I don’t like Christopher Hitchens. His voice is annoying and smug, I want his face to to beat up my fists, and when I learn that he agrees with me on something, I start to hope my opinion is wrong.

People call him “brave” and a “freethinker” for breaking ranks with his leftfag buddies and supporting George Bush’s Iraq war. I see a kid standing up for no other reason than because teach told everyone to sit down. Hard to seem rebellious and edgy when your opinions sound like carefully a/b tested PR copy with “NOT BAD. NEEDS MORE OUTRAGE – ED” scribbled in the corner.

But is my issue with Hitch? Or is it with something else? Maybe my problem is with his alcoholism.

blah blah blah

“There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully. This ought to be obvious by induction: on average I produce at least a thousand words of printable copy every day, and sometimes more.”

I wonder why he didn’t produce 997 words of copy that particular day by deleting “and sometimes more.” Seems redundant if you’ve already said “on average”. But yes, Hitch was noted for drinking like a fish (if fishes drank alcohol and this metaphor didn’t ride the intellectual short bus). Well, he’s not the first. Bukowski described beer as his “continuous blood.” Stephen King has an entire book that he doesn’t remember writing. Burroughs spent nearly his entire career afloat on a river of heroin: I wonder what work he would have produced on later drugs like crack cocaine and crystal meth. Alas, we will never know, because (as Nick Mamatas pointed out) his life was “tragically cut short by drugs at the age of eighty-three”.

Taking substances changes you. ‘Tis known. And if you rely on these chemicals to produce work, can you really say that it’s “your” work? Maybe beer and coke should get a co-writing credit on every early Stephen King novel. And I’ve heard it said that Burroughs himself is highly incidental in the creation of Junkie, Naked Lunch, et cetera. It was almost like heroin itself was writing through him, and he was just a planchette in some psychoactive Ouija board.

I’m not sure that I believe this. Geniuses needing stimulation and addicts needing excuses seem much the same to me. I’m reminded of that kid on reddit who photographed himself smoking a large number of joints of “medical marijuana” through those glass filters for blunts at a Snoop Dogg concert. Getting high at a concert was the last thing on his mind, I’m sure. It was medical marijuana – the one used in the online cannabis clinic in Ottawa.

But assuming this is true (that some writers can only work when drunk), then it causes a very stereotypical psychedelic thought: maybe being sloshed doesn’t impair us, it frees us. That the same impulse control that acts as a protective fence in social situations turns into a prison wall as soon as we try to let loose our imaginations.

My own personal experience in this area is inconclusive. Sometimes I get drunk and write pointlessly for an hour. One of these efforts ended up being my first published story.

I still have not looked at any of the others.

As I’ve mentioned, punk rock is anti-musical.

Is anti-music worthwhile, or should it be anti-listened to? I really don’t know. It’s tolerable in small doses, I suppose.

The punk bands I consider great are all faggot sellouts – Cabaret Voltaire, Killing Joke, stuff that has artistry and craft and something more than “Here’s thirty minutes of noise. Burn down the music industry. Fuck you.”

The issue is that anti-music, like anti-matter, is dangerous stuff. One slight push, and you get unlistenable self-parodic shit like the third Nirvana album, or Ministry’s Filth Pig. Music that’s all about posturing and pandering. Maybe my taste is deficient, but I don’t see the appeal of four intelligent, talented people booking studio time and trying their damndest to recreate the sound of a broken air conditioning unit.

The Sex Pistols were never that bad. They had strong songs, and strong pop sensibilities. Pop is great, guys. There’s nothing wrong with pop. What the world doesn’t need, on the other hand, is fifty thousand wannabes who think playing with your strings out of tune makes you a pioneer. That’s what everyone tried in the 90s, and we’re still feeling the aftereffects. I think the grating unmusicality of the grunge era is the time rock music really started to die.

Don’t argue. It’s undeniably happened. Let’s try an exercise: what was the defining rock album of the 60s? Sgt Pepper. The 70s? Led Zeppelin IV. The 80s? Several contenders, ranging from Black in Back to Appetite to Destruction to The Joshua Tree. The 90s? Nevermind.

The 00s? I…can’t think of any. A few albums like Hybrid Theory and The Black Parade captured a fleeting zeitgeist – a few years later everyone was embarassed to even remember them. The first half of the 2010s have proven likewise disappointing. Sometime after grunge died, we’d apparently made all the great rock albums it was possible. Or maybe great rock albums are still being made, but nobody listens to them. Albums that should make a splash now disappear without a ripple.

Is it possible that rock alienated itself from the public by being boring? Rob Zombie thinks so. “Everybody thought it was cool to be anti-rock star. But in a way they sort of anti-rock starred themselves right out the door.” Once, rock music was thrilling and visceral. But in the hands of Generation X, it became a guy in flannel staring at his shoes, whining about his feelings.

Once rock stars stopped looking and acting like rock stars, hip hop, rave, and house moved in to fill the gap. A turntable now has the same cultural cachet that a stack of Marshall amps did in 1981. The idea of dancing to a live band seems as weird as the tweed and brilliantine of the Sex Pistols interviewers, and electronic music now has a stranglehold on everything except nostalgia.

Did rock and roll really commit suicide? I think so. Suicide attempts are dramatic and powerful. They can feel enervating, and thrilling. They make a great cry for attention. But there’s a danger: you might really actually kill yourself. Sometime after 1991, rock and roll hacked too deep into its wrist, severed the ulnar artery, and let itself spill out all over the floor.

If you’re a Nightwish fan in 2015, I have a question about your fingernails. Are they chewed ragged, or have you gnawed them away completely by this point?

The last four years have seen levels of melodrama and self-parody normally reserved for Manowar. An uninspired studio album. A failed feature film. A frontwoman who left the band so abruptly there’s still skid marks around the microphone stand. A drummer forced into retirement by chronic insomnia. The announcement that Richard Dawkins would feature on the new album. A concept album about Scrooge McDuck. Tuomas crying because people had the cheek to listen “Elan” on February 10 instead of February 13 like he’d planned.

The stars were aligned for Endless Forms Most Beautiful to be the most pretentious and obnoxious Nightwish album to date. It isn’t. Honestly, sometimes I think it could stand to be a bit more pretentious and obnoxious.

New vocalist Floor Jansen is kept in cruise control mode, and her performance lacks both Tarja’s emotion and Anette’s chest-belted power. The production is scaled back to match, with a less savage guitar attack and quieter drums. Into the gaps flow an increased number of orchestral parts, mixed with Celtic instrumentation from new member Troy Donockley.

“Shudder Before the Beautiful”, an animated uptempo rocker similar to “Dark Chest of Wonders.” There’s a quote from Dickie Dawkie, Pip William’s trademark orchestration, and then Emppu Vuorinen’s guitars crash in to heart-racing effect. There’s duelling guitar/keyboard solos…when was the last time a Nightwish album had those? A powerful start to the album.

Lead single “Elan” is a delicate and fragile song. This song about triumphant human endeavor seems more like a guttering candle that could go out at any moment. “Alpenglow” works the same formula to better effect, featuring the album’s strongest chorus. Songs in a similar vein include “My Walden” and “Edema Ruh”. The first is a chance for Donockley to go hogwild on his uillean pipes and so forth. The second is a tribute to the novels of Patrick Rothfuss.

The album’s heavier side has some of the deadness and dryness we’ve come to expect. So many bands have done the “Rammstein + orchestra” thing by now that it’s hard to muster much excitement, no matter who’s singing it. “Weak Fantasy” has an Latin-influenced middle section to break up the chugging. “Yours Is An Empty Hope” is the album’s fastest song, with lots of vocal hysterics from Marco Hietala and another nod to “Dark Chest of Wonders” in the riff development.

“The Greatest Show on Earth” doesn’t quite pay for its 24 minute lodging, but it’s a strong song, telling the story of the evolution of life via symphonic metal and spoken parts by Richard Dawkins. It’s a bit like “A Song of Myself” from the last album – the “song” gets in, does it’s thing, gets out, then we drift off into a land of pure symphony and sectional development, unencumbered by the need to restate a refrain or remind the listener of what has gone before.

At worst, Nightwish is holding steady – an achievement, considering the battering of the last few years. At best, they’ve exceeded Imaginaerium and are approaching Dark Passion Play in quality, although Endless Forms Most Beautiful lacks an epic as good as The Poet and the Pendulum, or radio fodder as good as Amaranth.

It’s clearly not a return to the band’s glory days, though. I think we all know what needs to happen if that’s to be the next step.