The Brutality Report - "Dust in the Wind" by Kansas

First off, fuck Kansas in the face for recording this song. They have zero right to make anyone as miserable as this song makes me. My hunch is that everyone in the English-speaking world, at one point or another, has had the experience of hearing that familiar, tweedly guitar strum while they are in public. It's the sort of soft melody you might hear from a dying troubadour in a courtyard full of purple plague corpses. Then comes a lyrical blast of pure, uncut nihilism:

Same old song
Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

and, a bit later,

Say farewell
Toilet of darkness eats everyone you love
Flush it down
We're just squares of TP for the man above

One and a half minutes in, they drop a violin into the mix. It's a borderline hate crime. GG Allin, Geto Boys, Cannibal Corpse, and Varg Vikernes never had the unmitigated balls to write something this brutal. What in the name of holy fuck did any of us do to deserve "Dust"? Why does Kansas hate us so?

I'm only talking about Kansas the band here. Not Kansas the state. Kansas the state is a place of love. It's a wonderful realm. Bob Dole, the inventor of Viagra, is from Kansas. The nice bits in The Wizard Of Oz and The Day After are set there. No one in physical Kansas has ever made me feel as viciously low as the people in musical Kansas. Kansans have little room for the psychic terror of their entertainer namesake. The state deserves far, far better musical representation. Why can't they get the deal Alabama got?

It's bad enough hearing this song at home, when you're by yourself, staring out the kitchen window, but it's even worse when the song worms into your consciousness through a trap door. Perhaps it's playing on the clock radio in the morning, or thudding from a nearby car at an intersection, or chiming quietly over the office radio. You don't think about its unbearable message until hours later. Then it hits you. If the sun is eventually going to explode and engulf the Earth, what's the point of mailing your Verizon bill? Or doing laundry? Or getting dressed?

Overhearing this song at the supermarket is the worst of all scenarios. This involves several layers of horror. First, there is the realization of futility. Why bother shopping for food and then using this food for its caloric energy? This is followed by the more urgent insight that all the other shoppers have reached the same conclusion. In the adjacent aisles, everyone stands glassy-eyed, staring down at their toaster strudels and frozen burritos in shock. From overhead comes an emotional megaton:

And all your money won't another minute buy

No loudspeaker announcement to a Soviet food warehouse ever trampled on the human soul as thoroughly as this song.

In the wake of 9/11, Clear Channel sent a memo to all their radio stations listing 165 "lyrically questionable" songs. "Dust In The Wind" topped the list (in sheer horror). The pending tenth anniversary of this memo is a rare opportunity for all of us. I urge you, write your representatives and demand this track's renewed banning. Sometimes censorship works. Seriously, if we can't push this simple bit of legislation—if we can’t push this nightmare off our nation’s airwaves—then the terrorists will have won. Meaning Kansas. Kansas will have won.

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Previously - The Teaching Profession