02. Bad Manners

This song is trying to find harmony and balance between both sides of my personality and purpose. I want peace, love, justice, freedom- typical reggae values and I horror, darkness, and passion, rebellion. I also want to be successful, self-supporting, hardworking and I want to be happy, free, and foster good relationships. I have two divided parts of myself, mostly because I’m afraid to invest into myself as an asset, so I depend on companies, businesses, or others to silence the argument. The problem with being divided is even though I have a degree and got a full-time job I wasn’t going anywhere because I’m going two different directions. It was the beginning of starting to accept responsibility and my purpose.  I was at the point in my life where I was sick of suffering just to be polite to others conventional paths. 

I didn’t write down any of these lyrics until the very end, just let it go. I also just jammed the riff over a drumbeat, which I heard was how Bob Marley and the Wailers wrote most of their songs. Metaphorically and literally I was finding my own voice and direction. In African based music there is usually a click that helps keep the rhythm with lots of other rhythms occurring. Metal music has a lot going on so I thought adding the reggae “chucks” would give it some stability as I figure out how this should sound.

I wrote this song after I went to an Iya Terra reggae concert and I noticed the reggae and metal were both half times based. I thought that reggae music was talking too superficially instead of uplifting others and resisting downpression. I also thought that if I were to describe myself this is what it would be- a metal dread head. Basically, I thought about getting a seven-string guitar like Korn to get some groove and making some sick bass lines with it. You can sort of hear it in the reference to “I’m fed up I’m coming undone” to Korn’s “Coming undone”. The “clean vocals” are slightly influenced by Eek-A-Mouse with his accent.

In Jamaica the call the Rasta or musicians’ rude boys. The Rastas tend to be outsiders looking in on society and I felt like Metal and reggae were both outsider traditions. So rude boys must have bad manners. Ultimately, I found no meaning in conventional workplaces, or romantic relationships.

This is the rebel anthem. The system, real or imagined, wasn’t working for me and I wasn’t working for it. I reflected a lot on my needs at this point in my life in terms of love, rest, knowledge, and respect and vowed to take responsibility for getting what I need and saying it. I listed out what I needed versus what I wanted.