It was around 2018, and the pills weren’t working. I’d spent the past years as tired, bitter, and irritable as ever, except with the added state assistance of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, which I was also coming of age to be dropped from. Nothing was great.
My primary source of productivity was an idea for a concept album called PORNOVIOLENCE, a title based on a Tom Wolfe essay I’d randomly discovered through Wikipedia. Yet, this connection was aloof – I vastly liked the title for shock value. So instead, I initially wanted to tell a story- A sort of album format of Orwell’s ‘1984’, using the character of Winston Smith in the world of Donald Trump.
‘Brave New World’ is actually named after THE other major dystopic novel of the 20th century, by Aldous Huxley – Soma, the cure-all drug that numbs the population of the World State, is distributed freely to make the people feel good. When antidepressants like fluoxetine and sertraline are prescribed by GPs on an unquestioning whim, whilst real support is brushed off as too time-consuming, part of myself believed that these medications weren’t intended to make anyone better. At best, they were placebo and, at worst, a tool to instil docility. In a time of alternative fact, alternative right, and alternative left, it appeared the world had discovered a new religion: Apathy.
~BUCHANAN
