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Queens of the Stone Age (QOTSA) is one of those groups that plays a trick on listeners. The album starts with some talking and background
noise down low. It even seems like music has started, but you cannot hear it, so you turn it up. That's when
the CD jumps up the volume too. The first song "You think I ain't worth a dollar but I feel like a millionaire" is
actually the most fun--speedy hard rock.
The next song "No One Knows" and "Go with the Flow" are getting the airtime on radio stations. Whether music promoters posing as Christians or really Christians, some people may have criticized this album for its imagery playing with the devil on the CD cover. Given that MIM spends most of its time criticizing the romance culture in pop music, we have to give kudos to QOTSA for their song "Another Love Song." It even says, "just another love song" in the lyrics. So, some edgy music has managed to escape the romance culture except for a couple songs and QOTSA has still hit it big. This gets up our hopes at MIM, mostly to be crushed by a lack of coherent message that reviewers are calling pleasingly "odd." Musically, this is new rock, but we hear a little more 1960s and 1970s music in this album than in others since the 1990s. The BBC reviewer Nick Reynolds says he hears "ZZ Top in a really, really bad mood" and we have to agree. "Songs for the Deaf" jumps around in influences but stays a basically hard rock album that many thought was the best of the 2002 summer or the year. What most reviewers call "dark" or "moody" or handling the subject of death is often rock music's attempt to handle the subject of materialism, not materialism as in greed, but philosophical materialism. Whether it is Ozzy Osbourne telling fans there are no easy answers or various Christian groups saying rock is Satanic, the point is the same. For some people, easy Christian answers come apart through contemplation of just a few rock lyrics. The best example on this album of contemplation of "dark" subjects is "Mosquito Song." It plays on the notion that mosquitoes attack and eat their prey while it is still alive. That's a good start, to think about nature, but even more disconcerting is probably the ending: "We all will feed the worms and trees/So don't be shy/ Swallow and chew/Eat you alive/ All of us food that hasn't died." Humyns are walking food for mosquitoes and when we die we feed the worms and trees. In this there is no talk of the spirit rising from the body into Christian Heaven--just a confrontation of something that people know if they care to think about it. This sort of music can pound home unpleasant but obvious truths. Some parents seek to protect their teenagers from thinking about such subjects, but it's part of attaining intellectual maturity. We're not die-hard QOTSA fans, but the band is definitely an example of how the songs of pain and unpleasantness may be better than romance culture syrup.
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