Horror/Hero
“World Destruction” by Time Zone (with John Lydon). When I was in college this song was on my mind a lot. Now, let’s admit this upfront, there may not be a song that sounds more 80’s than this. With Afrika Bambaataa and the former Johnny Rotten (pus Bill Laswell’s production) you have a song that is early hip-hop and and new wave smashed together without either sound making concession against the other. I still love it but I can see how someone could never get over how much of an artifact this is. That’s before you get to the lyrical content, which is a summation of the various crises the world was in when it seemed like the Cold War was at a breaking point.
Truth be told I couldn’t get over the era this song was coming from once I, rather selfishly, figured out how it related to me. This came out in 1984, when I was one-years-old. I couldn’t get over the fact the world was in such a fucked-up place by the time I had just arrived on the scene. It created a certain sense of angry hopelessness in me. I knew activists in college and could only think “any power structure you fight has had a decades-long head start, so what do you think you could accomplish?” I discovered the song from an episode of THE SOPRANOS, and it’s a Tony Soprano quote that hung over my whole outlook when I was in my early 20’s: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
Turns out delving into that sentiment through fiction gave me a chance to explore the very opposite way of seeing things. The feeling that everything is firmly and irrevocably fucked is half of the inspiration of DRACULA WORLD ORDER. I wanted to tell a story where everything went wrong and the whole game is rigged. But I knew that alone isn’t a story. To make DWO compelling and interesting I had to look towards hope. I had to create characters that believed they could change things, and entered alliances they never would have otherwise based on faith. The juice to DWO (and I’m seeing this more and more as I write further stories, of which I hope you will see soon) is the tension between hopelessness and hope. In my life now it’s something I bounce between almost everyday, and telling these stories is a part of the thinking process.
Of course, I may have just forgotten that Afrika Bambaataa is dresses like Dracula at the end of this video and the entire book is a long recovered memory.
