10 Years of Decemberunderground

We made a cake to celebrate (in May, when we were together–not quite on time). Happy Decemberunderground to you all!

The Process and the Product

AFI and Blaqk Audio have a very different writing process. How does that impact the finished product, the album that comes out of it? How do the differing creative processes influence the notable contrast in the feel and the sound, resulting in either the emotional, overwrought, performative poetry of AFI or the direct, confessional, unabashed Blaqk Audio? (To say nothing of the deliberate rawness of XTRMST, which I cannot speak to at the moment, but you can read a good Jade interview here and a good Davey interview here; listen to tracks here. The XTRMST album was written mostly during Burials, but recorded much differently, with each track’s vocal being the first recording.)

Bandom in the Trenches

Here is a transcription of a text exchange between your fearless authors to demonstrate how our process works, in the wild. And also to demonstrate why most of our gay conspiracy breakthroughs and ideas never make it to text post form: a lot of polishing is required, and we are both lazy and more prone to just jump to the next Great Bandom Mystery instead.

Anyway, if this decidedly Socratic style works for you and you’d like more blurbs like this, let us know!

Wednesday, 8:14 AM

K: Decemberunderground is such a BDSM album, do you think it is a sexual reinvention post-breakup, a metaphor, or was Javey sex less vanilla than looking at Jade makes you think?

S: I think it’s a metaphor with roots in reality

K: Can’t even imagine a Javey forehead touch, there is no tenderness there and maybe never was

K: Grimmer than a ghost ship, those two

S: No, remember the coffeeshop interview??

S: Crinkle-eyed smiles?

S: It does kind of seem like for all that they loved each other they were never really happy

S: Even their private moments poisoned by Jade’s fear

S: I bet he’d go and close the curtains before he’d so much as kiss Davey

K: I believe that they are each other’s true love but also that they never could have been happy in this universe, no matter how they played it

S: Yeah

S: And I mean, I feel like Davey probably has unrealistic relationship expectations. He wouldn’t consider grocery store arguments over milk brands true love. I don’t think he wants to be happy or content or comfortable. He wants to burn, he wants everything to be beautiful and meaningful

K: Even with the crinkly smiles, the way Jade looks at Davey: wonderstruck and humbled and worshipful with the edge of fear that permeates all truly aweful relationships, be it between man and god or the two of them. There isn’t happiness there, in such a gratingly unequal paradigm. If it hadn’t been his cowardice there would have been other ways, I think, that Jade held himself unworthy. There is something frightened and damaged at his heart. He does not believe in his own happiness, and Davey does not believe in his own mortality they would have to be fundamentally different to live happily ever after

K: You’re totally right: Davey has a deep, core belief that true things hurt

S: He probably judges Jade for his grocery-store relationship, salt in the wound of his betrayal

S: And he probably doesn’t understand how Jade could choose something mortal and stupid over him, like how is that even love

S: “True things hurt” is probably the core of Davey’s BDSM philosophy

K: YUP WOW IT IS

K: Metaphor cracked

K: Another case closed by the bandom sleuths

10 minutes pass

K: So do you think the song Save Rock and Roll is about Pete’s reasons he and Patrick can never be together?

K: I am a monster today, sorry

S: YOU ARE, GOD

Wake Up, Open the Door, and Escape to the Sea

Blaqk Audio’s first album, CexCells, offers us a unique slice of history. Davey and Jade began working on material for Blaqk Audio back in 2001, although they were busy enough with AFI that they didn’t devote serious attention to the project. So CexCells, released in 2007 (shortly after Decemberunderground, right around the time writing for CrashLove was beginning), is like Javey trapped in amber. Some of the material speaks plainly of their break-up and the apparent transience of it, the way they fall again, again, and again into one another, the feeling of a temporary apartness that cannot last, because the narrator of the songs we hears still believes in his heart that they are forever, their love is eternal. That with time they will resolve this difference too, as they have overcome all other disagreements and fallings-out. Some echoes the more recent themes of Medicate and other songs about Davey’s method of self-medication using meaningless sex.  And other material is older, hearkening back to the Davey who was writing for Sing the Sorrow, who was vibrantly in love and assured of eternity worth damnation, even as he battled ongoing depression and disillusionment that love had not cured him (see Shan’s thoughts on Sing the Sorrow for more on that).

So, there’s a lot to be taken from the lyrics of CexCells, and perspectives on very different periods of Davey’s life all on one record. And I want to go through all of that in an extremely detailed, disturbing way. But the journey of a thousand conspiracy facts is begun with a single lyrics meta, so I’m starting with thoughts that the song Wake Up, Open the Door, and Escape to the Sea stirred up while I was running this morning. Shall we begin?

Break-up Photo

In most posed photos, publicity shots or not, Davey uses posture very similar to that in this picture, but oriented TOWARDS someone, like he’s going to tell them a secret; and by “someone” I mean, “usually Jade”.

In most posed photos, publicity shots or not, Davey uses posture very similar to that in this picture, but oriented TOWARDS someone, like he’s going to tell them a secret; and by “someone” I mean, “usually Jade”.

In this 2006-released DU promo photo, his head is tipped toward Hunter, but the way Hunter is in line behind him makes it a more normal/less romantic position; the intimate closeness his posture with Jade tends to evoke is not present here. He is turning toward Hunter, but he appears cold, composed, and removed; not connected.

He and Jade still take the center of the photo, as they often do. But here the space between them is not magnetic or buzzing, it’s barren. They are both oriented away from one another (D more strikingly). Davey clasps his hands to himself in the front–no more arms lost of in the blackness of clothing with hands that could be holding. The message of separateness is very clear here.

(The Jadam dynamic in these photos is what started me on my path of avid Jadam shipping. Fact! The positioning of Adam’s left shoulder and hand give him this protective relationship to Jade, and he’s tilted subtly towards Jade. Jade looks pale and empty here, as he does often in more recent photos. Needing the protection.)

Also of note is that Davey is the foreground, with Jade pushed visibly into the background. It’s not unusual for Davey to take the foreground in photos, but there’s usually some link between him and the other band members even then. Here, his and Adam’s shoulders appear to be on the same line, but there is a sense of “larger-than-lifeness” to Davey that I don’t pick up from the rest of them. Davey is the Subject & the Object of this photo without question. (Even his arms–his lovely sleeves–they’re the only color in this picture. If going for an all-black full-band aesthetic, he COULD’VE been in long sleeves. But instead he takes the focus to the exclusion of the others.

Also please note Jade’s dumb scarf. I love his his stupid face and his dumb scarves. That is all.

“What makes you say 2005?”

So this is a question I get a lot. (By which I mean, maybe 2-3 times ever, and at least once by someone who did not actually ask or want to know the answer to or care anything about my Javey conspiracy theories, but for whom I answered it in great detail anyway.) “Yes, fine,” you all say, “we accept the lyrically, stage-ically, and photographically manifest evidence that the Javeys have broken up. But what makes you think it happened in 2005?”

Settle in, cats and kittens, and I’ll tell ya.

Greater Than 84

The first time I listened to this song with my serial-killer-collage-level-crazy ears on, I became obsessed with finding out what significant event had happened in Davey’s life in 1985. So I began digging through Mendocino County news, and greater California news, and generally poured my finely honed research skills into finding out what might have impacted Davey when he was 10 years old.

Yes. I did this. With the crazed fangirl devotion I thought I outgrew a decade ago. It wasn’t until weeks (and a theory about Davey’s fascination with CA wildfires and people who set them–which kind of bears out under his fixation on arson in Pop Kids) later that I realized it was a reference to Orwell’s 1984: the future’s here, it’s 1985. Davey’s way of saying that he’s writing about his own dystopian future; that the worst he could imagine and the worst he could have feared is here, and he’s worried now that it’s immutable, that this is how it will be forever.