24. Close Your Eyes and Count to #$@! - Run the Jewels feat. Zack De La Rocha

Anger is a troubling emotion.

It causes damage that ripples out and stains people and relationships well beyond the initial outburst.

Like anything, it’s utterly toxic in excess. It poisons the world and, as we’ve seen too much recently, it leads to truly tragic demonstrations of rage.

It infects generations, making the guilty accept the unacceptable from themselves, and making their victims accept it from their loved ones.  

But.

At moderate levels – and I think a ‘moderate’ amount is a much lower limit than for other emotions – it can sharpen the mind, direct energy and force change.

It can stimulate activity and engagement and drive people to support righteous causes in the face of bullies, hypocrisy and bullshit.

It’s a fine point, though, that balance between toxicity and empowerment, between pain and indignation.

Finding this balance is something I’ve struggled with in the past.

I’ve spent parts of my life defined – willingly – by my anger, my outrage, my ability to articulate sheer irritation.

But not anymore.

Well, not entirely.

Mine wasn’t an angry house when I was growing up.

But it was a house filled with people, and with people comes the full gamut of emotion – including anger.

Except ours was more of a sarcastic breed of anger, one that comes from frustration, aggravation and offense. It’s a different type, from what I can tell, than many people associate with anger.

In fact, the kind of emotive expressions that typically accompany anger were generally frowned upon.

Losing your temper was frowned upon – it meant you forfeited the argument, automatically – so keeping your cool and communicating was necessary.

I remember my over-analytical mind rehashing arguments to make sure it went differently the next time.

Looking back, I think this might be why I don’t turn into a sputtering mess when I get angry now. I instead get annoyingly wordy.

(And oddly sweaty).

It wasn’t toxic, thankfully, and it was sure as hell never physical.

It was just an emotion that was there, and that we had to work with as we formed our own emotional personalities.

But one thing that always stuck was a deep loathing of bullies.

My parents, for better or worse (it definitely didn’t help their employment histories), didn’t put up with bullies and they taught us – indirectly - not to as well.

Call them out, shame them and shut them up was the lesson I learned from seeing them deal with the generalist bullies we all deal with.

My dad told me a story once how he was threatened by a client, who told my father he’d go and get his gun to make my dad hand over the plans he’d drawn up.

Hearing that my dad responded by telling him to “go and get the gun so he could shove it up his arse” completely aligns with my parent’s historical approach to bullies – call them out, shame them and shut them up.

Even if it was clearly a silly thing to do.

There are plenty of angry songs out there, plenty of artists profiting from the frustrations and irritations of angry people.

But few of them achieve the poetic heights of outrage of Zack De La Rocha.

His voice was the soundtrack of my outraged anger for a long time, via his band, Rage Against the Machine.

That all faded with accusations and collaborations and the awfulness of Audioslave.

So I moved on.

Then he collaborated with Run The Jewels, and the three of them put a new voice to modern anger - Close Your Eyes and Count to F#$%.

This track is built around a looped sample of De La Rocha’s voice, with thumping drums and probing lyrics questioning the many, many points of disgrace coming out of the States.

The rusty razor guitar line and outstanding rhyme delivery make this an anthem of anger.

My understanding of anger evolved as I went through high school. It wasn’t an issue – I wasn’t in fights all the time and I didn’t stalk the corridors filled with rage.

But there were undoubtedly moments of frustration, irritation and anger.

And while I didn’t walk around hitting kids, there’s no doubt I used a sharp tongue without thinking about the impact it might have.

I could be a sarcastic, cynical, bitter little twerp is a more accurate way to put it.

I remember one time a kid was picking on a friend of mine on the bus and before I knew it I had him by the shirt, up against the window.

Now, it’s thrilling in the moment but idiotic in hindsight. I had three years and thirty kilos on this kid.

And what was I going to do anyway?

It wasn’t until I was a lot older that I realised how awful a thing it was to do to my friend as well, how humiliating and belittling it must have been for them.

I was fifteen, and I’d like to blame those pubescent hormones, but I was a teenager – not a toddler. 

Again, it morphed a little during my time at university.

Part of it was becoming conscious of the motivating effect anger would have on my work ethic – outrage, it seemed, was a potent driver of activity and concentration.

Another part of it was discovering Hunter S. Thompson’s work.

I’ll leave for another day a discussion of the merits or otherwise of his oeuvre, but at its core is a naïve kid disappointed by the gulf between justice and real life.

A kid outraged by the bullies, hypocrisy and bullshit in front of him.

A kid who used language to spotlight hypocrisy and attack the incumbent power structures.

Couple this with my time studying the civil rights movement and you have a powerful demonstration of times when anger is justified.

When choosing a side is an imperative, and once chosen you should commit and harness your outrage to productive ends.

I could never understand how people at that time weren’t angrier.

I now understand, of course, that they weren’t allowed the ‘luxury’ of being angry.

That showing any kind of emotion would immediately and unfairly undermine their screamingly legitimate complaints.

Isn’t it grimly funny how those in power use accusations of anger to diminish the complaints of those without power? Lucky that’s changed…

Eventually, I came to the realisation that sometimes - occasionally - anger is utterly justified.

But far too often, it’s simply not.

Because the risk is that when that point of justification is set too low - or used to excuse some gross behaviour - then you’re just another bully, another hypocrite.

Because demonstrations of anger – the melodramatic slamming of one’s fist on a desk, or ostentatious clenching of ones fist in the first place – immediately mark you as unreasonable, unreliable and unworthy.

You immediately lose the high ground, regardless of the inherent justice of your position.

It’s also frightfully intimidating for those people around you.

Horribly so.

That’s the thing about anger - even when you feel it’s justified by a righteous cause, it’s a very selfish emotion.

It so easily becomes a tantrum; the equivalent of a child lashing out with violence and venom because they’re not getting their way.

It’s an indulgent (over) reaction.

Fists might win fights, but facts win arguments.

Joining the workforce didn’t really do anything to dissolve this feeling of justifiable anger. It took me quite a few years to realise just how broken so many of our systems are.

And that passive acceptance of the status quo isn’t going to change anything. Sitting around complaining is about as productive as tapping your foot.

The last time I got really angry, though, was in my last job before striking out on my own. It was the GFC and suddenly we weren’t getting paid on time.

It’d come in 1 day, 2 days, or a week late.

When we asked about this, the real problem was the attitude.

Being told “What – you’ll get paid, why are you complaining?” by a collection of men that didn’t need to worry about making ends meet made my blood boil.

Cue me loudly debating the point with the head of the company in a futile – but heated – attempt to extract some level of empathy for his staff.

That he was also the person that used the phrase ‘n---- in the woodpile’ several times did nothing for my blood pressure.

Nothing changed, though. While satisfying, my angry little tantrum didn’t really achieve much.

But it did leave me feeling like I’d at least tried. Does that justify the outrage? The behaviour? The argument?

I still don’t know. But I do know that I left there shortly afterwards.

Working through the challenges of those first years in my own business certainly reduced the intensity of my ‘righteous’ anger.

Being humbled by repeated failures tends to reduce your tendency towards outrage.

Which was a good thing.

The tipping point of anger, where it goes from righteous flame to painful inferno is too fine to have it as part of your standard outfit.

I imagine it’s my age as well – I’m certainly slower to anger, and more patient when it comes to dealing with people.

Although waiting while some people struggle to use an ATM certainly tests that patience.

But I still get angry about bullies, hypocrisy and gaslighting (though I never knew that’s what it was called).

And there’s plenty of all three in my industry at the moment.

Reading some of the corporate bollocks being spouted in the industry media sets me off.

The unending stream of overpaid, parasitic, suits waxing lyrical about their new initiative / culling / brain fart is a constant background irritation.

That they do so without any acknowledgement of their role in the disastrous outcomes we’re all familiar with is simply galling.

Having somebody tell you how great they are after they’ve thrown your profession under a bus is a trigger for an especially futile tantrum.

Still – what’s one to do? You can’t spend all your time battling, fighting, scrapping and protesting.

Because the thing is, I hate conflict. I always have.

It’s unpleasant and the adrenaline hit that comes with it leaves me drained and shaking.

There’s no ‘winning’ in most arguments, not in real life. Too few people have the capacity to change their minds – even fewer have the ability to change minds.

Silence, I have learned, is generally the smarter approach.

But I’m like my parents, I suppose, and just can’t leave well enough alone with certain things.

Bullies.

Hypocrisy.

Bullshit.

I used to think anger was a positive thing if harnessed properly.

I used to feel like caring about things would – in this unjust and rigged world – inevitably lead to anger.

That it was a natural part of giving a damn, and that the alternative is do-nothing cynicism.

Part of me still thinks that – the righteous rage of an informed group can achieve real justice.

But I don’t value it like I used to anymore.

I’d brought it in as part of my makeup, my personality, but I don’t want it as a definitional feature anymore.

The potential cost is too high, the opportunity for pain too severe.

Especially as I learn more about the toxicity anger can breed, the pain it can perpetuate across relationships, families, groups and across generations.

The damage anger – especially that awful, entitled, male anger that so many people are forced to deal with – brings to the world is so severe that it needs to be approached very carefully.

Or, very differently.

And I don’t want it being adopted by my son as he grows up.

I want him to learn that yes, anger is natural, sometimes anger is right, but being a decent person means he needs to learn how to recognise it, process it and voice it to effect change, not cause fear.

I have no easy answers – for him, or anybody else. And I imagine I’ll always have a complicated relationship with anger.  

Because it’ll always be there for me.

If it’s not, I fear that it means I’ve given up. And, frankly, some things are worth getting angry about.

Bullies.

Hypocrisy.

Bullshit.

Because to give up in the face of everything being thrown at us, well, that’s a whole other set of problems, isn’t it?