On a Saturday evening in a dingy venue, a man walks on stage to a crowd of about 20 people, mainly high-school friends, along with a few friends of friends.
The electronically produced music begins thrashing through the cheap speakers, one of which was blown out earlier in the night. About three minutes into his set, he jumps into the crowd, thrashing them around and encouraging a mosh-pit. The flailing teenagers and young adults have gone into an animalistic state through another man’s screaming, the mic cable just long enough for the singer to get off the stage and into the crowd, flexing every last portion of the cable with a thinly veiled attempt at keeping everything connected. Everyone there is having fun with these seemingly nonsensical lyrics. No consideration is given to the meaning of it, simply catharsis in the moment.
What does it all mean? Not even the singer of the venue could answer you.
This man was me a little less than five years ago: a fed-up teenager with a chip on his shoulder and a bone to pick with the ordinary high school-college transitional period.
As I reflect on those years, I can’t feel but a sense of vindication, that the seemingly perfect American dream that I was living was turning into a farce. The nihilistic television, movies, games, and other forms of media that were constantly pumped through my brain could not answer my many questions about what there was to live for. College was nearing its midpoint for me at this time, and it was a time of great emptiness in my education, often used for challenging my professor’s views on politics so often pushed in our classes.
I turned to music, as many in my age group did, as an outlet for catharsis. Many hours of my life were dedicated to attending and booking shows, chatting on Instagram or Facebook pages and group chats, Youtubing obscure experimental music, and scrolling 4chan’s /mu/ board and a collection of music subreddits.
I never quite found a home in any of them. Between the strange politics, clothing, piercings, tattoos, false friendships and relationships that were constantly being bound and unbound, there was an emptiness to this catharsis.
I knew there was something missing. There was a need to rebel, I just didn’t quite know for what purpose. Was I to die on the hill of the hope that then-president Donald Trump would restore order to America? Was I to chase my dreams of a libertarian utopia? Was I to abandon my presuppositions entirely and submit to the agendas I had seen rising in these past years? As much as I searched for hope in these things, I couldn’t help but feel the hollowness in the options I saw. I became less and less excited at the thought of any of these prospects.
I screamed into the void for answers. Every lyric had to do with the recognition of the decaying state of the world. Though disordered in its objective, I recognized the capitalist machine was rolling to a stop, the communists and socialists had summers of rage while only destroying the tools they had in front of them. I knew these weren’t my options.
What was there to do but yell?
Every punk who’s ever recollected on these thoughts has come to this question, ultimately succumbing to the temptation. The cathartic screams for answers: a lack of order, the evils of the world, and a seemingly unknowing populace. These punks are hungry for something higher than what they are fed.
I and many others received a forced intervention in 2020 that lead to a true search for this order I so screamed about. The COVID lockdowns had led to me, a skeptical punk, realizing that those around me who claimed to be punks were too afraid to even shop for groceries, let alone host an event, many parroting the same lines they had heard from the media they so claimed to oppose. The farce was over and the curtain was lifted: these punks were not rebelling against anything, it was just another recreational activity to them.
I searched frantically for an answer, I could not succumb to the nihilism any longer. I first turned to philosophy, classical stoic authors kept me company through the early pandemic. In these books, I could not find anything but men who rebelled against their modern world. The issues and questions I had were addressed in their own time, and finally, an answer was given to me adequately for the first time in my life in my pursuit of virtue.
Once one recognizes the need for virtue, the value in doing good, the question must be asked: who can authoritatively define what virtue is, what is good? The stoics hit a dead end for me after this point. I agreed with the pursuit of virtue, and the need to suffer well, but I needed an answer to where these virtues come from. How can I be doing good works if I was to believe that good is something fluid, constantly changing with the times? If this was true, why did people have to fight so hard to propagate a change in morality? I needed to go on a deeper search.
I had an intuition for most of my life that there is a creator. I was a cradle Catholic who was lukewarm at best, and atheist at worst, but still I held to this thin hope in a loving creator. Beginning with the book of Proverbs, I began my search.
I was no longer screaming into the void — I was jumping headfirst into it.
A serious inquiry into the Faith of my fathers led me into a rabbit hole of apologetics, philosophy and theology, and historical records. By the grace of Him, I found that my dive led not into a bottomless pit, but rather into the embrace of a loving Father and a discovery of me being a part of His Son’s mystical body, the Church.
The first mover, the natural law, the fall of man, and the hunger for righteousness were for the first time explained with a proper academic response. No longer was the Faith simply a nice story I was told as a child, it was a reality that was not only adequately answered, but answered with a fervor and true conviction that stumped the atheists that dared step to it.
My music at this point was openly mocking the materialist society around me, produced in my bedroom in the middle of the pandemic. I began to have bandmates over weekly. I was wielding the weapons of the enemies of the Church and using them against them. With the zeal of a convert, I rebelled.
As of now, I have decided that I will be closing the musical chapter of my life, with or without the help of those with whom I initially began that journey. I am currently planning to close this book with a triple album using the same instrumentals of my pre-conversion projects, along with completely new productions, with one goal in mind: hope. I invite you openly, if you are rebelling against the modern world and share a story similar to mine, to join my pursuit. Get in touch with me and I’d love to have you join the team.
There is someone to hope in and there is something to rebel against. It is in its proper order: God and the modern world.
Readers may reach Miguel at [email protected].