A Door to Joy: the “Scaled and Icy” era

The Prelude

One of the surprises of the past three years was how popular a post I did on the theological language and style of the alt-pop band Twenty One Pilots. It’s been a slow burn, but it consistently gets revisited by fans of the duo. So I’d like to do a follow up.

On May 21, 2021, Twenty One Pilots released their album Scaled and Icy, and most reviews have been mixed. I never took the time to analyze the imagery and lyrics of their fifth album Trench, but I think it would be helpful first in order to understand why the sixth album is somewhat controversial. Trench came out in October of 2018, and from the very beginning, it was promoted as a deeply atmospheric concept album. At the risk of boring readers, the concept is the following. The protagonist of the fictional universe is a person who lives in a prison-fortress shaped much like a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence named DEMA. A tower of silence in Zoroastrian religion was an elevated place where dead bodies were placed, and through exposure to the sun and wild animals, the body was prevented from experiencing ‘complete’ putrefaction. It is for this reason that one of the symbols of Trench is the vulture, which has an almost Christological significance in Trench‘s universe, as it is a being which feeds on death, but yet lives. DEMA is ruled by nine evil entities who are called ‘bishops’ (maybe that’s why I like the band so much!), who try to prevent escape from the prison by artificial light displays, meant to hypnotize and confuse. Trench describes the escape and recapture of one of the prisoners, but not before he encounters the ‘Banditos’, a gang of rebels who helps prisoners to escape. Trench has the strong implication as being the place where dead bodies are thrown. Nevertheless, the protagonist holds out hope in his trench for his final liberation from DEMA: “In time, I will leave the city. For now, I will stay alive”, as the last song of the album proclaims.

As I mentioned in my previous work, DEMA is an amalgamation of various aspects of Platonism. Just like the Allegory of the Cave, the prisoners are chained in prison where they are deceived into thinking, via tricks of light, that the shadows that they see are real. Meanwhile, the vultures pick at their bones. Tyler Joseph very cleverly reinvents the myth of Plato with a postmodern twist; the creators of shadows and the world of appearances are principally the modern news media (see We Don’t Believe What’s on TV) lying politicians and other leaders (see Never Take It) and the herd mentality created by mass-produced pop culture (The Hype). These influences lead to existential dread and despair, ultimately leading to depression and suicide. In this way, Tyler is describing the natural end to what the ancients called the vice of acedia, which is in the emotional order a sadness toward what ought to cause joy. I could write several essays on the complicated use of metaphor Twenty One Pilots utilizes in order to describe the allure of despair. It can be best summarized by their track Neon Gravestones, where Tyler very delicately but bluntly asks whether the increasing public attention given to problems in the mental health arena, and especially the increasing problem of ‘deaths of despair’ are in fact not addressing the core problem of meaninglessness that people, especially young people, feel. Tyler recognizes that we are a culture that glorifies death, even as we claim to decry the result, and for that reason these gravestones are neon, like the faux-welcoming sign of a run-down dive bar from which there is no escape, a sort of 2020 Hotel California.

A Break or a Development?

It is somewhat clear then that Trench dealt with some very dark, metaphysically intense issues, with a profundity which is so atypical of music today. Fast forward, though, to 2020, a year which exacerbated the mental and spiritual crisis present in our culture, with an epidemic of loneliness and despair whose full effects we do not even fully understand yet. Tyler knew this, and hence wrote two ‘connector’ singles, Level of Concern (released during the first lockdowns, and whose proceeds were given to concert workers out of work) and Christmas Saves the Year, which celebrated the power of family, memory and belonging in a year when the world seemed like it was falling down. Tyler in interviews seems to have acknowledged this fact, and so the whole aesthetic of Scaled and Icy is an almost complete 180 from the past. I have to make a tip of the biretta to the savvy marketing at play here too, with the demand for the nostalgic sound of 80s and 90s melodies, and the bright pastel colors which appeal so much to people.

Scaled and Icy starts with the track Good Day, an upbeat track which nevertheless has some strange elements of self-doubt. Although the singer sounds happy, he asks if that happiness depends on the weather, and calls his sunshine a “buzz and a light”, and admits feeling that way in spite of hardship (“lost my job, my wife and child”). Nevertheless, because good days seem to come so seldom to him, he insists on “sing[ing] my soul”, or that is, to express what he is feeling inside. The fact that the ‘sunshine’ seems to be more subjective than objective has led some fans to speculate that Scaled and Icy is in fact a kind of propaganda piece for DEMA. Is Tyler really happy? Or has he been deceived? As usual, I think Tyler’s answer is nuanced.

In his mid-album track Mulberry Street, Tyler celebrates the virtues of being willing to live with emotional ambiguity, and the importance of not dwelling on inner turmoil. He says, “Keep your bliss/there’s nothing wrong with this”, “keep your sunny days/leave us in the rain…keep your pills, save your breath…ain’t no sunny skies, ’til you finally realize, that everybody relies on synthetic highs they find someone to prescribe.” In an age where everyone seems to want to take medication for the slightest mental discomfort (although I by no means discourage the use of medication for those who need it), I think this is a very helpful song. The refrain goes “Get out of our way, we’re moving sideways”. In other words, going forward in life isn’t about the emotional “highs” and the “lows”. What is important is that one is moving forward, and not backward. In this sense, I think that Scaled and Icy is a true development in terms of the character psychology presented in Trench. In Trench, the compass direction East (thus, toward the rising sun and the light) is described as that which leads up and out of DEMA. But to get there, one has to start by moving “sideways”, by putting earth under our feet and moving in that direction. Ever sensitive to the mystery of grace and redemption, and the fact that one can never move “East” without help, Tyler already explored that idea in his beautiful song Taxi Cab, where he describes himself as a man emerging from a coffin in the backseat of a hearse, where he hears the voices of three men (which many people theorize is a manifestation of the Holy Trinity) that tell him “We’re driving toward the morning sun/where all your blood is washed away/and all you did will be undone”. Experiencing one’s own mortality, and psychological births and deaths, is thus portrayed as carrying with it the possibility of theophany. The Paschal Mystery is mystically present in each human life.

Scaled and Icy seems to manifest more of the adage that what is most important in life is not avoiding the inevitable storms, but learning how to dance in the rain. Much has been made of the fact that Scaled and Icy is an anagram for ‘Clancy is Dead’. Clancy was a fictional prisoner of DEMA, who struggled to maintain his sanity and dignity under the bishops’ control (I’m with you there, Clancy!), and who yearned for the day he would be free. I would like to propose that yes, Clancy indeed may be dead, but only if we view him as a manifestation of the part of people that feels they are enthralled to the deceitful world of appearances. By learning to die, Clancy may have transcended those appearances, and so learned to enter the outside world where joy may be found. Perhaps the Trench, in an almost Dantesque inversion, was the point in Twenty One Pilots’ narrative topography where one meets the deepest parts of the earth, before emerging on the other end to see the stars. As Taxi Cab already mentioned, “Sometimes we will die, and sometimes we will fly away…I said, don’t be afraid. We’re going home.” Clancy may be dead, but not in the absolute sense: he has died to the world of slavery to illusion, and is moving to the world of the real. Tyler admits that journey is long and lonely, and that is the theme of The Outside, where he says he has a “long drive…I’ll tape my eyes/so I don’t fall asleep again”. In keeping with his earlier imagery comparing faith to wakefulness and doubt to sleep, he makes clear that being truly and spiritually “woke” always carries a price. In the case of the Outside, that is being “outside” the mainstream of what everyone else is doing. Instead of paying the “cover charge” of belonging to ‘the inside’, Tyler rejoices in being in the street, because there “they can’t touch me”. Is the inside a sort of DEMA, a prison for the mind and the soul?

The Price of Freedom

Scaled and Icy‘s track Never Take It sounds like a song custom-tailored to the disinformation age. He castigates the monetization of information, as we see so much in social media: “Information…is just a currency and nothing more/[they] keep the truth in quotations/’cause they keep lying through their fake teeth”. The result of these violations of human privacy and dignity, and the outright manipulation of facts, is what Tyler portrays as the weaponization of people against one another. Tyler compares the consumption of news to learning a musical instrument: “you better educate yourself, but never too much”. That is to say, it’s good to know what’s going on in the world around you, but it’s important not to let it consume you, any more than the hobby of picking up a guitar.

Fleeing from the postmodern cave of Plato means that one will always be pursued by ‘the bishops’, both internally and externally. The last two tracks of Scaled and Icy are arguably the most ‘Trenchlike’ of the album, with the deep bass shout of the bishops, who threaten, “We come for you…no chances”. This track has a lot of things happening. It is extremely ambiguous, but what it seems to depict is a sort of stakeout situation, with the protagonist in a house, with the bishops outside saying that they have come to retrieve him, to drag him back to DEMA. He refuses to move, and seems to be in the company of other people in common defense, who reassure him, “We got people on the way/we want you home in one piece (run away, run away)”. In other words, keep running in order to save yourself from being enslaved again. Quite literally, he says, “Ride or die, my son.” Again referencing the power of the techno-oligarchy, he asks how the bishops even found him, and he cleverly says they did so through the selling of his data: “How did you get the location? Put together pieces? They say they sell the information in those terms of agreement…surveillance is outside, we see when you arrive.” Is the building in which Tyler describes himself almost like a tech-free holdout from the constant indirect (and direct) surveillance exercised by our smartphones, CCTV, website cookies, and other things? In an ironic inversion of the situation depicted in The Outside, where Tyler celebrated being separate from the hoi polloi by dancing in the street, he admits there are also times where this relationship is more like a police stakeout, and instead of celebrating one’s freedom, one feels besieged by hostile forces. Meantime, as Tyler examines these questions, the bishops continue to cry out “We come for you, no chances”. Tyler leaves this tension unresolved. For now, the good guys are waiting for reinforcements.

The last track of the album, Redecorate, is arguably the richest and most emotionally incisive of the album. Tyler described in an interview how that song came about from the experience he had with a friend who showed him the bedroom of a child who had died. The parents could not bring themselves to remove the personal effects of the deceased child, and so it became a sort of shrine to the dead. There seem to be multiple characters all trying to make a decision to ‘redecorate’ their interior world, which may be a sort of analogy for clearing out one’s fears, guilt and anxiety to make room for the future. What I find most interesting is the one who “feels trapped when he’s not inebriated/fair to say he’s fairly sedated most days of the week/he might have made it if he lived on a different street/I repeat, scaled back and isolated.” What I think we should notice above all here is the indirect reference of scaled back and isolated to scaled and icy. This is no mistake. The protagonists of that song might feel free if they “lived on a different street”. Is that what Mulburry Street is, with its emphasis on “moving sideways”? Is it the path out of DEMA, which involves being able to cope effectively with the difficulties of life, with the help of grace?

The first character in the lyrics, a male, seems to hold in tension two contrary voices. There is a voice which tells him to “look around and tidy up”, and a voice which “orders from that corner where that shadow always lived.” The former may very well be the voice of God, while the other is the voice of the devil. The primary enemy of the protagonist is his own emotional inertia or paralysis. The second character, a female, decorates by putting blankets over her mirrors, to avoid her own reflection. Eventually this leaves her cold, and so she is forced to strip the blankets off the mirrors to cope. This forces her to confront the fact that she is “haunted by a couple big mistakes…she covers all the dents with the way she decorates”. She could redecorate her room, move on from her past mistakes, and so make a move toward new life, or she could leave everything as it is, like a museum of dead objects. In a sense, DEMA can even be the four walls of one bedroom, or the ‘four walls’ of one’s mind. All of us have a choice as to whether we want to redecorate, or leave things as they are. It’s never easy to change, but as long as we live in time, change in some way is necessary.

Cautious Joy

Scaled and Icy I think, no matter what, would be controversial for its sound, aesthetic and message after such a dark and densely narrative an album as Trench. It would be easy to dismiss this album as ‘DEMA propaganda’ in order to conceptualize such a shift toward a more upbeat frame of mind. But I think ironically this gives the victory to DEMA. What Tyler appears to be doing is showing listeners that joy is possible in the midst of suffering, and that suffering in and of itself does not condemn someone forever to be devoid of meaning, purpose and happiness. In fact, “pain is just a middleman”, and it is not the pain that defines us, but what we choose to do with it. The blessing of every day should be taken as it comes, which is the theme in much of the tracks Good Day and Saturday, with their emphasis on rejoicing even if the rest of the week wasn’t the best. Having company and seeking relationships with others helps in this. Tyler laments in his track Choker that he has “no volunteers to cosign on my fears…I’ll sign on the line.” We all have to face our fears, and no one can do it for us. But it is not true that “I know it’s a over/I was born a choker/Nobody’s coming for me”. The rest of the album makes clear that help, like the Banditos of the last album, is always at hand if we know where to look for it. Tyler understands well that isolation and loneliness is one of the greatest obstacles to having a joyful and fulfilling human life. This is one reason why he so publicly and loudly proclaims his love for his wife, daughter, and wider family.

Once again, I think Twenty One Pilots has achieved “pill in the hamburger” status. Through impactful lyrics and creative music, they once again are providing much needed truth and fun, especially for young people. Instead of focusing mostly on the themes of inner turmoil, I think Scaled and Icy forms a backdoor to joy. The band reminds us that the mistake we often make is to become scaled back and isolated in our attempt to be liberated from our ‘inner DEMA’. That is the lesson to be found in the dragon “Trash” of Scaled and Icy: the dragon, the archetypal image of a great devouring predator, is the manifestation of those limits we experience due to our human frailty. But like in most dragon stories, there is a dragon-slayer. And like all trash, when we redecorate, it’s meant to be discarded.