12 Years Ago Incubus Released A Love Song So Bad It Split The Timeline In Two And We Got Stuck In The One Where Incubus Still Makes Music

Incubus’s A Crow Left Of The Murder… (with ellipsis) was the band’s fifth studio album, their first following the departure of founding member of the band and bassist Alex Katunich, and was by all accounts well-received at the time of its release, selling a total of 1.9 million records—enough to have it certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

It is not a good album, despite what the RIAA’s vaunted platinum status would indicate.

I know this because A Crow Left Of The Murder… was one of the first 10 CDs I owned as a young man, part of an expertly curated collection of music that included Eiffel 65’s Europop, a copy of Smash Mouth’s Astro Lounge that I stole from my older brother and listened to for basically the entirety of the year 2000, and the soundtrack to a Sega Dreamcast role-playing game called Grandia II that contained two songs I would describe as “painfully J-pop” in substance, and I thank my lucky stars every day that my brother only dunked on me about this to about 1/100th of the degree to which he was entitled, given what those songs sounded like.

I‘m sure it seems like I’m just exaggerating by putting Incubus in the same category as a JRPG OST and an album that contains a song called “My Console” where an Italian man just names every Playstation game he owns over a beat, but dear readers please believe me when I tell you that A Crow Left Of The Murder…, fifth studio album by so-called “funk metal band” Incubus contains a song so bad it’s worse than any of the other albums I’ve named here; a song so awful that I believe it tore reality in two on the day it was written, and we are living in the worse of those two realities it created—a reality where Incubus is allowed to continue writing music.

That song is called “Here In My Room.” You may listen to it now if you are unfamiliar with it and follow along with my analysis, which is below. If you choose to read on, it is at your own discretion and peril.

The song starts with about 30-odd seconds of a plodding, unimaginative piano fill before Brandon Boyd, lead singer of Incubus, deigns to set the scene for us:

This party is old and uninviting,
participants all in black and white
You enter in full blown Technicolor,
nothing is the same after tonight

We now know the action of this song takes place at a party, as evinced by the speaker’s (since I’m apparently dead-set on using the correct technical term for poetry to analyze a nu-metal song) use of the phrase “this party,” and it’s a pretty boring one at that. That, or the speaker has never been to a black tie event. Or he’s trapped in the Pleasantville universe with Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon. Or the Goosebumps book where a school keeps hiring the same evil cameraman to take photos on picture day even though he uses it as an excuse to banish children to a black and white dimension where everyone turns evil and feral. Maybe the speaker’s just colorblind. Take your pick, because honestly it’s irrelevant after this verse.

Suddenly, a new face characterized by the garish and eye-searing color correction of Golden Age Hollywood bursts onto the scene, and some spark ignites between them and the speaker (as of yet the other person in question is not gendered, but it’s coming and folks, it’s a doozy). This chance meeting will change everything, apparently.

If the world would fall apart
in a fiction-worthy wind,
I wouldn’t change a thing
now that you’re here

Incubus throws in a pre-chorus here, which was a thing you could do before the record industry imploded when you forgot that you needed more verses than choruses in order to make a functional song, and I’m quoting it in its entirety because I have no idea what a “fiction-worthy wind” means. James Joyce was by all accounts obsessed with his wife’s farts, and even then the most we as a society got out of it was a couple of horny private letters, so I can’t imagine how powerful a wind would have to be for someone to think they could write a whole story about it. Brandon Boyd is, of course, not content to rest on his laurels just yet and digs deep for a chorus that’s sure to wow even the most hard-hearted among us:

And love is a verb here in my room,
here in my room, here in my room
Yeah love is a verb, here in my room,
here in my room, here in my room

Flexing absolutely every one of my analytical muscles to their breaking point, I could make the barest bones of a case for the reading that what the speaker means is that in his most deeply private space (a room in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own) love is something that requires active participation from both parties, and not just passive acceptance, but that would be a lot of navel-gazing on my part.

All credit where credit is due though, “love is a verb” reads a little more tender than “I like to fuck,” (which is pretty clearly what Boyd meant, more on that in a little bit) so good job for not just expressing the obvious subtext, Brandon Boyd. After an overproduced, spacey bridge a competent guitarist obviously snoozed their way through, we reach the second verse:

You enter and close the door behind you,
now show me the world as seen from the stars
If only the lights would dim a little—
I’m weary of eyes upon my scars

Two things to note here: first, for those of you not torturing yourself by actually listening to the song, there’s this really weird flanging effect on Boyd’s voice when he sings the line “if only the lights would dim a little” that appears nowhere else on the track, so I’m assuming everyone in the studio was just as bored making this song as we are listening to it. It’s almost like they knew the line “now show me the world as seen from the stars” was kind of a dud but couldn’t rewrite the song to include any other references to space or solar radiance (given that the baseline for his lover’s brightness is Technicolor, the same way we were able to see Daffy Duck’s true radiance) so they just tried to make Boyd’s voice all echoey instead but could only afford to do it on one line.

Second, given evidence received in the chorus (“my room”) and the action of the speaker’s Technicolor paramour closing the door, we can assume that this party takes place at the speaker’s own house! He spends the first two lines of the song complaining about how boring this party is, but he threw it! And now he’s bailing on being a host to hook up in his room! There’s a word for people like that, and that word is “jackass.” Either that or he’s hooking up in someone else’s room at a party so either way, not what we might call a conscientious individual.

The only other thing of note is that Boyd portrays his speaker as wounded and emotionally vulnerable, but not in like, a lame way for babies. He’s got scars (which are cool and badass, even if they’re just emotional), presumably as he’s been hurt before on account of being so sensitive and not into lame things like being a good host or interacting with others in a non-sexual way, but he doesn’t want anyone to know that because he’s a Man in 2004, before feelings were invented.

After another laborious retread of the pre-chorus and chorus we come to the final verse of the song, even though it uses the same tune as the chorus that just preceded it. Readers, if you stopped reading here, I wouldn’t blame you. I don’t blame you if you’ve already stopped reading, but for those of you still with me, here is how “Here In My Room,” penultimate track off 2004’s A Crow Left Of The Murder… ends:

Pink tractor beam into your incision,
head spinning as free as dervish’s [sic] whirl
I came here expecting next to nothing,
So thank you for being that kind of girl

That kind of girl [x11]

PINK.

TRACTOR.

BEAM.

INTO.

YOUR.

INCISION.

Congratulations! You’ve made it. You’ve found your way to the absolute worst image of sexual intercourse that has even been written or ever will be written. It is the alpha and omega, beginning and the end of terrible sex descriptions. The awful secret I have harbored for the last 12 years.

“Pink tractor beam into your incision” is a phrase that even at age 13 I was sure I’d misheard because I could not parse the reasoning someone would have to earnestly refer to their penis as a “pink tractor beam” (which f0r the uninitiated is the term used in 1977’s Star Wars to explain how the Millennium Falcon gets captured by the Death Star), let alone the fact that he’s referring to a woman’s vagina as a SURGICAL CUT and thanks her for “being that kind of girl,” which I don’t want to even touch because that’s a strong contender for third sleaziest thing about this song, tied with the subtext of the third line, which is basically “I thought this party was gonna suck but then I got hella laid so it was ALL RIGHT.”

To wit, if a band as big as Incubus was in 2004 managed to make a teenager whose conception of high art included The Animatrix, Adult Swim’s mid-aughts late night anime programming block and Resident Evil 4 feel a sense of fremdschämen that strong on the basis of one (!) line out of approximately 510 total spread across 14 tracks of a professionally produced album (roughly equating to about 0.2% of the album’s total lyrical makeup), that band has, in no uncertain terms, shit the bed in a major way.

Here’s the thing though: I could shout “pink tractor beam into your incision!” into space for a thousand years and it wouldn’t get across how abysmal and ill-conceived that lyric is. All I can do is share this pain with you, gentle readers, the pain of knowing that this song exists forever, and absently wondering what might’ve been if someone, ANYONE at Southern Tracks Recording in Atlanta between October and November of 2003 had just said, “hey guys, let’s maybe nix the song about fucking in your bedroom at a party like it’s a revolutionary concept, yeah? Album’s probably gonna be fine if we don’t include that one.” What a world that would be. It’s just a shame it’s not the one we live in.