Song Spotlights — transcendent theory

King Me by Lamb of God

I saw the world through the lens of a pinhole camera/ I saw nothing. I was blind./ In between a black hole and a supernova is where you’ll find me/ Imploding and expanding simultaneously/ No longer blind.

I’d been running away for so long/ When I finally caught myself there wasn’t much left./ The script’s last page is blank/ And the medicine is gone.

A sick monster, a twister of dark matter/ On a heavier trip than you can comprehend/ A tornado trying to mend the life it shattered/ Waiting for nothing to begin./ A flat line, my insides are turning out.

King Me is killing me.

I keep walking past the places I was born in/ Now their faces are blank, shiny, and dead/ I don’t recognize a thing, I can’t recall them/ A closed book that I can never read again./ A flat line, my insides are turning out./ The lights fade, this final war starts now.

King Me is killing me.

All of that is ending now for I have arisen/ Survived myself somehow, dead and imprisoned/ I’m fighting to live if I am to see the day/ I swear I’ll never sleep again/ I am no man’s slave.

I wanted the fog to lift but I was living in a cloud/ Nostalgia is grinding the life from today/ The present always dies in future memories/ And King Me is killing me/ Cut wide open and bleeding to death for all to see.

King Me is killing me./ He’s killing me.

He won’t kill me./ I won’t let him kill me.

He won’t kill me.

Songwriters: Chris Adler / David Randall Blythe / John Campbell / Mark Morton / Will Adler

King Me lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

HERE WE GOOOOOOOOO

Let’s talk about this song. It’s so nihilistic I love it. Not that I love nihilism-- quite frankly the idea of it terrifies me-- but it makes me smile because the ideas it offers seems almost kindred-spirity to me. “I saw the world through the lens of a pinhole camera/ I saw nothing”. “A tornado trying to mend the life it shattered/ Waiting for nothing to begin” anyone??? HELL YES. It invigorates me because it understands me. Do I believe this is reality? Absolutely not. Do I feel this reality? You have no idea how much I do.

Which makes me think… in our emotion-driven culture of today, nihilism makes sense. If you feel like everything is going to shit and that there is no purpose to anything, then what you feel is what is. It’s logical in a very flawed sense.

I have a friend who is what I consider to be a default nihilist. He was raised with little stability and it appeared as if that instability and chaos followed him wherever he went. I’ve never encountered anyone who has had such poor luck in life. From a purely observational standpoint, it truly did seem that the universe was against him. He didn’t really see any grand purpose to life and vehemently objected any moral/faith system. According to my observations, his worldview was this way because, well, that’s what he deduced from the world based on the way it treated him.

Once we had a conversation about the purpose of life. I of course came from a faith worldview, and him without. At the end of our conversation, we came to an impasse. We agreed on several things: 1) that life is a spiral--you move upwards or downwards, but you seem to revisit the same issues over and over again; 2) it is good to try to become better persons; 3) the awful things that happen in life are meant to teach us something; and 4) love is the most important thing. But that’s where it ended, and it seemed as if it was impossible to continue, there was no more to talk about. Because, for him, that was the end of the line. Take for example, point #2 on becoming better persons. I deduced that he believed that we are supposed to become better because the better you are, the better the things that happen to you will be. But for me, I believe that I am supposed to become a better person because I reach my full potential when I become who God created me to be.That person will not be me anymore, but Christ who is in me. It’s therefore not about me, it’s about Christ. Also, love. In his understanding, love is the most powerful emotion with the highest vibrations and therefore can overcome all negative and evil emotions, which we don’t want because they don’t make life pleasant. Love therefore improved quality of life. To me, love is a person, and love personified is ultimately self-sacrificial. Love doesn’t really improve the quality of my life, because it means that I have to put others first, which is hard. However, choosing to love unconditionally is the only way that I will be at peace with myself, and also the way that I move aside so that Christ can live in me. Faith in something makes a huge directional difference.

This all being said, I found this friend to be absolutely FASCINATING because I had never before spent time with someone like him. I found myself drawn to friendship with him because of something I detected in his way of looking at life (which is kind of what I consider to be the holy grail): AUTHENTICITY. How is it authentic? His beliefs were true to his feelings.

I’m a feeling person. Feelings are kind of everything to me. I often base my identity on how I feel. For example, if I feel melancholy, I AM melancholy. And I take some kind of pride in it, because accepting my melancholy and incorporating it into who I am makes me different, it makes me authentic. If I’m in a state of melancholy and something good happens, I reject feeling happy because, MELANCHOLY. Is this good? Is this healthy? NO. But. This is me. Coming to the realization that I base who I am on how I feel has been HUGE for me. I’ve come into a habit of telling myself everyday that “I am not my feelings” and it has been so freeing and a rather mammoth step towards mental health. Even so, it doesn’t change the fact that my basic desire in life is authenticity and that my predisposition is to focus inward on feelings.

Now do we understand why I say nihilistic sentiments are kindred-spirity to me? And why, consequently, it is not mentally healthy for me to be a nihilist?

So, about this song…. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you that this venture was mostly autobiographical.

This song is tremendous. The dynamics are extreme. The vocals are severe. The operatic elements add to the drama. The lyrics and the sounds amplify the other’s intention to create one staggering, terrifying, glorious exaltation. This is LoG’s best song in my personal evaluation.

It’s core proclamation is one that we frequently see littered throughout LoG’s songs: “I am no man’s slave.” This is fascinating. This is his greatest fear--to be controlled by someone else. Particularly in the Western world (it might be helpful to note that LoG is an American band), personal freedom is our highest attainment. But, here’s the interesting thing-- he doesn’t need to worry about being another’s slave, because he already is a slave--to himself.

“King me is killing me.”

In our attempts to put ourselves first, we find that we have in fact become our own slaves. I have a quote from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on a massive canvas on my wall that says “The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort; you were made for greatness.” When I read it, I feel an ancient battle-cry swell up within me that yells “FOR GREATNESS!” whilst charging on my horse, sword in hand, Aragorn style. But how much of my everyday life is centered on the goal to be in comfort? 95%? 100%? Really, there aren’t many heroics in my daily life. But what does that MEAN. It means that while I’m binging on Hunter x Hunter (for example…), and hearing my 14 year old sister crying that she needs help with homework in some other corner of the house, I STAY IN MY ROOM because it’s waaaaay more comfortable to support my binging habit than to get up and painfully attempt to explain how to write a thesis statement. What happens in this situation? Sure, maybe she needs to just figure it out on her own, and yes self care is a thing, but I’m passing on an opportunity for greatness. I can’t get up to help her because I’m a slave to my own comfort. I’m addicted to living a pain-free, comfort-full existence.

“I’d been running away for so long/ When I finally caught myself there wasn’t much left/ The script’s last page is blank/ And the medicine is gone.”

I’m going to end by sharing something a little more personal, just because I want to show you how deeply I relate to these lyrics. You know, when artists put their songs out there, they’re putting a lot on the line. They’re sharing their deepest, most intimate thoughts and feelings. Vulnerability spurs vulnerability, and man do we ever need to be vulnerable with each other if we’re going to have mercy for one another.

My first year of teaching was the worst year of my life. It was overwhelming and the pressure and expectations crushed my spirit. I loved my kids, but that’s all the good I have to say about it. I never used to be a drinker. I enjoyed an occasional beer, but it wasn’t anything even resembling habitual. That changed that year. I was definitely drunk every weekend, if not most weeknights. I’m a church person, but for the first time in my life I was consistently showing up to church 20 min late because I was hungover. I couldn’t believe how easily I fell into a lifestyle I previously had never planned for myself. It was mostly fun at the time, and I still stand by the fact that I didn’t know how to properly cope with failure and that I managed in the best way that I possibly could.

But something happened at the end of that year. Days after the last day of the school year, I went to a conference that I go to every year with my family. This conference is a cornerstone in my life and I can’t imagine going a year without it. This year though, I wandered around in a daze. I felt as though I had woken up from a terribly realistic bad dream. My memories were mixed and vague. I thought about the past year, and who I was didn’t fit the person who had been at this place in previous years. Then an ugly thought dawned upon me-- I had forgotten who I was. I couldn’t remember what was important to me, what I stood for, what things brought joy, because all the life had been sucked out of me.

“When I finally caught myself there wasn’t much left/ The script’s last page is blank/ and the medicine is gone.” The first time I heard these lyrics, years after this realization occurred, my mind immediately went to that time. That was EXACTLY what I felt like. That’s what’s so special about music. We can hear a thousand lyrics and it means nothing to us, and then all of the sudden one will come out of nowhere and knock you off your feet. And now it makes me think— never again. I never want to lose myself ever again. I don’t want to use unhealthy coping mechanisms as medicine ever again (like I still do, spoiler, but you get the sentiment).

Lol I just googled “meaning of King Me” and everyone is saying that it’s about alcohol addiction and superiority complexes… well, guess I missed the point, oh well :)