In the most recent edition of What’s Really Good, I discussed my affinity for the bludgeoning force of Die My Will’s …And Still We Destroy. This EP and the rest of the band’s discography have been in heavy rotation as of late. There’s been one song of theirs in particular that I’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s the second track on their debut self-titled EP and it’s called “Endless Suffering.”
In the 90s, several hardcore bands pulled from sludge metal’s thick lethargic riffs and dismal atmosphere to write songs that added a brooding bleakness to the cathartic energy of hardcore. The sombre rage came through not only in guitar dissonance and harrowing vocal performances but also in the lyricism. Groundwork injected leftist critiques of consumerism and the Amerikkkan Dream, while Will Haven and Disembodied opted to express a more internal sense of anguish and existential dread. The overarching lyrical theme of Die My Will’s self-titled EP strikes me as “I reject God, but I struggle to find anything to fill the void and overcome the alienation I experience as a product of my participation in modern society.”
On “Endless Suffering,” the band is at their most dynamic in terms of songwriting. A dismal drumless intro gaves way to disaffected wails that grow into disgusted shrieks of refusal. After a crushingly ferocious midsection, we come to a pinnacle of blunt hardcore social commentary. The climax of “Endless Suffering” is the repetition of a very poignant reminder of the source of much of the strife, conflict, and oppression inflicted in this world – “We create the suffering.”
Virtually every injustice has both an oppressor and a victim. This is not just true for one-to-one cases but also where groups of people exploit and harm other groups of people and other species. There are also the bystanders, whose supposed neutrality is in many cases a form of complicity in allowing these injustices to carry on. What I find so poignant about “we create the suffering” is that it drops these distinctions between oppressed, oppressor, and bystander. It acknowledges that we, as part of humankind, are not only responsible for the suffering of others, but also leaves open the suffering that we ourselves endure is the result of our actions or complicity not resisting/overthrowing systems that make us suffer. To ask ourselves “do we want others to suffer” and “do we want ourselves to suffer?” would likely/hopefully lead to the plain answer of no to both questions. And if we acknowledge that suffering is our creation through the actions we do in our lives, then it is worth asking: what are the things that drive us to perform acts that produce suffering?
The song is not a hopeless proclamation of doom. It provides a point at which to intervene, reflect, and resolve to act in ways to reduce our collective suffering. Reflecting on the song more than twenty years after its release, Brandon Dubrovsky, vocalist/guitarist of Die My Will, had this to say:
“I think we all have to be more than where we came from and how we were raised. I think we have to consciously try to correct the things that we each perceive as wrong. If we don’t, we are the problem.”
We create more than just suffering, but I would like to believe most people would acknowledge that there is too much suffering in this world. To eliminate suffering is utopian, and there are some forms, such as the grief of losing a loved one, that will remain a common part of existence. War, bigotry, poverty, the climate crisis, and the capitalistic exploitation of the time, lives and bodies of the working class are yet but a few examples of suffering as an effect of human behaviours oriented towards the perpetuation of hierarchical social structures that consolidate prosperity into a few hands while disproportionately doling out suffering to the exploited and disenfranchised masses. In so far as our day-to-day actions perpetuate the status quo (by going to work, following the orders of the boss, obeying the will of the bourgeois political class, and/or cowardly punching down on those lower on the social ladder) the suffering of today will be renewed for tomorrow.
“We create the suffering (We empower)
We create the suffering (We feed the beast)
We create the suffering (We tend its wounds)
We create the suffering (We accept)
We create the suffering (We’re to blame)”