HAPPY, HURT

disclaimer: This blog post is 100% fan squealing enthusiasm about why an awesome thing is awesome. I have no business relationship with The Stupendium and am not being paid to say this, I just got caught up in wanting to.

 

Okay so, one of my team members has recently been linking me to a bunch of Stupendium songs, and they're really good. The other day I arranged a YouTube playlist starting with a song my teammate had been listening to a lot recently, which I took as tonal inspiration, seeking a similar sound in instrumentals for the rest of the mix. You can find the list over here, but that's not what I'm here to talk about, that's just the background.

"Slide Into The Void". It's based on Control. I have never played Control. I have, however, played Lobotomy Corporation and read a fair amount of the SCP wiki, so the tropes of the Federal Bureau of Control were instantly familiar to me.

A few days later, I approached my teammate with a nonsequitur message:
🤍 HAPPY, HURT

They didn't seem to pick up the reference, and so I felt compelled to analyze and explain why I thought they might have. Why these two words are so emphatically memorable to me as a symbol of the song.

If you haven't heard it, or didn't catch all the lyrics, there is a section of the song which plays at the beginning before the first verse, and again later as a pre-chorus, which goes like this:

YOU HEAR OUR WORDS BUT YOU FORGET-
PUSH YOUR FINGERS THROUGH THE SURFACE TO THE WET-
WE WAIT IN THE STAINS -
WE BUILD YOU TIL NOTHING REMAINS-
IN THE NAME OF THE SOUND OF THE NAME-

REPEAT THE WORD, REPEAT THE WORD, REPEAT THE WORD-
EGG CRACKS AND THE TRUTH WILL EMERGE-
A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY-
YOU ARE HOME, YOU REMIND US-
HAPPY, HURT-

It is delivered as a rap or a chant; not melodic, highly rhythmic, in an altered voice so as to sound oppressive, supernatural, inhuman. In this presentation, it positions itself as something from outside, intruding through unknown nuances into human awareness. It is a voice in the environment or a voice in your head, with the question of how it got there conspicuously unanswered. Or, possibly, forming the basis of the entire narrative.

And it ends with these two words.

The end of a section of a song is where the greatest emphasis naturally lies, especially in a chorus or other repeated section. It's where, conventionally, a pattern set up in the section is resolved neatly, or turns into a smooth lead-in to the next part. A chorus might trail into a line that completes as the first sentence of the next verse.

(A good example of this latter structure can be found in Dave Matthews Band's 'The Stone' where a chorus ends with a long trailing line, "I will go alone" in one case, and then changes to "I will go a long... way... to bury the past," and continues into a verse later in the song)

Neither happens here.

A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY
YOU ARE HOME, YOU REMIND US, HAPPY

If it stopped there, it would almost-rhyme. It would have neat closure.

But this song defies the pressure of all that convention. "HURT" does not lead into the verses as the beginning of a line. It appends to and thereby breaks an otherwise consonant resolution which was right there. It's not even the end of a coherent sentence. "HAPPY, HURT" might be framed as what "YOU REMIND US" of, but structurally, semantically, it stands alone.

All these conventions of flow in songs defied for the sake of adding "HURT", which makes it really stand out. Someone suspended a lot of weight-of-expectation to pair those two last words. There is so, so very much which would otherwise, more naturally, separate them. But "HAPPY, HURT" insisted on being together.

That conveys to me that "HAPPY, HURT" is one indivisible enigmatic 'unit' among the disjointedly enigmatic phrases of this segment. It reminds me of the taglines attached to abnormalities in Lobotomy Corporation; evocative phrases generally taken from the pre-written lore section which in some way convey... something, about what the abnormality is, or does, or means, or something. This section of this song always stood out to me like that.

Every place I added a dash in the way I typed the lyrics at the beginning could be a place where you're switching from one 'piece' to another of this multifaceted story. It seems to me that each of those lines could be a tagline like the ones you'd find in Lobotomy Corporation; a tiny description of the purpose or perspective of a something imbued with supernatural abilities and intent.

... And this is the one which receives the implicit structural emphasis of the section's end, as well as being reinforced by a refrain including "YOU WANT TO HURT" in a section toward the end of the song.

We wriggle, seeing all these fascinating facets of design align like sharp triangles on the map of a conspiracy theorist. It delights us; it thrills us, it sticks in our mind. It makes itself noticeable as a refusal of a pattern to close, a wrench in the machine, and invites the instinct to examine what is clogging it up. Then what's there to examine is a juicy juxtaposition of complex subjective experience expressed in the simplest, most primitive and personal terms. "HAPPY, HURT." There's nothing else to go on, nothing else to contemplate. Make of it what you will.

That... is... artistry.

And we think we get it, including that the thing to 'get' is the way we can't 'get it'.

 

Of course... like I said. I haven't played the game. There's probably more stuff to 'get' in here if you have.