I’ve been working on my final project for tomorrow, but I have hit a roadblock of confusion and doubt, so I thought I would blog in an attempt to clear my head.

The basic idea of the video is to present a history of anger-based genres of music.

As far as I can tell, punk was the first rage-oriented music genre. Everything about it expressed rage, bitterness, and frustration with the world. As such, it was the complementary opposite to the hippie music of ten years previous that had emphasized positive messages of togetherness, harmony, and enlightenment.

But that trip ended when all the great musicians of the era started dying from their drug habits, and when a trip like that ends, people crash pretty hard. Disillusionment set in as harsh reality caught up with the dreamers. The hippies retreated and a new generation inherited all the bitterness and rage the hippies themselves could not express.

And so punk emerged as the voice of angry youth rebelling against the broken and nefarious world they were inheriting. And they aimed their anger at the hippies they thought had played at making the world a better place but really just retreated into airy hedonism – strumming their guitars while the world burned.

Punk flared up and burned out fairly rapidly. and those embers lay dormant, only to flare up once again with the emergence of heavy metal in the Eighties. While not as angry as punk, its aggressive and macho image and its screaming, growling guitars, as well as it’s often dark and serious subject matter. tapped into the same feelings of anger and frustration as punk had in the previous decade.

Then came the 90’s, and two separate track of angry music emerged : on the one hand, you had industrial music, which based its sound on brutally mechanistic music contrasted sharply by deeply emotional lyrics screamed into the microphone. This is the music that became punk’s closest successor as the DIY ideals of punk were transformed by the increasing availability of computers into something one or two people could put together in their basement and compete with the sounds of the big labels.

At the same time, rap, which had been dying as a pop music phenomenon, found its flame relit by the emergence of bands like NWA and Public Enemy whose rap tapped into the rage of black inner city residents who had never had their stories told before and were eager to embrace rappers that channeled that rage into their lyrics.

Industrial never had the widespread appeal of gangsta rap, but they still took their share of the newly divided angry white boy market.

Aaaand that’s all I have. I am really questioning my topic and my approach. The voice in my head that knows I don’t have to beat myself senseless and put myself through the shredder on this thing is trying to calm the anxiety and despair that threatens to overcome me, but it’s a very difficult balancing act.

Probably a bad idea to have so much caffeine in my system at this point, come to think of it. How come other people get energy from their caff and I just get anxiety?

So I have no idea what I am going to do. Maybe I will come up with something that is easier to do. Not sure what that might be, but maybe I can think of it if I just calm down enough to get my brain working right. Or I will figure out a way to do this topic that doesn’t seem so hard.

I don’t know why it suddenly seems overwhelming. Chemical fluctuations? Phase of the moon? The fact that I am insane?

And medicated. But still.

Whatever happens, I am sure I will figure out a way through this mess. I am almost tempted to just make a compilation of my own music, but that would be pretty tough to sell as having anything to do with the history of music.

Personal history doesn’t count.

Of course, I wouldn’t be in the mess if I hadn’t waited to the last minute to do this goddamned thing. I did it mostly because I am not good at multitasking and that means I have to do things one by one, and when I am deep into one thing, the other things tend to fade away until I am done.

Like, for instance, my initial plan had been to start work on this thing last night. But I forgot that I would need that night in order to do my History of Canada Since 1867 exam. So I did not ending up working on it last night.

And then today, there was therapy, then picking up my transcript at school, then a nap I hated to take but had to, and then I started work on the thing at around 5 o’clock.

And if this was just one of my silly ass videos like a talker or “interpretive captioning” or something, I would not be freaking out. But this is something that is going to represent me in front of my awesome professor, and the fact that I know she will give me an A just for showing up with something doesn’t make it any better.

In fact, it makes it worse. Because that just makes me want to strive for her approval all the more. I know that’s perverse, but this is neurosis we are talking about here, not rational thought.

I will come up with some way of trimming it down. Maybe I will use on screen text instead of voiceover. It would be kind of lame, but it would make it way easier.

I ruefully mock my previous idea that doing a video (one more ambitious than any I have done before) would be a breeze cause I was so good at video. Even though I have not done a video since last fall and I am way out of practice with the tools.

Who knows. Maybe I will do something else entirely. I will make it through somehow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.