ruin our lives.  In the case of sex or building a fortune we ruin the lives of others and human beings become our objects.  As soon as we have had our fill of our sex or labor objects we simply throw them away.  As soon as our objects have lost their value we throw them away.

Imagine how awful it must be for a young woman to have her vagina sown back together over and over again because her clients only find value in her if she feels like a virgin.  Imagine how awful it must be for a sex slave to be beaten by her client because he/she "gets off" on that, and then thrown away because now they're bruised and no longer beautiful. 

Once again I invite you to think about your own life.  "Team Black" and the album Truthless Heroes are not merely explorations into the hearts and minds of those who have completely ruined their lives, they are explorations into the hearts and minds of all people.  How often do you seek after a pleasure, receive it, and then feel empty afterward?  How often do you seek after a pleasure even though you know it's not going to make you feel any better?

My hunch is that we can all relate, that all of our answers to these questions are, at least, "occasionally" or "sometimes."  Ultimately I think what this song, and Project 86 in general, is trying to tell us is that drug addicts and those who own slaves or contribute to the act of slavery are not a whole lot different from us.  The sooner we acknowledge that there is not a great divide between "us" and "them who commit these awful deeds" the sooner we can understand the motives and perhaps put an end to all of it.  The sooner we see that we, too, seek after things knowing, at least deep down, that they'll only make us feel worse in the end the sooner we will be able to speak openly about temptations with our friends and children so that they might not choose a sick and twisted path.  For it is only when we can talk openly with those whom we love about our temptations and why we're tempted that we can speak about how and why we are delivered, why we do not give in.  Only then can we actually teach others just how dangerous the wrong paths are.