Finding God in Speaker Mesh (Originally in Ink Magazine's "Transcendence" issue)

There’s a term in sports called “the yips” for when a player gets too into their own head. They begin considering their grip on the bat, or the looseness of their glove or any other tiny imperceptible difference, and it throws off their entire muscle memory. They strike out, which makes them burrow deeper into their own head, strike out more and so on and so forth until they’re finding themselves out of a job.

In the summer of my sixteenth year on this planet, I was having a generational, existential case of the yips. I’d only been experiencing life as a fully sentient being for three years — having flipped some sort of switch in my brain at age 13 that made me realize I could have a personality and traits — and I’d done nothing with it. I was this malleable thing — afraid of looking dumb — and it was incredibly, incredibly obvious. I couldn’t breathe without wondering if I was making too much noise. “Am I sweating too much?” “Oh God, my back isn’t straight.” “Fix your posture.” “Tie your shoes.” “Eat your Wheaties.”

In short, the yips.

It was in this stupor of indecision and posturing that I found myself in possession of my first set of concert tickets: IDLES — hot off their pandemic-era release “Ultra Mono” — coming to the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. Despite weak releases (including “Ultra Mono” itself) and an increasingly corny presence in interviews dampening pretty much all enthusiasm I had for them, I could confidently say that IDLES were like gods to me in 2021. It was a fatal concoction: My first simultaneous experience with true-blue leftism, heavy music and that ever-potent — but positive — male rage. Soaked in the vigor and colors of punk mosh dreams, I made my plans.

I rode into the city in a black Hellcat. It wasn’t mine, I should say. It was my cousin’s boyfriend’s, who I’d conned — alongside the aforementioned cousin — into coming along. The quo of this quid-pro was my attendance of that year’s Dreamville Fest, but when the time finally came around she decided her soft-brained little cousin was a lot less enticing of a companion than, say, any of her friends.

I spent the entire ride listening to Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” — a fundamentally boring album. No matter how many times 16-year-old Mason had scoured Rate Your Music reviews, absorbing notes on The Band’s “apple-pie Americana” or Dylan’s “shrill, informative voice,” I still fell asleep thrice across its runtime. But I’d been told it was God, so as we parked the car illegally on the street, rushed our bags into the hotel and ate takeout as the sun fell, I planted my terrible headphones on my head and listened, waiting for that divine spirit.

As the sun set over our dingy slice of the district, we set off. We rode to the 9:30 Club after much difficulty on electric scooters. Inside, a pair of Xs on my hands were the only thing separating me from the majority middle-aged, majority bearded, majority white crowd. The dense mass spent their time idly sipping Pabst and muttering back and forth to one another.

“Have you seen them before?”

“What are you drinking there?”

“If you like them, you should check out…”

“Yeah, parking was a nightmare.”

My cousin, after making sure she had my phone number, quietly and swiftly retreated outside before the house lights dimmed. Some band named Gustaf played. They were, no offense to them, very plastic — very art school in a “I own a copy of ‘Stop Making Sense’ because it’s an A24 movie” type of way. If they were a person, they’d be played by Rachel Sennott in three years. Then, IDLES.

They played like they wanted to stop your heart. They existed as energy. The guitarists flailed like they were being flogged. Lead singer Joe Talbot screamed till his face was red and sweat-drenched, and his voice seared with a primal tone — like a fist was being buried down his throat as he sang. The kick drum rang out like automatic gunfire. They blazed through song after song after song, and as the night continued it felt like a baptism. I’d gone from a tentative toe-tap on the outskirts of the mosh pit, merch shirt draping from my body like an unfamiliar third skin, to bruised ribs; to a complete refutation of civility as I — with full love in my heart — rammed headfirst into passerby.

They announced last call: No encores, no after-shows. A crowd surfer clad in the transgender pride flag made it to the front and made an impassioned plea to the crowd for “Trans rights now, trans rights forever!” I screamed along with a pang in my heart I’ve yet to resolve. The crowd split at Joe’s command and — as the band launched into show-closer “Rottweiler” — he dropped his hand; and all of us in the pit — those who were young, dumb and hungry for a good time — charged.

The walls and the floor are breathing, rising and falling with every ragged breath as you spin yourself hysterical, like those nuns in France, and you slip and a strange arm with the force of a jar of smelling salts grabs you and pulls you to your feet with a jerk, and you continue running, despite the pain in your shins or the cramps in your soles you pick up into a sprint, your movements are jagged, the guitars grow in volume, you pound your chest like some sort of primordial instinct, some deeper inner working that tells you that this is where you should be, and you can barely breathe, your lungs straining alongside you with the heat and the exhaustion but the strobe light is moving so fast it’s like it’s synced with the refresh rate of your own eyes, and the snare rings like liberation bells, and the room is a blur but it seems it’s always been a blur, a chundering mass like the ocean itself, a collective soul, a hivemind, you can’t remember a moment before this but you can hear the thump of the bass analogous to your own heartbeat, and the ringing in your ears creates a tone that becomes your single, only, permanant thought, and in that moment, between those ice-pick guitars that feedback into one another like twin fates punctuated by an absolutely tectonic drum fill, that brief instance between this and whatever beyond there is, you’ve found God. You’ve found God in others, flashing in your peripheral vision with a tap on the shoulder to keep you moving or a grin as you move in time. He, or She, or It, has consumed you whole, slipping between bodies and molecules. It is nirvana in rhythm.

I left sweat-glazed. I walked back to the hotel with my cousin in tow, shell-shocked, breathing air that — after the hazy, heavy breathing supply in the club — felt like holy water running through my lungs. I crawled into my pajamas and laid my head in a new reality. Despite driving back the next morning into small-town tranquility, despite the anxieties still never really ceasing, even now, I still think I’m there.