04. Age Of Capricorn

[noveltywave]

Thanks for explanations, I understand a bit better now although it is still hard to wrap my head around some of it!

It’s one of my favourite tracks on the album, and I live the aesthetic, surface level sound of when the prayer comes in, the tone of the voice and everything. But then I listen to the actual words and I am like “What the —— is he on about?!”

“You shed your blood for me. To cleanse me.” It sounds so odd to hear. Like, how does these images get into someones head that they believe it so strongly? The blood shed by someone else crucifixtion 2000 years ago will “cleanse” your sins now. Whaaaat.

The juxtaposition with the other two samples are so interesting. We have someone trying to tie Osama Bin Laden to, apparently as Google and this thread tells me, the third antichrist, and then there is a chant in the background about waiting night and day, longing to see, just once, their god, saviour what have you. And then apparantly it is mixed with garbled samples from The Exorcist?

I wonder a few things:

1. Is this just BOC messing around having a joke like on some of the early Old Tunes tracks?

2. Did they try out various different samples on this track over the years until they got one that sounded right (ie. building around aesthetics “hey, this sound cool, yeah I like the sound of this”), or did they have a specific idea in mind and find the samples needed to execute the idea (ie. building around meaning “hmm, i want to make a statement about X, let’s hunt for samples to help express it”), or did they just have a bank of 1000 religious vocal samples and just picked a few at random and played around with them until it was a happy accident?

The U-S Mabus spelling sample deliberately shouts back to The Color Of The Fire, and Telepath, so they thought “hey it’ll be fun to throw in another spelling vocal sample, but this time about the devil!” and they wanted to throw in something from a TV evangelist and this was a sample that just sounded cool…. Or is there a deeper meaning, an intended statement? I am not sure if I can explain what I am getting at clearly.

I’m assuming Capricorn has some deeper meaning but it is beyond me still! Just moving on from Aquarius? (And The Color Of The Fire?)

Why only one brother with the writing credited? Why does it talk about sin and blood and then go directly into Father And Son? Is there a deeper meaning or is it just meant to make us ask questions and get obsessed looking for meaning that isn’t there (like Twin Peaks or something)?? Questions questions!

[Redd Panderson]

2. Did they try out various different samples on this track over the years until they got one that sounded right (ie. building around aesthetics “hey, this sound cool, yeah I like the sound of this”), or did they have a specific idea in mind and find the samples needed to execute the idea (ie. building around meaning “hmm, i want to make a statement about X, let’s hunt for samples to help express it”), or did they just have a bank of 1000 religious vocal samples and just picked a few at random and played around with them until it was a happy accident?

This is the stuff of their 13 years / slow pace of putting our material, I feel. I think they are more or less constantly building songs, changing them, adding and subtracting things, recontextualizing them, etc, with a point B kind of framework in mind, but a point B that is open-ended and malleable to suit its overall needs both inwardly with as its referential material evolves and outwardly with the moment in history it's eventually released in. All that, and their threshold for when a song and an album counts as "finished" is WAY higher than most bands.

It's possible they've had "finished" iterations of lots of this music for a decade or decades and have just waited for the right alignment of track iterations, references/hidden messages, album framework, and time in history. So by the time they put this out, it's got all of a rich text (the music itself), subtext (the referential content between samples, titles, certain compositional choices, probably personal life development, and the overall artistic direction/package), and moment in history.

Putting all those things in conversation with each other and then being willing to work hard on one thing for over a decade before you decide it's ready is going to yield something impactful. It's putting in the work!

[The Other]

It's possible they've had "finished" iterations of lots of this music for a decade or decades and have just waited for the right alignment of track iterations, references/hidden messages, album framework, and time in history. So by the time they put this out, it's got all of a rich text (the music itself), subtext (the referential content between samples, titles, certain compositional choices, probably personal life development, and the overall artistic direction/package), and moment in history.

I have often thought this too. Seems they have countless tracks they have worked on over the years. Given that Inferno really sounds like so many different eras of BoC i think it is highly possible.

On the topic of Age of Capricorn...it has slowly become one of my favorites on Inferno.