999,936: Muse — Map of the Problematique

Muse is a band I discovered fairly recently after an otherwise regrettable evening watching the FUSE network. And while I can't fully endorse this band right now, when science finally gives us a working time machine I'm definitely shooting a copy of the song "Map of the Problematique" down the magic time tunnel back to the 16 year old version of me.

This thought of blowing the mind of a younger me has come to me a lot of times over the years. Usually I imagine wowing myself with some piece of awesome technology, or I imagine giving him a condescending nudge towards future me's amazingly good taste. But with this Muse song I'd be accomplishing something different. You see, my younger self was kind of lame, and this song is the same lame shit I liked back then with the lameness cranked to absolute maximum lame. Letting high school me hear this song would accomplish no more than making him happy. But I realize now that that is accomplishment enough.

For instance, this song wallows in one of the greatest evils to beset us in this modern age, Pro Tools production. Teen me would not know that Pro Tools would soon roll like a towering log of shit across the face of rock music, leaving behind a stinking plain of uniform brown, pounded flat and polished to a blinding sheen. He would simply sit back and marvel at the monolithic wall of sound that Muse's producer has crafted for them while they were off at the video shoot.

And if there's one word to describe my taste in music back then that word would be "soundscape." From Pink Floyd to Peter Gabriel to later Pink Floyd without Roger Waters, I sought out that immersive musical experience. I wanted music that would not simply blot out the world, but replace it with another world full of fat sampled synth sounds with lots of reverb and delay effects. Muse is nothing if not exactly this times infinity, plus they add that shrill edge of teenage hyper-emotion that is largely missing from the Floyd.

Pop music has always been about adults trying to capture the manic stupidity of the teenage mind, but I feel like they are only recently getting it right, or rather only recently are they capturing the specific flavor of MY manic teenage stupidity. You can hear it in this song. If you're going to sing a line like "Loneliness be over," you don't simply sing it, or scream it, or growl it, or overdub it a few times; you over dub it 50 times over with a bunch of digital processing and place it inside a tornado of guitars and keyboards played by an army of robots. That's just common sense. Prior to 2004 the technology simply didn't exist to do this properly.

Fortunately I don't have to guess or wait for that time machine to find out if this is the perfect song to drop on my younger self, because that shrill soundscape loving dude is still banging around my head. He comes out most often when I'm drunk or stoned and, for the record, he does absolutely fucking love this Muse song.

Map Of The Problematique - Mus...