Let's take a step back from that first Gizzpost and re-examine the start of it all: I'm In Your Mind Fuzz. The album opens with the famed "Mind Fuzz Suite," which consists of "I'm In Your Mind," "I'm Not In Your Mind," "Cellophane," and "I'm In Your Mind Fuzz."
Everybody's lazy when they're tired
Because everybody's sucking on fluoride
And everybody's filing into line
Because everybody's sucking on fluoride
When I'm in your mind
Then I'm in your mind
The members of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are millennials who lived through the fluoride scares and conspiracies from the 90s and early 2000s (though these conspiracies still persist; just check the lyrics page on Genuis to see for yourself. Surely everyone is a mind-controlled thrall because of fluoride in the water, and not because of the myriad social pressures that exist to keep everyone in line. There is no sarcasm font, but I hope the italics can make it pretty obvious that King Gizz are likely taking a jab at conspiracy theorists in tongue-in-cheek fashion. However, once that thought is in your mind, it is in there. It becomes a background musing, then a nagging thought, until it builds into a full-on fixation. I'm partway choosing to interpret this as King Gizz announcing "Hey, we're gonna be in your weirdo brains for a while, you cooked-ass millennial fucks are gonna eat this shit up."
This leads us to "I'm Not In Your Mind," which is an instrumental track that contains the "Streets of Cairo or, the Poor Little Country Maid" motif. Of course, I was introduced to this riff long before Gizzard entered my life, but in the form of the schoolbus rhyme:
You may wear no pants in the southern part of France
But you'll need some grass to cover up your ass
..Thanks Dad. Anywho, the absence of lyrics here offers the interpretation that the lyrics, the words are an external self being implanted into the listener. So, the narrator is out of your head, for the time being anyway. This brings us to "Cellophane," which also has a music video, which I'll discuss first. The music video offers a view of someone (Stu) from the real world being sucked into the television after putting on 3D glasses, transporting them into a psychedelic kaleidoscopic wormhole. Upon being sucked in, Stu dons red robes and is flying through the liminal space, arms outstretched in Superman fashion. Six other figures (band members) are seen wearing the same red robes, and are jamming out to this tune.
Some speculation: Typical, old-school 3D glasses have a red filter and a blue filter. On the RGB CYMK color wheel, the color directly between red and blue is magenta. Pocket that thought for later; it may come in handy for a far future speculative thingamajig regarding the fourth color, tetrachromacy, and "Magenta Mountain". Now, as far as the lyrical content goes:
You can watch your movies in 3D
It's so strange
With cellophane, cellophane
and:
You can color everything you see
It's so strange
Donning your 3D glasses offers a new perspective of the world, coloring everything and breaking through dimensional barriers, at least perceptually. Bringing 2D content into the third dimension... what if you could go up another dimension?
Moving on, "I'm In Your Mind Fuzz" repeats the refrain of "I'm In Your Mind," cementing the fixation into the minds of the listener.
When I'm in your mind
Then I'm in your mind
After the Mind Fuzz Suite, the high rolling energy comes crashing down into "Empty," a track where the narrator describes the feeling of emptiness they feel from the world.
There is nothing deep inside of me
Love is nothing like it used to be
Feeling so empty
...
Life is death
It's because I shot it through its head
I'm wandering around so lazily
...
But I don't feel empty when I'm with you
I feel like you level me too
On its face, the track is personal, perhaps about Stu's disillusionment with the world at the time of writing the album. There are certainly Gizzverse implications, though; I think the Altered Beast/Alter Me Suite from Murder of the Universe could relate here, but I won't get into that. For now, just know that this track may have implications for future albums.
Time for "Hot Water," a personal favorite of mine but only the live versions ("Hot Water Live in New York '24" is fucking incredible). The refrain of "Hot water" is repeated many times in this track, with the verse following:
Eat up
Vomit
Date line
Repay
System failure
Wish for old way
Hot water being repeated ad-infinitum elicits a sense of familiarity with hot water; in another sense, it gets in your mind and stays there, but you don't really notice it. Sorta like a frog in hot water. The lyrics above indicate a robotic perspective, and may be referring to Han-Tyumi, another character from the album Murder of the Universe. I still wanna keep the scope of speculation/analysis to this one record, so that's all I'll say for now on MOTU. There is also a motif played by the flute that is later played on "Robot Stop" from Nonagon Infinity, indicating some sort of linkage there.
"Am I In Heaven?" May be the intersection of the real world and the Gizzverse, at least if it's taken literally as Stu's perspective on the world. The opening lyrics go:
I've got ideas in my brain about the end of the world that I won't even say
When all the bricks that build our brain will be turned into sand by the eternal wave
If we save her, we'll live on a star because Mother Nature made everybody else so far
Am I in heaven?
If we take the narrator/Stu to be the primary storyteller for the Gizzverse, then all future ideas and albums about the end of the world spew forth from here. Additionally, there's more talk about water and its power, in this case the potential wiping out of humanity (Hot Water, Murder of the Universe and Crumbling Castle). Stu/narrator may be tetrochromatic, seeing the other worlds and future endings of the world. If we do well to save Mother Nature, surely we will be rewarded. Surely this is something we can strive for, and nature can be saved by human intervention and artifice... right?
The track also features an appeal to nature, both in referring to Mother Nature making everyone who is living (so far; androids/cyborgs are gonna be a doozy for humanity hint hint nudge nudge wink wink). The remainder of the lyrics also touch on this theme
Well everybody that I knew has jumped right in and taken over you
And I swear even the ocean's changed its hue
The lesson rings again
Repeats within my brain
Let's all put her to the test
C'mon suck our mother's breast
...
And everybody that I knew has taken bits and pieces out of you
And I swear even the sky has changed its blue
The lesson rings again repeats within my brain
Let's all put her to the test
C'mon suck our mother's breast
Drink from Mother Nature's teat and be rewarded, or destroy her bounty and be lost forevermore. Oh, and nature is being obliterated, Gaia is being carved up for her resources and the ocean, the sky, are sick, turgid with the bastard child of humanity and the evils they wreak upon her surface. Some folks on the Genius site are trying to link it to Lord of Lightning/Han-Tyumi only and I think they are thinking far too lineraly and literally. To be a fundamentalist as a scholar of the Gizzverse is to a fundamentalist lmao, don't do that shit. Honestly, "Am I In Heaven?" is a great Gizzverse track as far as the many many paths one track can lead us down, due in part to themes of anamnesis being drawn from (past lives from the sea of dreams swirl and mix together, and what we can even recall can be murky and incomplete) as well as the fact that the Gizzverse was very much still in construction at this time. This is venturing a bit further from the scope of this article, but I doubt that Stuart and the band have really gone in and wrote down a whole massive Gizzlore Bible that they draw from; it's generative, it's (re)contextualizing, and, most importantly imo it's dudes who took way too many psychedelic drugs to tell a story in a straight line anymore, which is great because my permafried noodle prefers stories that somersault.
Now with that tasty nugget out of the way, time to head into the closing section of the album. "Slow Jam 1" is pretty simple; just a few lyrics and mellow guitar chords.
I need to slow my mind down low
...
When it feels like coming on
Boy it makes it hard to talk for me
Coming down from the driving rhythms and screaming harmonica of the previous track, "Slow Jam 1" offers respite and space to breathe. The first lyric is repeated almost like a mantra, as though someone is calming themselves down from a panic attack, or perhaps it's among the last thoughts they are thinking. It could also be interpreted as Stu telling himself to slow down his thinking of the thoughts of the end of the world; it's hard to express yourself when your mind is going a million miles per second, so slow down and take a look at what you got; take stock and move along! (See also: "You Can Be Your Silhouette")
Well, I suppose with that slow-down, someone else has gotta go fast. And that someone happens to be Satan of "Satan Speeds Up."
You brought us to your gift of generosity
And all our silly games wreak havoc on your soils
When I stop to think of all that
...
Every life is like a song that takes forever to be sung
When all our silly games wreak havoc on our spoils
When I stop to think of all that we've done
Satan's at the door
We live on a planet with more than enough resources for everyone. War, famine, disease, poverty... these are all constructed. True scarcity is an artifice; we have everything we could ever need in this Eden-like planet. Instead of sharing it, we sin. We hurt each other, we kill each other, we deceive and cheat each other. We are playing our silly games, ruining our spoils while Satan watches, waiting in that threshold before coming through the door and pulling us under forevermore. That's all I've got for this track, let's move on to the album closer: "Slow Jam 2 (Her and I)"
Spoilers: It's a love song with few implications, if any, for the Gizzverse. Best I've got is that love is a good thing! and it should be nurtured wholly and truly. To love is to partway worship; love is holy, superseding our capacity for reason and going straight to the beauty-appreciation centers of the brain. Listen to this one and smoke a bowl, maybe cry over someone you didn't love right or cry over the beauty of the love you have. I won't judge, and King Gizz won't either.
Ok, so lately I've been trying to figure out some of the recent Gizzlore as far as how Phantom Island slots into the greater picture. My general understanding of the Gizzverse is that it's multiple unvierses that sorta wormhole through to each other, or perhaps they loosely interact with one another across time and space.
Take Phantom Island's title track as an example. The opening lyrics of the eponymous track
I just woke up from a dream
I was in a place I've never been or never seen
evoke themes of anamnesis, as found in other Gizz tracks such as "The Wheel", "Dreams" & "Blue Morpho" to name a few. Dreaming appears to be a conduit into these other worlds, and when we consider the themes of Butterfly3000, we have a potential explanation for certain aspects of multiversal Gizzverse interactions. King Gizzard are no strangers to Eastern philosophy, either. Much of Butterfly3000 revolves around the metaphysics of dreams, which is reminiscent of Zhaungzi's parable of dreaming oneself as a butterfly; the boundary between dream and reality is thin enough to be shattered by the simple act of waking up. Petrodragonic Apocalypse and The Silver Cord were conceived as being complementary Yin/Yang storytelling in both music and lyricism. When considering the band's previous album Flight b741 whose themes revolved around the rich escaping the very planet they plundered and extracted from, I wonder if we're back to the greater Gizz themes of perspective (e.g., "Mirage City" could well be referring to someone with the same viewpoint as the narrator in "Mars for the Rich" on account of looking starward/outward yearning for a place to be allowed existence. Damn, Gizz is trans-coded as fuck). So, what perspectives are being considered in Phantom Island?
I think part of the difficulty in determining what makes the Gizzverse tick is how all my thoughts kinda meld together when it's evoked. So many little micro-tangents and musings that veer me off the path of just explaining what the hell story is going on. And that's before there's any conversation about whose perspective is narrating whichever song. Sometimes it can be as simple as figuring out who's singing; the closing track of the album, "Grow Wings and Fly",has three distinct verses sung by Stu, Joey, and Ambrose respectively. They each give their perspectives of generativity: the process of giving those a future while your own time is running out. The first verse touches on sensation seeking:
I wanna drink from the beehive
I wanna jump from the tightwire
Like a moth into a fire
I'm gonna burn up on the pyre
Drinking the sweet honey out of the beehive invites the stings of angry bees; it's also the destructive extraction of another's home. Jumping from the tightwire evokes Ambrose's verse from "Le Risque"
Philippe Petit, yeah
Walk the tightwire
Take the risk, take the risk
You only live once
Which itself draws on the themes of the rich extracting from Earth and killing us all for the mere thrill of it (+ where's the thrill if you don't have the risk of getting hurt?). So, it is likely that this perspective is that of the unsatiable self, that baby-like ego compelled reach out and touch everything. To grow wings and fly, one must taste it all and then "transcend this life", flying away and singing solemnly about what once was. It's also sort of a jab against nostalgia; the only reason why the past is inaccessible is because you destroyed it.
Let's return to an earlier track in the album, "Deadstick", which details the crash-landing of Flight b741, the spaceliner with the souls of the rich on-board. Broadly speaking, the song is about leaving your loved ones, feeling knotted up in your chest about it, and then the pants-shitting panic of "oh fuck our best laid plans are about to be propelled into the dirt at mach 3 oh shit oh fuck." Think about it: the submarine assholes are tryna go to space. You really think they know how to do anything on their own? They're like the rest of us; society is necessary for anyone to get the shit they want, and since they basically dropped the atom bomb on all of humanity, there ain't much that their money can do for them.
Joey's verse in "Grow Wings and Fly" exists in direct contrast to Stu's, singing:
When I first saw you lying there in wait
With your unearthed buried smile, I sing to my duckling
Yes you must learn to use your wings
But it is I that will be taught by you to fly
This verse is sung tenderly, and the music video shows Joey singing this to a beached mer-person who is being returned to sea. It can be interpreted as a sweet lullaby sung to his own child, or the embryonic souls referred to in The Silver Cord.
From the womb I materialise
Terrified
Uncircumcised
My mother's love; Hypericum
Awake for the caesarean
The "Mother" is all pervasive; it's mother nature in the shape of the universe, its undulating currents drawing souls together like gravitational disks flattening into stars and planets. So, is Joey singing from the perspective of the universe? I'm not entirely sure to be honest; "Deadstick" also has a mother/child pairing that is discussed, but the mother is bewildered;
"I am your child
You are my mother, and I'm sitting here dying"
I say, "I got no children, I am but a boy, you are mistaken"
She sings "Follow me down through the wind and the earth to the edge of the forgotten seas
Save me from the hurt
Tell me of my worth
A phantom is taking everything
Sidebar: who is that phantom? My money is on the bat-winged demon of time from Laminated Denim and Made in Timeland but I'm not entirely sure. That said, it's the only non-named extra-dimensional creature/deity/godbeing mentioned in the Gizzverse (the rest of them are named by humans and thus relate to human culture and what it produces; e.g., Set, Chang'e, Abaddon, etc.). Regardless, the mother/child relationship being explored in this track can be found elsewhere. Parent-child messaging can be found in "Silent Spirit" off of the same album, as Ambrose sings
I would say don't be a musician my son
Be a doctor, lawyer, or a stand-up citizen
People on the street will stop and ask me if I'm proud
But I'm not proud, you did it yourself, I wasn't around
...
But time is pregnant with the past
With the knowledge that we lost
Time is eating its last meal
If we listen, could we heal?
I'm pretty sure that second verse shown above is sung by Joey, but both verses have to do with some aspect of parenthood. In the first, the narrator hopes their child focuses on living in their material world, doing the classic Asian-upbringing speedrun of "be doctor/lawyer" with the addendum of "or a stand-up citizen", where the importance is whether the offspring can actually do something greater than their parents' capabilities. The parent won't be proud; the accomplishments were done indepedently of the parent, so what pride can the parent feel? All they can really feel is shame. In the case of the second verse, the aspect of parenthood shifts to Time personified. I'm choosing to believe that this is the aforementioned phantom as well. When looking at, say, "Time = Fate," looking backwards through time is to look through a distorted lens. Time in this context is "pregnant with the past," turgid with more forgotten memories than remembered.
Fuck, I never thought I'd lose my mind
I s'pose sanity is easy to lose and hard to find
Hey, and can you hear that tintinnabulation?
Are all the bats in the belfry again?
I wonder if it's a tongue-in-cheek thing, but King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard seem to enjoy making their fans rave and rant and ramble on about their theories about how all this shit is strung together. Can you imagine the looks I get when I try unraveling any of this to my friends and family? They look at me like I've got 16 eyes, I tell ya! Anywho, here's lyrics from "Magenta Mountain" and a poorly thought-out analysis:
I don't believe you
Your eyes deceive you
Better check yourself in
The mirage is creeping outwards from your dream
Can't you see you've gone insane?
and:
We fell through a dream across clouds of glue
Anamnesis crashing through
Compare these lyrics to the lyrics from "Blue Morpho":
Falling upwards through clouds of glue
Anamnesis crashing through
Blurry photos all I've gained from my last domain
Dream grips me and pulls me into global unparalleled new
Metamorphic is my name
Surrender this brain
So we can see the direct linkage with regards to anamnesis and dreams, as well as others interpreting this experience of anamnesis to be simple delusion. Those who experience anamnesis are also likely those who see the fourth color (i.e., they can see through time and space, across the Gizzverse and beyond). This fourth color, referred to as "magenta" in "Magenta Mountain", is also referred to in "Extinction", where Stu sings:
Magenta beckons like a lighthouse
Hypnotized and pulled into a pulsar
Music of the spheres calls me to it
The last thought I think: "but, am I human?"
In death, we all are tetrochromats. Our souls, flung into the vast cosmic abyss, are guided by universal music and the harmonies of orbital ratios until they once again congregate into something greater than their constituent parts (sidebar: this is why gizzfans sound completely insane). The death described in "Extinction" is simply that: mass soul-death on a planetary scale. When considering the material of Phantom Island, there may be the throughline of the rich "listening" to the music of the spheres. Indeed, it may quell one's anxiety to heed the advice offered in "Silent Spirit."
Life is but an eddy
So be a leaf in a stream
Eternally we return to cycle through the song we learnt
In death, our souls are not lost to nothing. The grand motion of all things, the underlying currents that stir chaos into order into chaos again; it's all song. There is no music of the spheres to seek out and listen to; you simply change your role in it over time, only for it to start all over again. Life and death are cyclical on a universal scale.
So, what was the point of this Gizz ramble? Frankly, it was less about getting these thoughts into one big coherent thing and more a display of how fucking difficult it is to even talk about ONE song without going on a million tangents with a million different references. At some point, I'll probably construe my Grand Theory of the Entire Gizzverse, but for now, I'm closing this off here and will be starting another post next week.
Love you lots
xo jade