“Change (In the House of the Flies)” – Deftones
(Words/music: Deftones, available on White Pony, Maverick 2000) 

Earlier this week, my friend (and amateur archivist) Mike produced a copy of what I believe to be my first piece of published music criticism.  He handed over a slightly browned copy of our high school’s newspaper The Trojan Times, folded over to an article titled “The Best Kept Secrets of the 2000 Music Scene.”  Some people, when confronted with an artifact from their youth, get nostalgic and eagerly delve in head first.  I usually end up focusing on the awkwardness in things that I wrote as a teenager, but this was too good to be true.  I wrote about six albums (well, five and first set of Pearl Jam bootlegs as one collective entity).  One of my highest marks went to the Deftones’ White Pony in a capsule that starts with a rap-rock takedown and continuing with a dazzling list of facts that one would now glean from the band’s Wikipedia page – name drop their previous album, credit their hometown, and make note of all the guests.  In a way, this was my concept of “music journalism” when I was seventeen – list facts, say something snarky, and make a few statements of the music itself.

To be fair to teenage Brian, I described the album as “intelligent, layered, and compelling hard rock,” and while I’ve only occasionally listened to the Deftones in the last nine years, my statement touches on the reasons I found the band compelling in the first place.  “Change” invites the term “Kafkaesque” because of the morphing-into-a-bug plot in the song, but it also shares the same feelings of alienation, disconnect, and faint despair suggested by the term.  While their music is loud and heavy, a strange vulnerability runs underneath the distortion.  When Chino Moreno screams, it’s not a sound of pure aggression like some of his peers.  Rather, his voice feels like a wounded animal trying to protect itself.  His claws come out as a defense mechanism rather than a predatory weapon, just as his growl masks his confessional lyrics.  Even when he’s detailing an act of aggression (the removal of the wings), he couples it with an act of self-destruction, making it feel more like a commentary on his lack of power rather than an assertion of dominance.  It’s appropriate that an artifact from my teenage years would feel this awkward yet compelling and only underscores why I loved it then.

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