I often read reviews on this site where reviewers will talk about how such and such album was a life-changing experience for them. The review will be filled with extreme statements about how the album is integral to them as a person or changed how they lived their lives. My only reaction is how? Because they always seem like run of the mill, ordinary albums that I’ll probably give 3.5 stars, but then never revisit. It all seems silly to me, but when I remember this album, I think about how other people will probably feel the same way towards my review. This album is really an all of the above situation in terms of my earlier statements. I really can’t imagine how my life would have turned out without this album, and this review is an attempt to make sense of that.

Eyedea was always an outsider in the hip-hop community, but this album was a different animal and understandably pissed off a lot of his fan base and was received pretty poorly at the time of release. Eyedea teamed up with DJ Abilities and formed a classic Emcee/DJ duo that garnered a lot of backpacker fans. You know the type. Then after 2004, Eyedea quit rap and started a rock band, which pissed off a lot of people. When this album was released, I guess they assumed that he was going to be going back to his roots? Well they were in for a rude awakening, because this sounded nothing at all like his older work (or any other hip-hop for that matter). This isn’t just rapping over rock beats, it’s a fusion of the two genres into something unique. Eyedea himself described it as Post-mathcore Grunge Hop, and that honestly does a pretty good job. If you go into this viewing it through the lens you would view a regular rap album, then you’re doing it wrong. I understand if the sound isn’t for you, as it’s not particularly pleasant all the time and he isn't the best singer, but I’ll never understand traditional heads who can listen to Fugazi, but then hate on this. Let the genre grow man.

Anyway, I’ll spend most of my time talking about the lyrics, because that’s where the real magic is. Eyedea is pretty much the only rapper that I’ve ever felt comfortable calling a genius, because of both his ideas, and his way of presenting them. A half-ass listen to anything in his discography will tell you that he was deeply troubled. He’d been rapping about mental health issues since he was in his teens. Issues that lead to chemical dependencies as coping mechanisms, which ultimately lead to his death in 2010. That makes this album all the more tragic, as it reframes the album as a last cry for help by a man exploding with pain, and frustration, and love, and caring and ideas. It was a window into himself, not unlike the cover art. One only needs to listen to the bipolarity of the first verse on the album to see that Eyedea was a man of internal conflict between the duality of two competing states of mind. He starts off the album boasting, “I’m not shit, I’m champagne,” before talking about killing himself in the very next line. That song, “Hay Fever”, is one of the heaviest songs in rap, but sets the tone for what the rest of the album is going to be like. The second verse touches intensely on the loss of a loved one and his belief in an afterlife, “I believe there's never a place better than right where you are/
Although imagining an afterlife can tend to mend a broken heart/
And with someone dead, it's a way of coping with loss/
But I don't need you out there somewhere if I have you in my thoughts.”

Apparently, the song is about his dog, but while listening to it, you would have no idea. That’s the beauty about Eyedea’s writing. It’s deeply personal and affecting, yet abstract enough that anyone can find meaning and apply it to their own situation. Eyedea actually explained that he began writing this way after he broke his hand after the E&A sessions. He said that because it forced him to write his lyrics with his left hand, that he began trying to get his ideas across in as little words as possible. This lead him away from extremely detailed paintings from the Born Again days to the abstract brush strokes that we hear on this album. In my opinion, this took his writing to another level because of how intimately personal each of the songs are. By listening to the album and thinking about the lyrics, you help take part in creating it, and it becomes as much your own album as his. I’ve listened to this album literally hundreds of times since I first heard it, and I still have no experiences that make me go back and reinterpret lines with a fresh perspective and find new meanings. I now finally understand what he meant when he said “If I could do with nails what you do with words/ There'd be one more crucifixion - one less open door.”

When I try and explain great lyricism, I often talk about how many words does it take you to explain what they said? Can you summarize their whole verse with one sentence, or does it take a paragraph to go into the meaning of a single line? People get confused when I say this, and think I’m talking about Aesop Rock levels of obfuscation, I’m not. I’m talking about about capturing an entire story, emotion or state of mind, with a single line. One of my favorite examples of this is the end of “Burn Fetish”. One of his most quoted lines is “My worst habit’s waking up at least once a day.” However, I find the true power in the following line: “Balance barefoot on a needle, Heaven’s just a jump away.” The rap genius explanation has something stupid about intravenous drug use, but what could he actually be talking about? I take Heaven as Eyedea’s idea of happiness. When he finally reaches a state of mind where he is content living within his own skin and is finally at peace. But for you, heaven can be a metaphor for whatever your deepest desires are. For me, the most important part of the line is the word just. Heaven is just a jump away. Just makes it seem easy. Anyone can just jump. He’s so close to his Heaven, all he has to do is jump. But he’s standing barefoot on a needle. Not just standing, but balancing. There’s not enough surface area to jump, he would drive the needle into his foot. He’s so close to his Heaven that it’s just a jump away, but he can’t jump without hurting himself. He knows that he’s so close to happiness, but he also knows that he can’t reach it, and that makes it all the worse. To Eyedea, the needle probably represented depression or his personality disorder, but to you it can be whatever you’re dealing with in your own life. A state of mind captured in a single line. This review could be a novel going in-depth on every single line of the album and that’s why I personally think that he is the greatest lyricist to ever live, but that’s a different debate.

“Smile” is what you could consider the lead single for the album because it is the most traditional/ least abrasively sounding song on the album and has a music video. In college, I wrote a literary analysis on it, because I thought it was the simplest song on the album, but I ended up only doing the first verse because it was already over 6 pages. When researching for the paper I was doing a lot of reading into his interviews and that’s when I first started getting into the philosophy behind the album. At first the album just helped me cope with being a sad, emotional teenager who was going through shit. But now it was actually helping me move beyond that stuff and turn into a better person. It really changed my perception of the world and how I interacted with other people. The idea behind the song is self-explanatory and seemingly generic. “I'm falling, but no matter how hard I hit the ground …I'll still smile.” The how and the why is what’s important though. There’s a whole interview he has with Daily Planet in 2009 where he explains the philosophy behind the song, and it’s amazing, but it’s too long for me to just copy and paste. The whole song is about how people are suffering and in conflict, but that’s okay and instead of running from our suffering and trying to Band-Aid it with coping mechanisms, we should learn to live with it and smile because of it. The easiest example to show this is at the end of the second verse. “Signs read "Support the troops," "Bring 'em home" "No more innocent victims"/ But when a homeless veteran asks for spare change, you're too busy protesting to even listen/ And I'm no different; I live in conflict and contradiction…” It’s really a beautiful song and message.

I would really love to go into detail on the topics and themes of every single song. Talk about relationships in Spin Cycle: “A liar’s lips are the best fingerprints; you can fake it isn't there/ But I can taste it when we, kiss…”, death and pain on Burn Fetish: “Empathy is the poor man’s cocaine”, addiction on Sky Diver: “Bad habits make for good memories”, Fame and corruption in Junk: “You're going crazy? Well, I’m happy you're leaving”, and humanity in This Story: “One day we'll be holding hands instead of grudges.” But that would make this review that much longer than it already is. So instead I’ll finish by just talking about the title track, “By The Throat.” The song is the heaviest and most emotionally intense song I’ve ever heard. It’s beautifully produced, with heavy drums and an almost drone-like use of the guitar to encapsulate the sonic expression of heartbreak. From the first line, “Oh how easily we forget, there’s no anchor to the past”, he makes it clearly that he’s struggling to move on from someone he loved. We all can relate to this song and that’s why I think it’s greatest song on the greatest album of all time. If I wrote a novel about this album, then at least half of it would be about this song. Every line and phrase is carefully chosen. He describes their intimacy, “You took me by the throat and made me understand the world as if I were you and I couldn’t breathe,” his struggle to cope with what was going on, “I’m now a lone flame searching for a purpose/ Setting fires everywhere I go, can’t avoid the burns,” and his desperation, “Turned hope inside-out a thousand times trying to see if it was ever anything more than dressed up fear” all in the first verse. The second verse is shorter and deals more with acceptance of the situation, “Thank you, for giving what you had to give, taking what you had to take and making me believe in you”, and coming to terms with their break-up, “You have my best wishes, even if only in silence, you deserve everything that you’ve ever dreamed.” But the both end with the reframing of the same two lines. It fills me with deep sorrow and happiness that the last lines uttered on an Eyedea album are “We went through thick and thin/ Came out separate on the other end/ But please know no matter what you'll always have me as a friend.” He was a very important person to me, and touched so many lives that it would be impossible to count. However, it brings me comfort knowing that his life will live on through his music because as he first told us:

“To live forever, all you have to do is learn to sing.”

R.EYE.P