Queens Of The Stone Age Songs For The Deaf Live

[Edilma Howard]

Songs for the Deaf is the 3rd studio album from Queens of the Stone Age, released on August 27, 2002. The album marks the transition from a looser sound in its predecessor, Rated R , and into a heavier, riff-driven rock. It is known for the singles Go With the Flow and No One Knows, two of the best-known songs from the band, and also from the feature of Dave Grohl on drums.

The album has the concept of a drive from Los Angeles to Palm Desert, California, listened through the radio stations on the car. You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire begins with the sound of the car being started and the radio stations, shuffled, until it stops at the KLON fictional station, which announces the song. Throughout the album, there is radio stations shuffling between songs that conduct one into another, up until A Song For The Deaf. After that, the "hidden tracks" don't present any radio sound at all.

Deaf is most known for featuring Foo Fighters' frontman Dave Grohl on drums, but, although everyone believes he wrote the drum tracks, they were originally worked by the previous drummer, Gene Trautmann. After Trautmann left the band, Josh Homme called Grohl (since Queens had opened for Foo Fighters on the Rated R era) inviting him to play the drum tracks for the new album. Grohl then put Foo Fighters into hiatus, playing drums for the album and playing on the promotional tour for Deaf. The first gig from the short tour with Grohl was in the Troubadour, in Los Angeles, on March 7, 2002; and the last one was on July 28, 2002, on the Fuji Rock Festival. Shortly after, Grohl returned to Foo Fighters, releasing the album One By One on October 22, 2002. After Grohl's exit, ex-Danzig drummer Joey Castillo entered the band for touring, turning into official drummer up to the recording process of Queens' 6th studio album, ...Like Clockwork.

Songs for the Deaf marks the last appearance in studio albums from Brendon McNichol, Gene Trautmann and Nick Oliveri, and the first appearances from Natasha Schneider and Alain Johannes. On the touring lineup, it was debut for Joey Castillo and Troy Van Leeuwen, which later became two of the most important musicians in Queens history. It also marked the last Queens tour for Nick Oliveri.

The Real Song for the Deaf is a ghost track from the album: hitting play on Millionaire and then rewind on the CD version takes to an 1:33 minute-long hidden track. The "song" begins with a man saying "Huh? What?" and then takes us to a bassline which goes to the end of the song. The bassline was recorded in such a deep, low tone it is possible that deaf people might actually percieve the vibrations in it, "hearing" the song (hence the name, The Real Song for the Deaf).

After A Song for the Deaf ends, there is an approximately 30 second-long break, and then a "hidden track", that is the recording of a bit of Feel Good Hit of the Summer, but with the lyrics exchanged for laughter.

That's the crucial question: Did God, should God, have intended direct and final communication with us? If so, Jesus certainly failed his mission. There is little evidence that Jesus' appearance cleared anything up or gave us God directly. Wittgenstein, who wanted our language to be clear, knows well enough that neither the Hebrew nor the Christian God's words could fall within his constructed linguistic net. They would always come from outside, from "the mystical." Thus, where our clarified language is concerned, "never the twain shall meet." Then, was Jesus really a proto-Wittgenstein? Did he use parables as an obscure vehicle for speech which alone might bridge the gap for us between our languages and the mystical always outside of it?

The Christian Bible, the Hebrew Scripture, The Muslim Koran - or any religion's sacred texts for that matter, will remain controversial but still important avenues for divine communication. Somehow all religious faith lies locked up in non-direct discourse. How, then, can we claim to "hear the word of God or gods," as many claim to do? Well, in the first place, we know that we will never all hear exactly the same sacred speech, interpret it in unison, or respond to it in the same way. For all that our enlightened scholars of sacred texts may provide—and there probably are more misreadings of a text than can be recognized—the Modern-Enlightenment goal to clear up all variant interpretations of a text will fail, due to the impossibility of confining living gods to our attempted literal interpretations.

Our major problem, religiously, is that our various divinities do not seem to have employed competent editors, and clearly they did not directly supervise the books that resulted from our "hearing the word." All texts were given up to human hands for compilation and particularly for interpretation. Heaven obviously contains no single, authorized publishing house. And what is now printed in many instances existed first in oral tradition, that notoriously changeable and often obscure medium. Some divine czar of communication should have allowed into written form only the authorized versions, with clear Wittgensteinian definition of all terms. Any authoritarian dictator, bent on preventing discord, could have done a better job, if put in charge of the divinities' printing house. Thus, as the source of a clear, single, religious creed, all sacred texts are failures. They were too loosely compiled.

Our divinities either need a course in exposition and writing or they never intended to offer us a clear text in the first place. In God's name, why not? For Heaven's sake, didn't they realize what confusion would result from their laxity? Wasn't it Nietzsche who remarked: Isn't it strange that, when God decided to turn author, he should have learned to speak Greek? We have the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which explains how we came to have so many obscure and divergent languages. But surely the heavenly U.N. Security Council could have elected to authorize, and to allow us to speak, only one language, putting all the rest of our vague tongues to shame. "Now hear this...." should have come over the speakers of any divinely engineered communication system. And, then every vague speech should have remained silent and complacent. Aren't the divine special forces in charge of linguistic uniformity at all times? Is heaven less efficient than a zealous communist dictator?

A dictionary of important terms in the language elected by the gods, set out as a guide and left prominently in Eden, would have been much better than arrogant but obscure injunctions about not eating fruit from the tree that would make us more knowledgeable. God's injunctions to Adam and Eve in Eden were odd. Shouldn't a high level of education be a goal of all divinities? And for heaven's sake, any parent knows that saying that something must not be touched only arouses our curiosity. And where would any religious tradition be if it were not for our intense curiosity to learn all the secrets of all the gods, to steal their fire, which later moved from fathoming God's life to grasping Nature's secret ways? Maybe what we need to do is to turn from the obscurities that lie in all important texts, whether secular or sacred (else we would need no Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution), and ask what problems lie in us in how we hear the words that divinities offer to us.

Jesus turns to this issue (Matt 13:13) "They look without seeing and listen without hearing," And he had also said just before: "Listen, anyone who has ears" (Matt 13:9). So, it would seem that we are not all equipped with ears that either make us understand alike, or even pay close attention, as every teacher who stands before a class knows. Odd, then, that a great part of the problem goes back to the genetics of the mind's evolution. Why did our evolutionary rise not bring us all out into conformity instead of into conflict, both intellectually and physically? Had the divine designers of evolution's course gone to MIT, surely this could have been avoided. The fruit on the tree of knowledge should have been equally distributed to all, rather than in the discriminatory manner in which human intelligence seems to have been parceled out.

To 'hear' the word, any word, really should mean to 'understand it'. The problem lies, not in the words themselves, as Wittgenstein thought (hoped), but in how we do or do not understand what we think we do. And a control system set on our minds, which might produce uniform interpretation, seems biologically to have been left off. And yet isn't is true that, both politically and religiously, we are often at our worst when we are certain that we are right? Or to put it another way, all too often isn't it true that our claim to have a divine authority underwriting our beliefs, as expressed in churches, synagogues, mosks, classrooms or legislators, is all-too-often simply a cover up for our own insecurity in our uncertain belief or understanding?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, "The fault, dear religious purist, lies not in the text but in ourselves, that we are underlings." (That is, deviant intellectual dissidents, except when under compulsion from pope or dictator or religious zealot). Then all who hear any word will not understand alike, no matter how clear the translation is made. It is our plural hearings (and non-hearings) that is more the problem. As Augustine noted, after all, the same words are heard by the student who understands and by the one who does not . This does not mean that some teachers are not more effective than others, some orators more persuasive than others, but that our unity can never come from the text alone or be made sacrosanct against new "hearers of the word" who listen to different voices. But our interpretative task remains, since obviously not all interpretations are equally good or even acceptable.

And aren't religions and religious people (and politicians) at their worst when they are sure that they alone are right? Truth may exist pure and enshrined in Plato's heaven of Forms, but he knew absolutely that, for that very reason, it could not lead to a uniform embodiment or interpretation. The very existence of the truth that we call 'divine' means that such can never be rendered final in secular discourse, else it would not have issued forth from our diverse divinities. "What if God were one of us?", The title of a Country Western song asks, but it adds a question in the asking and assumes that this could not be. Even if Moses got God's commandments on tablets of stone, or Joseph Smith on tablets of gold, they faced diversity the second each one stepped down from his divine mountain top or ecstatic religious excursion.

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