Since the release of the studio album, The Stage by Avenged Sevenfold, I've been wanting to do this but could not seem to do the album justice.
To call this album a masterpiece is an understatement, and I hope that by the time you complete this series of song reviews you will understand why I say this and perhaps you will agree.
The album is the band's first concept album, and their first featuring their new drummer Brooks Wackerman (from Bad Religion, Tenacious D, Infectious Grooves, Mass Mental, The Vandals, and Suicidal Tendencies).
First a little background on the inspiration for the entire album. The album is based upon ideas promoted by Carl Sagan and Elon Musk and includes several interlaced themes that include Artificial Intelligence, Interstellar Space Travel, Simulation Theory, and the human condition... all with a central theme centered on the idea that the Earth serves as the Stage to all of these concepts.
I was going to try to do a review of the entire album in one post but realized that it would not be giving it the justice that it deserves. Instead, I will make this a series with one post for each song on the album.
Track 1: The Stage
Watch this video. Make sure that you turn on the Captions so that you can see the lyrics.
The video was designed and produced by one of the guitarists of the band - Zacky Vengeance. The video was made using real hand-made puppets which were used to illustrate the history of humanity. When I first watched it I found it to be jaw-dropping. It left me speechless. To this day it still has a profound effect on me every time I rewatch it. The more you watch it, the more it will hit you.
This song is based on a speech done by the late, great, Carl Sagan. A transcript of that speech is included here because it deserves to be read by every human on this planet.
Carl made this speech after he convinced NASA to reorient the camera of the Voyager 1 spacecraft to capture an image of Earth as the probe left our Solar System.
The image featured a small faint dot hanging in a sunbeam, barely visible. The image and his speech follow:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Read the transcript of this speech, then read it again. Read it, commit it to memory for it is, in my opinion, some of the greatest words ever uttered by any human. Read them, then watch the music video again.
Seriously, watch the video (with captions) again. It will change you.
This was track 1.
Track 2 is up next.
Further reading:
The Planetary Society