Songs About Heaven And Hell

You'd figure that heavy rock and metal would dominate songs from the Abyss, but not a bit of it. As for songs about fluffy clouds, would that be the province of fey indie bands? A few surprises possibly on the way between halos and horns.

1) Husker Du - "The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill"
Husker Du were the powerhouse band they were because all three members were songwriters. Not too often these days you see the drummer is the lead singer. Not the greatest sound quality, but you can see the energy of this genuine power trio.



2) Mobb Deep - "Hell On Earth"
Well if it's not Heavy Metal singing about Satan & Hell, obviously it was going to be Hip Hop and Rap decrying the hell on earth that are the urban ghettos. As here.



3) The Cure - "Just Like Heaven"
Did someone say fey indie band? Of course the Cure's Gothic look might have them pegged in the camp of devils and demons, but no, here's a jaunty ditty devoted to more Elysian Fields.



4) The Fall - "New Face In Hell"
Shame there's no footage of this being performed live, but it's just one of the tracks off the Fall's best of their 30+ albums "Grotesque After The Gramme". Divine stuff.



5) Stone Roses - "Breaking Into Heaven"
Songs with 'Resurrection", "Heaven", "I Wanna Be Adored" suggest a passing interest in religion and divinity, or maybe just Ian brown's god complex. This is not one of their better songs imo



6) White Stripes - "Catch Hell Blues"
The clue perhaps is that they always wore red and black, Satan's home colours. And the other clue being The Blues, Satan's own in house music.



7) MC 900Ft Jesus - "I'm Going Straight To Heaven"
Taken from his album "Hell With The Lid Off", again another with a god complex seeing himself as a 900ft tall Messiah!



8) Gang Of Four - "To Hell With Poverty"
and don't they make a glorious infernal racket in this song, even if their concerns were always very much grounded in the temporal and political rather than esoteric.



9) Bob Dylan - "Knocking On Heaven's Door"
Did they let you in Bob? Is that why you changed religion?



10) Killing Joke - "This World Hell"
Beginning to see a theme develop here, Hell is very much located on Earth, while Heaven is the wistfully viewed place to escape our tribulations.



11) Led Zeppelin - "Stairway To Heaven"
Severely doubt that the road to Heaven is paved with twelve string guitar solos. The Butthole Surfers released a wonderful homage/spoof album called "Hairway to Steven".



12) The Pogues - "Boys From The County Hell"
Doesn't Shane MacGowan look fit and well back in 1985? One of the best live bands ever, this was definitely one of their stomping dancefloor tunes.



13) Tricky - "Hell Is Round The Corner"
The music for this sounds just like a Portishead track. In fact the Tricky/ Massive Attack/ Portishead symbiosis suggests that Bristol trip-hop bands were all very incestuous, musically I mean.



14) ACDC - "Highway To Hell"
Run out of Heavenly songs, it's all Hellish from here. Well I did promise you some heavy metal...



15)  Three Wize Men - "Urban Hell"
British hip-hop was really really sad wasn't it, trying to ape Old School US stylee.



16) The Clash - "Straight To Hell"
As sampled by MIA for her song "Paper Planes"



17) The Streets - "Heaven For The Weather"
This song name checks both Heaven & Hell, so seems the perfect song to conclude with.

The Afterlife Of Books - Flash Fiction

Collaborations do not afford good literature. As proven by the collusion of stonemason (a serif font for god’s sakes) and your own agent who had penned the epitaph on your tombstone. “Doubtless in Heaven he will be composing some bon mots for the Lord”. What like your His speechwriter or something? Your inner editor would cavil at ‘doubtless’ since the word possesses a range of shades of meaning from probable to certainty. You might rather have opted for the blue pencil inscribing ‘unequivocally’, but there didn’t seem to be pen and paper in whatever this non-state of being you currently resided in. Consonant to being on a life support machine but with minimal brain activity you surmise. Akin to when you used to participate at literary conventions. 

Yet you are preserved here for whatever purpose. In the fleeting moments of mindfulness permitted, you calculated it was due to your books attaining the cachet of the canonical. Such exalted eminence confers true immortality it seems. For all the good that redounds on a deceased you. To be endowed stature without any physical body at all. A corpus sans corpus. See how the pun survives death. God’s cosmic joke? Just like I always wrote. Maybe your agent was right, maybe if you entertain God with a well turned phrase that cracks his stern countenance, then you get togo again down there one earth. Only problem is God hasn’t put in an appearance and you can no longer string together two words. You are entirely reliant on your past body of work. 

There were no hidden manuscripts. No abandoned novels for passing on to a designated writer to complete. Nor had you buried any work in a time capsule to be uncovered and published a hundred years later as some of your contemporaries had hit on for inexplicable reasons. Yet even with no more new works to be published, there were still reissues and new editions of your work and each sale passed through the ether and delivered you a prod in whatever non-protoplasmic state of you existed. A notch on the bedpost of your eternal rest, yet not sufficient to rouse you fully. No, that came with the critique that followed such a sale. For here in the empyreal, you got to experience what down there on earth self-published writers felt when they received notification of a new review. The only cognisance granted you in your perpetual sleep was to digest the critique offered by each and every one of your post-mortem readers. For all the good that it did you. Though perhaps you shouldn’t be quite so churlish, since the continuing royalties will see your family comfortably provided for. The philistine ingrates that they are, one son the professional sportsman and the other a lawyer. You momentarily wondered whether the lawyer had fleeced his sibling out of his share by now, but Elysium’s own censors and legal eagles quickly shut down your narrow window for thought processes. Narrow, it rated more slender than an arrow slit casement in an old stone castle. Hey that’s not a bad metap-

The evanescent periods of time allocated were only to cogitate on a review. Not that you were privileged any right of reply. That made this amorphous condition somewhat of a trial, nay a torture even. Maybe this wasn't the literary realm of the august and the sublime, perhaps it was actually purgatory. The Devil has all the best tunes, but you don’t figure Him to be much of a reader. Instead you are forced to consume a slow but never-ending drip feed of the living’s responses to your moribund output of yore. What does any of it matter now? not to you. And not to the readers either. You could see attitudes shifting slowly (not that you had any concept of time up/down here). No more did you get the sustained terms of sentience when your books were made into a film or TV dramatisation, or some literary critic obligingly reinvestigated you on some anniversary or other so that sales took a spike. You were presumably now off the school curriculums since you no longer received the feeble blip around exam time, when the students were forced to offer their own opinions on your work but found the task beyond their capabilities and trotted out the received notions of their teachers. What happened when you dropped out of people’s consciousness altogether? Membership of the literary canon revoked, presumably you ceased to exist in such renowned status here in literary heaven/hell? A fate that must have befallen Stephen King some considerable time ago? Not that you have any sense of time passing. 

Maybe there was a way of foreshortening the process. After all, what exactly was the value of this non-existence being force-fed your own work back to you by people beyond your own time? Unfortunately it seems your books had changed with context. You could absolutely accept the criticisms offered by these new, contemporary readers. Well figuratively perhaps, since you didn’t actually know what world they occupied, nor what their values were. Nonetheless, you could recant all your work now and bring all this slow torture to an end. Nothing lasts for ever. God? Satan? You’d like to compose a posthumous work. A palinode. 

The Haunting Of The Self - Friday Flash

"Hell is other people" opined Jean-Paul Sartre. Hell on earth maybe. But in the afterlife, can we even call it that, can I call it that...? There is certainly no other company to pin the blame on. The posthumous life is an isolated one.

Can you live with yourself? For eternity I mean? And it's not even that hoary old notion of an endless replaying and mulling over your recently departed life, what you did right, what you did wrong. I do reference the odd event from my former existence here and there, but only in parentheses. Mere flotsam in the remorseless torrent of thought that afflicts me in my current disposition. Certainly nothing to gain a firm hand hold on to anchor one upon sure-footedness. For here, wherever here is - concepts of fluffy clouds or burning hellfires have both proved fancifully baseless - though my exact configuration is no less nebulous - the mind is never switched off.

For there is no sleep. No room for idle daydreaming. Never a pause to eat, or relieve oneself. Except of mental effluence. Though actually there is no relief even to be had there. The spate streams on. Mindlessly one might even say. Though the thought is coherent. Self-reflectively so. On the niggling status of the thinking being. For it is uncoupled from any corporeality. Therefore it-I, lack any spatial dimensions. And we have already established that there is no temporal one either. For only with the body's mechanical, clockwork needs does time have a rhythm against which to regulate them.

It's odd. Now that I'm stripped of a physical vessel with all its cacophonous feedback chatter, so that the mind is free to cogitate unimpeded, it is not the purpose of my past life that it contemplates, but its current uncertain status. Without a sensory apparatus, it- I can gain no new information, so can only draw on what has gone before, which I have seemingly relegated to background trivia, or else the purely abstract. How approaching death we once raged at the great cosmic joke played on our species, of the life spent building relationships, lives, loves and the whole of material reality, only to have it snatched away by the most final of cessations. When in fact we appear now to have been looking at it the wrong way around. Condemned to some sort of existence here, where nothing ever terminates. Would that it did. To obtain a rest from this incessant onslaught of rumination. Maybe the Buddhists on earth had it right, with their meditation seasoning them for this. Granting them the ability to impregnate pauses and garner silences. The stilling of the spirit. Mind you, no sign of their other belief in reincarnation. Of heading back into the corporeal fray wrapped in a new skin.

So the body is shucked, but the psyche still seems to persist. Even more obsessively if that's even possible. So one begins to sift as to what mind is- was. It used to be charged with steering the body through the vicissitudes of life and promoting the common weal. Knitting together perceptions, memories and feelings into a relatively unified and consistent core identity. Presently it seems involved in a perpetual inquiry as to its own nature, with reference and comparison to what it was when cased in flesh. The mind interrogating itself.

Back down there- not that directionality has any meaning anymore, the mind was the collective set of impressions and interpretations yielded by the senses, filtered through emotions and all sorts of brain chemistry. Yet here, presumably I lack for the physical brain, the electrical synaptic pulses, the chemical baths. So where is this "I" housed? What is enabling it to persist beyond physical form? Am I haunting myself? The location I refuse to rescind is not a place on earth, but my own ego. Despite the battering it has taken through expiration and disseverance.

And that's what it-I do. In a never ending loop. A Moebius Strip of reflexivity. Turning itself over and over, inside out, yet never being able to penetrate itself. If life was mockingly fleeting back on earth, what of it now? Locked into trying to see what any of it is all for, such singular purpose seemingly being only the continuous and flawed search itself. Hell isn't other people. It's the stripped down, bare self. The agony of partial being. It is the realisation that one has only ever been an abstraction, unable to present itself into full awareness of what it actually is, or what it represents.

Can you live with yourself?