On surviving HELLMODE

First, some commentary

Like most of my essays, I wrote this over a long time period. About eighteen months, in fact. The opening section came to me when I was feeling absolutely furious and hopeless about everything (I dunno; when wasn’t I?) and thrashed it out in my bed. I workshopped an early version as part of my Creative Writing MA: shout-outs to my course mates who gave vital and considered feedback.

The rest of the piece developed when I took a module primarily on writing climate change the following year. I started writing something on that specifically, which was outside of my wheelhouse and it showed. It was too pedestrian. Too nice. I revisited this when I hit a wall, realising I couldn’t untangle all the interconnected threads. This came through in the final assessment, where it attracted possibly my favourite ever piece of feedback: “You are very aware of the breadth of the attack you’re making on the status quo.” Hang it in the Louvre, tbh.

Mostly, it reminded me that I’m still a political music writer before I’m anything else.

---

On surviving HELLMODE

I watch a man transport his young daughter’s remains in the basket of a bicycle, followed by an advert for luxury travel. I am expected to pretend this is normal. A pile of bloodied limbs once attached to bodies. Bodies that belonged to people with lives, families, dreams. My heart heaves – don’t look away – but it’s 7am and I need to get ready for work. I put down my phone, sip my coffee and mentally prepare myself to write emails I don’t want to send and no one wants to receive while society falls apart in real time. The planet’s on fire, and we walk inexorably towards a future that feels unlikely, and if we reach it, what will be left worth saving?

I begin my commute. It will cost roughly twenty percent of what I earn that day and take three hours of my short and precious life if everything runs to schedule. Strikes go on for weeks and months as the rail workers resist the erosion of their pay and conditions. It’s good to be reminded that people are still fighting back. If I sound pessimistic, fatalistic even, please understand that I live in England. I watch a country – its political imagination as grey as the weather – let its quality of life dwindle to nothing as long as there are immigrants and foreign enemies and trans people to blame. The misery is the point. Provided someone else is suffering more, then we’re alright, (Union) Jack.

Writer and anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Bullsh*t Jobs, notes the ‘moral and spiritual damage’ associated with the nature of work within a late capitalist framework.¹ Specifically, many people do jobs they secretly don’t think should exist because they provide no real meaning or social value. They’re doing work for work’s sake to pay the bills. It underscores the hopelessness of continuing business as usual while watching the most catastrophic human and climatic violence several times a day. There is real work to do. Is my experience (or that of anyone in the global north living in relative comfort) remotely comparable to the horror being enacted on desperately oppressed peoples? Of course not. It’s part of the emotional whiplash; being utterly miserable while recognising your misery is a privilege. You get to turn the phone off. Make an impulse purchase for the dopamine hit. Find a way to block it out.

I throw on my headphones. I already know what I want to listen to because I’ve been listening to it three or four times a day for several weeks. It has to be start-to-finish––it’s not a singles album or one I can easily dissect for a playlist. At 41 minutes long, I can get through two runs before I get to the office.

This is HELLMODE.

Critics have described Jeff Rosenstock’s music as prescient. In 2016, his second album, WORRY., elevated him from patron saint of Punknews readers to a much wider audience. It captured the sense of unease at a culture defined by Silicon Valley, flagrant landlordism and living in cities that “don’t care if you live or you die” (from ‘Staring Out the Window at Your Old Apartment’). He followed it with 2018’s POST-, written in the wake of Donald Trump’s (first) election as U.S. President. Following in this bleak tradition, he dropped 2020’s NO DREAM in the middle of a global pandemic. That same year saw mass shootings and the boiling point of police brutality that galvanised the Black Lives Matter movement. I won’t run through everything bad that happened from the album’s release in September 2023 to the present, though it must be tiring being so relevant all the time. It’s a back catalogue of what it is to be living through this timeline: fucked.

But Rosenstock cannot predict the future. He’s witnessing collapse and just trying to survive it. These are punk songs, not prophecies. In ‘HEAD’, he illustrates the existential malaise:

It’s difficult articulating any silver lining
When the signal fires burning cast a fog over the sky
I am screaming something that will later be deleted
And bracing for a world no longer suitable for life

I know how hard it is to be optimistic and that it must seem counterintuitive to listen to music that corroborates my most terrible thoughts. Still, I find myself leaning on his music again and again to calm my anxious brain because his brain is anxious, too. It almost feels invasive, as though the lyrics were written directly from the perspective of my particular mental illness. At this point, I wonder if they should add being a Jeff Rosenstock fan to the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria.

Aside from being the album’s title (stylised in all-caps, which heightens the sense of panic), HELLMODE is a concept. ‘Something’-mode has been introduced into popular parlance through internet-speak. ‘Goblin mode’, for example, was voted by the public as Oxford’s word of the year 2022. It describes descending into a feral state, rejecting the ideal of a productive citizen, wearing pyjamas all day and staring at your screen(s) of choice. It’s the memeified version of poet Mary Oliver’s directive to ‘let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’, especially if what it loves is eating crisps in bed and scrolling until your remaining brain cells turn to soup. (Incidentally, ‘soup mode’ is another example, dating back to a 1996 episode of Seinfeld.)

HELLMODE can also be considered a video game difficulty setting. They start at ‘easy mode’ and work their way up to the most challenging: ‘hell mode’. With each increase in difficulty level, the baddies get harder to defeat and begin to appear in greater numbers. You might not have a full health bar or complement of weaponry, yet you must fight on. Stop me if the metaphor is getting too real, because this is exactly where we are. Rosenstock might not have foretold the end times, but he sure knows how to describe them. In the song ‘FUTURE IS DUMB’, he calls this the ‘infinite tragedy’. It’s the next crisis on the 24-hour news cycle without an end in sight.

As I write, the ‘infinite tragedy’ presents as three major acts:

1. Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

2. A health insurance CEO has been shot dead in a Manhattan street.

3. Los Angeles is burning to the ground.

***

I escape from the conference. I’ve had enough. It was the point at which someone declared that their (rich, prestigious) organisation ‘did quite well out of the pandemic, actually’ that I decided. My options are to speak up or leave, and I choose the latter. I don’t have it in me to pick a fight; plus, I’m on company time. I’ll save it for the post-event feedback form. I need to see the streets of Glasgow as they are, which, currently, is strewn with litter owing to the latest bin collection strikes. It is the first day of September 2022, and the weather is still warm enough to smother the city, intensifying the smell of abandoned waste piled on the roadside. It is rancid and wonderful and real. I can breathe for the first time in days, free from my Serious Adult costume. No one here is going to talk to me about engagement metrics. They likely won’t talk to me at all.

I stop to use a public toilet somewhere on my journey between the Gallery of Modern Art and Central Station. Sitting in the cubicle, I notice the sign in front of me. It isn’t a glossy advert strategically placed to take advantage of my active attention––boldly assuming I can pee without looking at my phone. Instead, it is a message scrawled in black marker pen:

They will not care until it is their homes that are on fire!!

I have often thought about this message since. I consider it an instructive text. ‘They’ are the politicians, CEOs and billionaires who make the decisions that lead to catastrophe. But I also think ‘they’ means us and I also think it means me. It’s easy to pretend that everything is okay when the flames, by wildfire or warfare, are not at your door––until they are. We know they’re coming for the wealthy and privileged last, but in the end, no one’s riches will protect them. It takes an extreme arrogance – which, granted, is not in short supply – to believe anyone is bigger than the forces of the earth.

The question I’m left with from my toilet door edict is this: if that’s what it takes for the powerful to care, then who’s gonna light the match?

***

Rosenstock, a New York City native, moved cross-country to Los Angeles in 2020. Today, the city is engulfed in flames. The frequency and severity of wildfires in the area have increased, and this one has been reported to be one of the most destructive––so far. Violence in its many forms is a common theme in his music, though the violence of climate destruction is a new and pronounced focus on HELLMODE. But rather than succumbing to his characteristic dread, he opts for anger. I think it’s important to recognise, though, that anxiety has a protective function and is a wholly appropriate response to existential threats. It’s clear why we’re all overwhelmed by everything: we’re in survival mode. ‘SOFT LIVING’ faces these emotions head-on. Rosenstock acknowledges that the gentler options aren’t working, and we can’t self-care our way out of the ‘infinite tragedy’. He knows his targets and names them.

Count to ten and breathe
Drink some water when your head starts spinning
I tried everything that was easy
Oh, it’s hard, soft living
What’s it gonna take
To guide the brush fires to eradicate
Every single trace of these
Scum fuck, white supremacist shit lords?
When this song comes on
Burn a police car

A fundamental truth is at play. We have tried polite and respectable ways to resist the collapse of society and the destruction of the planet, and they have all failed spectacularly. While Rosenstock writes broadly from an American perspective, the principles could apply to the United Kingdom or any other major democracy in crisis. Voting has little meaningful effect in two-party electoral systems where neither offers a real alternative. Supporting a genocide looks the same dressed in red or blue. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has convened for thirty years – a generation – and carbon emissions are higher than ever. In 2024, annual global warming passed the 1.5C mark named in the Paris Agreement as the threshold to ‘significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.’ We will keep choosing the least-worst option until we reach oblivion.

The casing on the bullets that killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson reportedly read ‘deny, defend, depose’. The words are thought to reference Delay, Deny, Defend, a book by law professor Jay M. Feinman revealing the tactics insurance companies use to avoid paying out claims and increase their profits. When applied to the U.S. health insurance system, these are life or death decisions. In the wake of the shooting, there is a palpable lack of sympathy for Thompson that crosses the usual political and class divisions. It even goes as far as support for his alleged killer, who becomes something of a meme, an internet hero. Questions are asked in the media on how debased society has become to celebrate the violent death of a family man. But it is easy to see the unfortunate inevitability of it all when access to healthcare is dependent on income and denied for profit. According to a 2023 lawsuit brought against UnitedHealthcare, the company allegedly used AI with a 90% error rate to make decisions on claims. This is structural violence. No bullets were fired, but the death warrants were still signed.

As journalist Zito Madu writes:

To see the killing and mass indifference to Thompson’s death as a sign of moral decline, while ignoring the normalization of the death and suffering of every victim beneath him, is to advocate openly for the idea that there are those who deserve life and those who don’t.

That some lives are valued over others is true whether talking about Palestine or economic inequality or climate change. In David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, he quotes a foreign minister describing the impact of two degrees of global warming as ‘genocide’.² The ‘infinite tragedy’ is interconnected. It is all part of the same system of power and capital that will see all efforts for progress fail until we reimagine the entire thing. The problem is that we are constantly gaslit into believing something else is true or asked to look the other way. Prevailing narratives on carbon emissions put more pressure and responsibility on the individual – average working people – than billion-dollar corporations. Politicians have called for a ceasefire in one breath and sent arms to Israel in the next. They lament the lives lost and call to a common humanity while shaking hands with the perpetrators. The media has taught a masterclass in using the passive voice when reporting depravity on an unthinkable scale to conceal the aggressor’s identity. We have seen things through our phones that will scar a generation, yet we can’t talk about it. Not truthfully, for fear of damage to our reputations and careers. It is maddening. It feels like losing your mind.

And, so, when Rosenstock offers us the opportunity to scream along to “FUCK ALL THESE PEOPLE!” at the apex of ‘GRAVEYARD SONG’ it doesn’t feel puerile or overly simplistic; it feels right. What else is there to say?

I know you want me to get to the hopeful part.

I believe that anger is inherently optimistic. Sure, it isn’t always well-directed or acted upon in healthy or useful ways. But it has a role––a warning signal that something is hurtful or unjust and compels us to seek out the source and change it. Anger can be action can be hope. Targeted correctly, anger might be the only tool we have left in the box. It’s why someone blows up a pipeline or takes to the streets. If, as Rage Against the Machine’s Zach De La Rocha once said, ‘anger is a gift’, then it is our moral imperative to drink in its abundance.

It is for this reason that I remain so compelled by punk rock. It carries a strong tradition of anti-establishment and liberatory politics that can’t be detached from the aesthetic. While there are plenty of fakes and false idols in the broad church of the genre, I still believe in it as a force for change. Change that happens on principles of direct action and mutual aid, outside of electoral politics and state structures. Rosenstock follows in this history. Listen to anything from HELLMODE or his previous records, and you’ll hear his reverence for bands like Dillinger Four or Green Day. But he’s creating his own history. Far from wanting to engage in hero worship, his lyrics give voice to a generation of punks that feel like they’re screaming into the void. In ‘3 SUMMERS’, he asks:

How hard can you go and for how long can you sustain it?
When the force that fights back doesn’t ever relax
It’s so relentless, oh, how long can you defend against a cheat code
At a furious pace with a smile on your face

He’s screaming with us.

***

I watch a young girl and her mother standing with a cardboard sign at the clock tower. There’s a sea of placards, and many of them are held by children who know things about the world they should never have to know. Flags of red and white and green and black. The streets undulate as thousands of people move together in rhythm and purpose. I am standing on a concrete platform. It’s unclear what role it plays in the usual architecture of the city but today that city looks different. For now, it’s my lookout point. Breaking out from the crowd, I think about how you don’t really appreciate the scale of a protest until you get an overhead view. You notice everyone and no one at once. The megaphones cry out different chants, sound waves intersecting overhead until you can grasp the closest one. Words feel heavier in your mouth when they leave to join a thousand, ten thousand others. My voice cracks under the weight of what we are saying together. Some might say that marches are nothing more than vanity, but I think there is joy in the collective movement. It’s the most hopeful I have felt in months.

Following the protest, some weeks later, I visit the encampment that students have built on my university campus to stand against the genocide in Gaza. They’ve occupied the green outside the main administrative building in full view of senior leadership. I know they are braver than I am, sacrificing comfort and shelter and likely their studies in service of something bigger. They join a long history of student-led movements fighting for social justice. However, the controversy surrounding the encampment’s existence makes me wonder if the academy as a site of protest has been wiped from memory. I question what else we are here to do beyond churning out employable graduates. I drop off a bag of food and share some words of solidarity that feel wholly inadequate. I tell the person at the welcome stand that I believe we will see a free Palestine in their generation’s lifetime. She invites me to a sign-making session that afternoon as a security guard watches on. I don’t notice the girl standing behind me until she approaches and asks, “Can I give you a hug?”

A teardrop falls to the grass. I am reminded that action begets action. Every act of resistance empowers another. It will take a range of strategies to defeat the ‘infinite tragedy’––and we do not always have to colour within the lines. We get to say ‘no’ in a thousand big and small ways. Each time we stand together, start a fundraiser, make a sign, share a story. Each time we confront our elected officials and demand a better answer or they lose our vote. Each time we boycott an organisation, resign membership of another, speak up even when it risks a career or a friendship or a follower, we assert our agency. This is the truest evidence of our shared humanity and the only thing that will alleviate the despair. As Andreas Malm argues in the concluding chapter of How to Blow Up a Pipeline:

Like each grain of sand in the pile, an individual joining the counter-collective could boost its capacity on the margin, and the counter-collective could get the better of the enemy. No more is required to maintain a minimum of hope: success is neither certain nor probable, but possible.³

Or, as Rosenstock would have it: “Don’t wanna hold out for the end of the world.”

1. Graeber, David, Bullsh*t Jobs (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018) p. xxi

2. Wallace-Wells, David, The Uninhabitable Earth (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019) p.9

3. Malm, Andreas, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (London: Verso, 2021) p.147