Daily Jam - At the Heart of It All

This column was originally published in August of 2018.

A whole lot of stuff happened yesterday (yesterday being August 21st as I’m writing this column well before I intend to publish it). It was a lot to take in. A lot of guilty verdicts, guilty pleas, and possible ramifications for a neverending stream of even more stuff to come. But, the inner cynic in me doubts that there’s really much to be happy about or excited for. The inner cynic in me has no expectations for anybody to finally get their comeuppance. The inner cynic in me lost faith in this broken system a long while back. And the inner cynic in me is usually right about that kind of stuff.

So I guess we’ll all just wait and see as everything crumbles around us…turns to dust.

And while I wait, I’ll let some haunting and cinematic music score my mood, soundtrack the encroaching clouds as they black out the light. I’m going to listen to “At the Heart of It All” from Nine Inch Nails’ 1995 remix album Further Down the Spiral. And I’m going to watch the world go grey.

The bleak, 7-minute instrumental was created by Aphex Twin for Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails to use on said remix record, and it sounds like a harbinger of some sorts. A crusty electronic beat pounds and hisses while a loop of an eerie horn section rises and falls, a dead fog laying over a cold and dying valley, like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. It sounds like a processional for the end of all things, a final dirge to play our souls to eternity. So, maybe it’s not so much a harbinger of things to come as it is a stark and icy denouement.

I guess that’s where we’re at these days.

Listen below, our Daily Jam.