Vol 2.2
The Downward Spiral, a record explicitly concerned with the decay that issues from indulgence, was recorded in the house that killed the 1960s, in the city that projects image over substance, where glamor circumscribes and hides destitution on a daily basis, in the state that makes consummate the double nature of the frontier as both the height of American exceptionalism and the embodiment of its most brutal expansionist tendencies
The dead lover is the eternal muse, his voice revoked by death, his consent unattainable.
But they also promise a conditional escape: if you attain the right knowledge and listen to the right people, you might be able to save yourself and those you love.
We have to do so much for you, don’t you see? You play all day while we work so hard.
Watch Your Language shadows So to Speak, offering what the poems can’t—not explanations of the origins of lyric impulse, but a recreation of the process involved in coaxing it.