Drifting Somewhere in the VAST

How does one properly objectively assess the music, books, and movies with which one fell senselessly in love when one was a youth? "One could just, you know, not do that," I hear you saying, in recognition of the foolhardiness of such an endeavor. "One could just extract one's head," you're saying, "from the cavernous depths of one's own ass. It’s shoved so far up there,” you’re saying, astonished, “as though one misunderstood how navel-gazing was supposed to work, and had approached it instead from the inside-out—as though one mistook one's belly button for some sort of fleshy extendable pirate monocular." To which I say, well, this would be a very short blog, then, both specifically and more broadly! To which you are nodding encouragingly, and threatening to drop the polite pretense of the third-person altogether.

What I'm saying is, the art I loved then and still love now has become part of my very identity, making it impossible to objectively judge its actual aesthetic worth. This stuff wasn't just observed and consumed, swiped and scrolled and scanned--was not merely more grist for the endless content maw in my now broken, internet-addled brain. No, my favorite art was permanently affixed and absorbed into my senses—it became the vocabulary of my experience. I didn't choose the art that performed this alchemical transmutation on my self, no more than I could choose to unmake the changes it made.

With that in mind, to determine the objective worth of my favorite music, books, and movies, and perhaps with a sidelight toward a total theory of aesthetics, I will have to step entirely outside of myself.

:: FHUUHHWHOOOOPSSHHhhhsssss ::

With that done, we will take a long, hard look at one of my favorite pop-cultural works to determine just how much it actually, objectively, totally fucking rules.

~ ~ ~

The album -- Visual Audio Sensory Theater*, by VAST

I can’t say for sure when I first heard VAST, but if I had to guess, I would guess that it was at one of those listening stations at Schoolkids Records (RIP) in Athens way back in 2001 or 2002. What I can say for sure is how long it took me to decide to buy the album: two minutes and twenty seconds.

VAST, which stands for Visual Audio Sensory Theater, because alternative music in the 90s was nothing if not intense, is the creation of Jon Crosby, whose quaint Wikipedia biography redeems the internet.

“And where’s your Wikipedia page, huh MICHELLE?” -Jon Crosby [citation needed]

Crosby—in the context of this record, anyway—is like what would happen if you yanked a really good Jesus out of a pretty good local production of Jesus Christ Superstar* and cranked the horniness and the self-regard and the Catholicism up to 11 and then had him make a heavy alternative/industrial rock record after listening to a bunch of Nine Inch Nails and world music. If that doesn’t seem like a recipe that would entice a major record label to lay out a bunch of money for top-tier production (the album sounds great) and a couple of (bad) music videos, well then you don’t remember the heady pre-mp3 days of the mid-to-late 90s. And if it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that would be, you know, any good, I’m right there with you! I’m sort of astonished that I like this CD as much as I do, but there’s no denying it. I love this goddamn record.

When I was first listening to it, some staggering number of years ago, I was already many years removed from worrying about the eternal ramifications of questions about God, so it’s not like I identified with the specific themes being explored throughout. I guess I probably enjoyed the voyeurism of it, of watching a faithful person very sincerely wrestle with the Big Questions, as he saw them. It’s probably the same instinct that kept me hanging out in front of the library on North Campus between and after classes while the campus street preacher testified to whoever would listen. Those were, more often than not, great conversations, heavy with the same heaped-on import and implications that made all the classes across the quad in Peabody Hall so much fun.

“Your immortal soul is going to suffer in eternal isolation from everything, save one piece of knowledge: that God’s love is real and was offered to you, and you chose to forsake it,” Preacher Steve might say, pleasantly enough. “Your treatment of these ancient metaphors—which are of dubious utility in the best circumstances and are provably false, anyway—as literal matters of life and death hurts actual living people everyday,” I might respond, pleasantly enough. We were friends, in our way.

Those people, the Christian types, they used to confuse me with someone who was searching, someone whose heart was asking the right questions, and would eventually “accept Christ,” probably because I kept showing up to chat and because they really believed in the supernatural, transformative power of their God. But their revealed truths were never going to dawn on me, and no dark afternoon of the soul ever ended in surrender to Christ—these things were as impossible for me then as they are now. I kept coming back because I was drawn by their dogmatism, just mystified by their willingness to be absolutely sincere and certain of something that was so clearly utterly unknowable, and based on no more physical evidence than mere words on a page. Powerful things, these words we all have access to, I knew, but not like that.

That sincerity and certainty runs through this VAST record, too, and not just in the moments where it evinces an underlying Christianity. Whatever else it is, it’s not “Christian rock,” because the thing Crosby is selling isn’t faith in God, but a comically outsized certainty that the music he is making is both good and that it really fucking matters. Could someone make a terrible record while believing those things? Oh, oh, yes—there was this whole genre called “emo,” you’ll recall. But that didn’t happen here. This sort of authentic artistic dogmatism is only ever really possible on a debut, I think. This is not to say that great art can’t follow the inevitable shaking of the faith, but that there’s something particularly captivating about somebody really believing it the first time out, and finding that dogmatism justified—maybe, in small part, on the back of nothing more than that self-reinforcing belief, but also because the work is good.

None of which is to lose sight of just how fundamentally silly it is—both this record and all the rest of the variously flavored dogmatisms. But the silliness and the naivete is all part of the stew, too, working its magic on whatever it is pumping—just as preposterous and credulous—through my veins. Let’s listen.

~ ~ ~

“Here”

The album opens with Here, which is a good place to start, both for a rawk’n’roll record and for an Abbott and Costello-type comedy routine. “Where do I put the shame? / It feels like a broken toy / I can’t play with anymore.” Now that is a lyric with which to open an album! He’s so full of shame, and has been wrestling with it for so long, that he doesn’t even know what to do with it anymore. I don’t know that Crosby was raised Catholic, but I think we can safely assume he was told some pretty weird stuff about God and masturbation when he was younger.

As I said above, it only took two-and-a-half minutes for me to decide to buy this album, and that’s because of what happens at the end of the first chorus. The chugging guitars and most of the back end of the verse drop out for the chorus, which gets all airy and soaring. “All I know is that I’m here / drifting somewhere in the vast / somewhere in eternity, yeah / and I never want to—” (pause for just one perfect second, to let the riff come crashing in again: [beat], CHUGGA-CHUGG) “—LEAVE!”

It looks and sounds silly there, written down, but when I first heard it I got a big dumb smile on my face and knew I wasn’t leaving the store without the CD in hand. I had the same big dumb smile on my face when I played it in the car on a road trip last month, however many years later, because music is for time travelling, too.

“Touched”

A year before Sting released that shitty car or camera commercial or whatever it was with the funky Middle-Easternish yodeling and all the strings, VAST released this song as a single, with a real video and everything! It’s not a very good video, despite featuring a lot of slow-motion running, trains, and bathtubs, but the song is pretty sweet, and probably VAST’s biggest “hit.” Young Jon seems to be contemplating the loss of an important relationship, a love that he’ll never quite match again, he suspects. The tumbling acoustic guitar intro, the Bulgarian choir and Tibetan Buddhist chant samples, the crashing heavy riffs seventy seconds in, the quiet-loud-quiet dynamics that worked so well for so much of alternative 90s music, the inscrutability and overwhelming sincerity of the following lyrics—it all comes together to ramp up the DRAMA to impossible heights, and it really holds together as a piece of music. You want cosmically high stakes in your arch-rock sad romantic laments? Get a load of these fuckin’ stakes: “The razors and the dying roses / plead I don’t leave you alone / the demi-gods and hungry ghosts / god, god knows I’m not at home / I’ll never find someone / quite like you / again.” I’m not sure what any of that means, but I know he means it, and it’s serious.

“Dirty Hole”

This one’s called Dirty Hole, and it’s the first of a few songs on the record where it’s easy to (1) hear the surprising influence of Catholic priests or Benedictine monks on Crosby’s vocal stylings, and (2) find our tortured narrator singing about the Lord Almighty or/and also a vagina—you should really just push play, there, if you haven’t already.

The song starts with a couple of minutes that remind me a great deal of a priest singing the consecration part of the Catholic mass a capella. At about 1:55, though, the song takes a strange and wonderful turn, with a sample from an old Johnny Moore chain-gang song that transforms what had felt like a liturgical dirge into something heavy and fraught and energetic. Speaking of fraught, check out these lyrics: “as I spread her thighs / my life flashes before my eyes / soothing, disturbing / I’m intoxicated with fear / how many men have died? / in your dirty hole / how many men lay dead / from this killing hole.”

I wonder what she’s thinking, legs spread, during Jon’s sudden vagina-induced purgatorial life review! “Oh for chrissakes, Jon! Just stick it in already, you weirdo,” is my guess. Our tortured narrator does not seem to wonder what she is thinking, but I guess there’s an outside shot he’s having a near-death experience while also empathetically resonating with her needs.

I don’t know for certain that this song is about the having (or the not having) of sex. (Of course it is.) There’s a decent chance that the other “hole” in question isn’t a vagina at all, but actually God’s love—seriously: “you can live as long as / you want to live / lately all I want is to be / in your hole / (…) it’s my destiny / how many men have been / in your sacred hole / how many dead men god?” So, like I said, maybe an either/or/and situation with the holes—but what I do know is that it was probably a real bummer to date our boy Jon around this time in his life.

Sunday school-descended PROBLEMATIC misogynistic lyrical curiosities—don’t go filling other people’s holes with your imagined sins, bro—aside, though, the music is really great, possibly entirely because of the chain-gang sample.

“Pretty When You Cry”

Speaking of PROBLEMATIC lyrics, the fourth song on the album is a bit of a heel turn for Horny Jesus, as Crosby leans away from the self-flagellation, loss of innocence stuff and leans into his inner pick-up artist. Whereas you could probably sneak any of the previous songs’ less kid-friendly content under most radars, this is the song to skip if you’re in the car with the kids or grandma or whathaveyou. The song remixes and reuses some of the chanting sampled a couple songs earlier in Touched, but goddamn it, it works again.

The lyrics tell the story of a decidedly dysfunctional previous relationship: “I didn’t want to hurt you baby / I didn’t want to hurt you / I didn’t want to hurt you / but you’re pretty when you cry / I didn’t want to fuck you baby / I didn’t want to fuck you / I didn’t want to fuck you / but you’re pretty when you’re mine / I didn’t really love you baby / I didn’t really love you / I didn’t really love you / But I’m pretty when I lie.”

Yeesh! Squicky! But it’s uptempo and Crosby doesn’t do any of the weird priestly speak-singing, so it’s dance-able and fun and another solid track.

“I’m Dying”

This one is a bit less dance-able, believe it or not.

“Welcome to Sad Mass, everyone! For our first hymn, the band will be directly addressing Jesus, demanding an answer to the fundamental question dividing the great Abrahamic religions—to wit, a query about the divinity of Christ. You can find the words here, if you’d like to sing/moan along.”

I can’t give a rational reason for why I like this song as much as I do. The music is kinda Rammstein-by-way-of-the-Trans-Siberian-Orchestra, which shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. But here we are, after a four minute highly theatrical industrial hymn affirming belief in the divinity and redemptive power of Jesus Christ, and all I’ve got is… “fuck yeah, dude.”

Flames, a song by Vast on Spotify

“Flames”

This one is a quiet, cello-heavy little love song. Of course, if we weren’t just a couple of songs removed from all that talk of killer dirty holes, this might come off as more romantic and less creepy: “just put me inside you / I would never ever leave.” Gross, dude!

As a brief aside: The first creative writing class I took in college was a poetry and songwriting class, probably not long after I bought this album, actually. I bring it up in the context of this song only to express an old frustration about the distance between “writing well” and “writing words for music well.” The dudes in my class who were writing lyrics for songs had a plainly lower bar to clear, just in terms of what level of trite, cliched trash was acceptable to turn in as work. When you can pick up an acoustic guitar and strum out a few chords while you mumble and groan your way through a rhyme scheme that inevitably ends in EYES, your shit poetry is somehow magically transformed into perfectly passable music. It’s fucking amazing! I, lacking the ability to write music in much the same way that I lack the ability to write in Mandarin, was not at all happy about this reality. But there was no denying it, either.

This Flames song, while a perfectly fine palate cleanser and bridge to the back half of the album, suffers immensely when its lyrics are written down and read, rather than sung, even more than most. “You are the only thing / that makes me want to live at all,” is clearly an unacceptable thing to write down, under any normal circumstances, to or about anyone. And that’s putting aside the gross manipulation that might be behind telling someone, perhaps unrequited, that you might as well be dead without them. “Just put me inside you?” Fuck outta here, buddy! But when he sings it, set to music and a sad cello solo and shot full of that pure sincerity heroin? Swoon go the ladies! And the shitty-writing dudes in the audience, they pick up their trusty acoustic and think, “hey, I could write this stuff—I’m sincere and shit, too! Now…what rhymes with dies?”

“Temptation”

This one is catchy as shit, which I know because my kids want to listen to it eleven times in a row and then run around the house for an hour making serious face and shouting “YOU ARE MY TA-TAY-SHUN” over and over again until I’ve come to despise Edison for having invented the phonograph, and all that wrought. There’s a neat effect at about the 50-second mark that sounds kinda like a swallowed, backwards yell, and it’s one of those “really ties the room together” flourishes that appear throughout the record and makes the whole endeavor work better than it should.

Jon’s singing about a woman leading him down the wrong path, again, as is his wont. There is one line that stands out as particularly strange, though: “they’ve been killing children / and nobody seems to care / they’ve been laughing at my god / my god I wouldn’t dare.” I can see this one going one of two ways. The first is the obvious one: Crosby is expressing an anti-abortion position, and the “children” being killed are fetuses, and society is mocking God by destroying his creations in the womb. Make a sweet poster and take it to the march, Jon, sheesh. There's another possibility, though, which is that this song is in the voice of Jesus. It’s clearly meant to at least echo the temptations of Christ, what with the song opening in the desert and all: “I went in the desert / I went searching for the truth.” Anywho, if Jesus is singing, he’s possibly on about the practice of Roman infanticide, in which people just left their infants outside to die of exposure if they were undesirable in some way. Fuck! Maybe moral progress is a thing. Or maybe it’s about some other bunch of dead kids, or maybe he just thought it sounded foreboding as shit. Who knows!

:: Boy goes marching by :: “YOU ARE MY TA-TAY-SHUN! YOU ARE MY TA-TAY-SHUN! YOU ARE MY TA-TAY-SHUN! YOU ARE MY TA-TAY-SHUN! YOU ARE MY TA-TAY-SHUN!”

Hmm. Exposure, eh, Romans?

“Three Doors”

Hey, is that a hint of a discernible vocal melody in there? And that beat! One could dance to that beat, or at least shuffle one’s feet and shrug one’s shoulders forward and backward and forward again in a meaningful attempt to approximate dancing. And who doesn’t love a lively dance number about choosing the right path to God and immortality! And with a cameo from the Big Man himself at the end, in a shouted, pleading aside that you choose wisely, no less! Or maybe it’s just about chicks, man. Either way, great song. One of my favorites on the album.

“The Niles Edge”

Remember up in Jon’s Wikipedia bio, how he never met his father? Well, did you wonder if he might address this missing relationship in his music? Is it possible that a young man who never knew his father, who has perhaps filled that paternal hole in his life with a certain other, Higher paternal figure, might need to express some feelings about this, in song?

“Welcome back to Sad Mass, everyone! For today’s reading from the Old Testament, Jon and the boys will be singing The Niles Edge. This is, of course, a retelling of the Moses origin story, with Jon in the role of the tiny abandoned infant. Jon asks that the congregation not sing along to this one, but listen contemplatively as he sings it. You may, however, read along in the hymnal.”

As the old story goes, the enslaved Israelite population was growing uncomfortably large, making their Egyptian masters nervous about the potential for a vast Zionist conspiracy, rebellion, and seizure of the means of production. The Egyptian Pharaoh decreed that all newborn Hebrew boys be killed as a means of population control. (Aside: given the matrilineal nature of Jewishness, according to their customs, why wouldn’t the Pharaoh instead demand that all the Hebrew girls be killed? Further aside: Yes, I feel weird wondering aloud about how best to wipe out the Jews 3600 years ago.) Anyway, rather than kill him, Moses’ parents hid him in a basket and floated him down the Nile, and he was later discovered, adopted, and raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter. He then went on to do many Moses-y things, including murder and hallucinations.

Crosby, as Moses, seemingly addressing his absent father: “You saved my life.” This is weird, no? Is the “saving” just the act of conception, or did Jon’s mom want an abortion, and the unnamed Japanese (suspected) sperm donor insisted on her carrying the fetus to term, only to later disappear? Or is he just trying to make the analogy hold? What’s with all the empathy for this fella you’ve never met, Jon? Why does he get the kid-gloves treatment, and Mom doesn’t warrant a mention? Is this all just about her dirty hole, you weirdo? Call your mother, Jon.

I wonder how Jon and his mother get along.

Anyway, the song is a nice churchy lullaby after all that rawk’n’roll.

“Somewhere Else to Be”

We have entered the come-down. This is a song of self-aware contradictions about wanting to be left alone and also taken in and taken care of and loved. It is the Song of the Teenager, and it resolves into a moody but pleasing instrumental track.

“You”

The last song on the album is another fraught-as-shit love song, though one that sounds very pretty. Hey, Jon, why are you telling this lady that the only thing she can take with her (when she dies, presumably) is your love for her? It’s weird as shit to do this, to make yourself into all that she has, to make her entire identity contingent upon her relationship with you. It’s almost like you only think of her as some sort of receptacle—a container, of sorts. A hole, even, of dubitable cleanliness.

~ ~ ~

So that’s it. I’ve never had any real interest in listening to anything else this guy has ever done, despite my unequivocal love for this record, so I couldn’t tell you if delving into the rest of the VAST catalog and its associated side projects is worth your time. Hastily judging by only two little things, my ignorance about the rest of the oeuvre—yes, you have to say it, out loud, and in italics, every time—is a blessing. (1) The fucking terrible lead single from the second (and last) major label release, which sounds and looks like VAST was rebranded to exist as the connective tissue between Creed and P.O.D. Apparently, after the first record didn’t perform as the label expected, the suits insisted on a “more commercial” aesthetic for the second, and the resulting “Music for People” album, given the parlance of the times, was pretty bad. (2) The band/Crosby’s relentlessly self-serious website, which is a website that in 2019 still paints its nails black and spent all of its birthday check from Grandma at Hot Topic.

But that’s fine! I don’t need any more VAST. This 50 minutes of VAST is actually a great deal of VAST, probably the right amount of VAST. With a lot of my favorite artists, I seek out everything they’ve ever done, and I trust them to lead me to places I might not otherwise have been comfortable going on my own. Beck, for example—I’d follow Beck anywhere. VAST, though, gave me this one perfect record—preposterous and credulous and good—and that’s enough.

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