Something to say about the human condition!
[Video]
[3.13]
Ian Mathers: Brah, help he out here: is being undistinguished and boring as fuck also a symptom of being human?
[2]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Makes the Eminem song we reviewed earlier sound like the peak of musical agility. Even relative to the decayed standards of modern rock radio stalwarts, this is dire — I’d go for the most recent singles from Finger Eleven, Avenged Sevenfold, Five Finger Death Punch, 311, and many other bands without odd numbers in their names before I opted for this one. You can hear the exertion in every minor move here. Melodically and lyrically, this is effortful music, trying its hardest to convey the weight of the world and the uplift of its “Normal is just a setting on a washing machine”-ass wisdom. The song is ultimately a paradox; you can at once hear all of the very human failings at play in this song’s construction, but all of those disparate, repugnant choices come together to create something altogether inhuman.
[1]
Aaron Bergstrom: I once got stuck in a traffic jam trying to leave a parking garage at the same time a Shinedown concert was getting out. This song is a pretty solid approximation of what that felt like.
[2]
Harlan Talib Ockey: Come on down to the Shinedown Emporium! We have: 1) Uncanny valley processed vocals! 2) A synth pad that sounds kind of like strings! 3) Conflicting lyrics! (Is anxiety a special, exclusive ticket to a “lunatic ball”, or an ordinary “symptom of being human”?) 4) A hollow bid for as many listeners as possible, especially adult contemporary and country fans! Buy as many as you want; we’ll be here for just over four minutes, but it’ll feel like a lifetime.
[2]
Taylor Alatorre: I think Brent Smith sees himself as performing a public service by watering down his firsthand account of a panic attack to make it palatable for Hot Adult Contemporary. There’s a respectable logic to that; sometimes the “YOU ARE NOT ALONE” message needs to be skywritten in big block letters for it to get through, particularly in the parts of the U.S. where acts like Shinedown still reign supreme. On the other hand, the stab at universality may end up filtering out those who see themselves as, or know they are seen as, more than just “kinda weird.” If everyone’s invited to the “lunatic ball,” including those who present as normally functioning members of society, then what is the point of labeling it as such? The answer may lie in post-grunge’s strange place in the current landscape — exiled from the mainstream, but not oppositional to anything in a meaningful sense. Genre reflexes being what they are, Shinedown can’t avoid the ever-present temptation to prescribe a sold-out rock concert as a kind of collective therapy session. It’s a quaint idea, in the sense that it needs to be preserved for those who are helped by it.
[5]
Will Adams: Always a fun game when a song I’m hearing for the first time ends a line with “remember” and I have just a few seconds to guess which month it’ll be rhymed with. (I guessed December. Bzzt.) Things don’t improve from there, with Brent Smith making so many maudlin choices to describe the human condition (“the lunatic ball”?!?) that I was expecting a children’s choir to appear near the end. (Bzzt.)
[3]
TA Inskeep: With more pneumatic production — and getting rid of the strings — this could damned near be scaling the Country Airplay chart. Singer Brent Smith’s pleading voice makes me wanna punch him in the throat, as do the terrible lyrics here.
[1]
Isabel Cole: As someone who has in fact always been slightly awkward, kind of weird, there are moments where I can glimpse a version of this I might like; it scans as sincere, I think, and I’ll always have a soft spot for songs offering up this kind of connection over the loneliest parts of ourselves, where cliche can work because it proves the point that none of us are as burdened by uniqueness as we might imagine ourselves to be. But those schmaltzy strings smack of a failure to trust that the song itself was enough to sell its own pathos, draining it of any power a sparser or beefier or otherwise less saccharine arrangement might have let it display, and the yelping vocal that totally lacks in any kind of dynamism doesn’t help matters. Plus, “lunatic ball” is way too Joker-core to be forgivable.
[3]
Nortey Dowuona: Zach Myers’s guitar line is a simple lick that keeps looping in the background as the piano and strings, arranged by producer and bassist Eric Bass, swirl around Brent Smith’s inflexible and stolid voice, providing it a gravitas and weight it does not have alone. The issue is that because the guitar line is the core melodic information, it feels like an anchor to the first few bars, which feel trite and limp, barely able to move. The mere fact that it has to be drowned out by the piano, then the strings, then Barry Kersh’s barely propulsive drums, is galling enough. The way the piano plays this lick comfortably and sweetly before choosing not to resolve is worse. It feels like a way to occupy Myers’s hands while he and Bass sing background, a way to avoid him being sidelined entirely. A symptom of overloading the song with too much information.
[4]
Andrew Karpan: I admittedly missed out on the chance of paying attention to these post-Nickelback butt rawk champions of the sunshine state during my teenage years, but this is very much the kind of thing that would have spoken to me then, a smooth, piano ballad that earnestly insists upon itself and that appears strangely banal in the cold light of adulthood.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: More than for its pomposity and its voracious appetite for cliché (“coloring outside the lines,” “crystal clear,” unpack all your baggage,” “a ship of fools”), “A Symptom of Being Human” stands out for its unsettling competency. There’s little notable about yet more post-post-post-grunge glurge, but Shinedown’s strained-vocal, string-soaked balladry soars thanks to a structure built on precision engineering — like a Predator drone, perhaps. That makes it remarkable but also lethal: any song can invoke “November Rain” and sound like it might have been played immediately afterwards on the radio in 1992, but only by knowing how to deploy a big chorus and an arpeggiated riff that starts on acoustic guitar and alchemizes into piano can it reach the grim realm of the actually repulsive. Call it the Hinder rule: ineptitude can’t produce a “Lips of an Angel.”
[3]
Mark Sinker: This is how whiskered the “Ship of Fools“ metaphor is: Plato gives Socrates oblique recourse to it in book six of The Republic. Some two millennia later, Sebastian Brant made a German phrase of it, for the title of his much-translated hit novel in the high-blogging Gutenberg moment, just as the Reformation was grinding into motion. It was popular as a figure for statecraft and as a satire of religious conflict primarily because everyone could enjoy the image without having to agree which side of the argument it depicted. Today that enjoyment may have drained away a little: hard to tell in a context where melody and timbre and style and an unbroken line of other lyrical clichés are all so grating. There’s some nicely tiny tinny little-mini echoes off at the edge of the vocal now and then, and then there’s this clod in clown’s whiteface smirkingly bellowing how everyone’s mad here.
[4]
Katherine St. Asaph: While moving last year, I accidentally ripped some paint off the wall while taking down an adhesive hook. Taking the errant chip to Home Depot, I learned how surprisingly difficult is to find a color of paint that replicates the exact microshade of landlord off-white that was applied to the unit years ago, or at least something that blends in well enough to not jeopardize your deposit. Thus, I can appreciate the effort it took for Shinedown to recreate the radio fixtures of Hoobastank or Lifehouse or Train this faithfully.
[5]
Alfred Soto: Declarations of woundedness disguised as pleas for solidarity are as old as the crucifixion, but when I want Nickelback I listen to Nickelback, m’kay?
[2]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The best, prettiest P!nk song I’ve heard in years!
[6]