NOMEANSNO

e Day Everything Became
othing” is quintessentially
OMENSNO music. 20 years old
bw (Jesus H!), the song, in typical
ONMEANSNO fashion, is a
eling exercise in guitar, bass
nd drums. Brothers Rob and John
‘right, who play bass and drums
spectively, provide the punishing
ythm section that seems at times

h experiment in jazz and speed

etal with a little funk thrown in

st to keep things weird and poten-
hilly danceable. A member of the
hnd who chooses to remain anony-
ous plays guitar, but that instru-
ent is almost an afterthought com-
ared to the Wright brothers’ relent-
s assault on their instruments.
erhaps not surprisingly, the song
boins with Rob and John playing

f of each other in a rapid

change of scratched bass strings
hd battered drums. Guitar soon
ins in providing a fuzzed out tex-
e that hangs somewhere above

e bass-heavy progression of the
bng. In a heavy metal inflected,

ost freeform jazz detour, the gui-
drops out of the noxious ether
d joins the rhythm section like a
t being strangled, but only
omentarily before the song goes
hck to the thud and crush fur-
shed by the Wright brothers.

Bass player Rob Wright, with his
rep voice, a Fender Jazz bass so big
looks like it weighs 50 pounds,

d his alarmingly “square” appear-
ce, adds gravitas to the words of
e song he so articulately yells.

lharacteristically, the lyrics of “The

 

ong of the Week:

he Day Everything Became Nothing”

Pat Mackenzie, OP Columnist

Day Everything Became Nothing”
are, like the rest of
NOMEANSNO’s lyrics, dark, and
present a world on the verge of

total collapse — if it hasn’t collapsed .

already. But a certain black humour
buoys the song. An acknowledg-
ment of the human condition and
its failures seems to draw the song
back from being a complete con-
demnation of our messed up little
world and the weird little creatures
who occupy it.

In “The Day Everything Became
Nothing” the listeners are given a
bizarre spin on the apocalypse. As
Rob Wright sings in'‘his conversa-
tional style, “No thunder roared. No
lightning cracked. No missiles rained
from the sky. This was no sneak
attack. There was just suddenly this
awful lack. Things had changed
that’s for sute.”

But exactly what has changed we
are left to wonder. Perhaps in a
world that values things, stuff,
indeed the consumer dream, every-
thing becoming nothing is the worst
possible scenario. If everything that
we value as a culture, superficially at
least, loses its value both monetarily
and metaphorically, then our society
would cease to function as we know
it. Rather than give us a world liber-
ated from the shackles of con- .
sumerism, for that would be too
sentimental, NOMEANSNO in its
ironic and often hilarious way, give
us directionless people seemingly
incapable of living outside the
bounds of a coercive society.

Even in freedom we are lost.

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