The Ballad of Aaron Lewis

Or, everything he can't remember.

In July of 2021, Aaron Lewis - the once and current Staind frontman - released a single from his solo country project called “Am I the Only One.” Maybe you noticed it at the time, maybe not. It debuted at a startlingly high 22 on the Hot 100 and promptly disappeared. However, because of my current profession as CEO of Nu-Metal, I think about it quite often. “Am I the Only One” postures to be about the bravery of Lewis’ rage against the modern era and all its abhorrent evils. What it is literally about is being mad at the TV. 

Over some overwrought acoustic guitars the second verse begins: “Am I the only one, willin' to bleed? Or take a bullet for being' free?” immediately followed by, “Screaming, ‘What the fuck’ at my TV For tellin' me [...] that I'm the only one.” The television is disrespecting Aaron Lewis - a hypothetical US army soldier - and it has him riled up enough to actively scream at it. 

Lately, Lewis has been schlepping his guitar around to the same Bar & Grills across America; because there he realized – in between rehashing the story about how he wrote “Outside” for the millionth time and drunkenly honking and horking his way through “It’s Been Awhile” – that he can scream at his constituency of hee-hawed up tactical SUV drivers about how we should all hear Vladimir Putin out. 

This may not startle you much, but Aaron Lewis has no clue what he’s talking about. He has no ideas, he has grievances. His sudden sympathies towards Vladimir Putin or bigotry towards transgender people are the result of the television he screams at telling him that the libs hate Putin or groom children, which causes his brain to emit the electric signals necessary to fire off a thin jet of spinal fluid that elects the thought “what the fuck” somewhere in his grey matter. Eventually that thought develops enough sentience that it allows Lewis to scam his audience by writing a piss-miserable “country” song about it that he can sell to “own the libs.” The cycle continues. 

Maybe the ultimate tragedy of Aaron Lewis isn’t that he’d end up as boring and miserable as he has but that he has occasionally stumbled into some good art. Staind’s debut album Dysfunction is a solid bit of Alice in Chains ripping nu-metal that, despite itself, manages to maintain the same level of quality throughout. Which is to say, if you’re extremely down in the dumps it might be just what you need. It happens to contain the most honest thing Lewis may ever write about himself: “Look at me, I’m so pathetic.” Following the freakishly well timed “Outside” live acoustic breakthrough, Lewis managed to write exactly the right song at the exact right time with “It’s Been Awhile,” a faux-tender acoustic ballad that traded nu-metal historonics for post-grunge melodrama that would become a top 5 pop hit in the US and chart high all over the globe. This turn of events proceeded to blow Staind up into a kind of global phenomenon. The album it came from, Break the Cycle, notably debuted at number one in not just America but England too, a country that historically has rejected post-grunge in total. Magazines rushed to make Lewis out to be the voice of a generation, putting him on their covers glowering and looking haunted and deep. Lewis adored this attention, the stories he tells, the letters from distraught fans he received or the one that committed suicide while listening to “Outside,”. He presents these anecdotes like they're a cross to bear, but it doesn’t take much to notice a hint of boastfulness in his voice, starting to see himself as a hero to hurting teenagers everywhere. He even gave one his Rolex. 

When I first got into Staind in 2019 they were exactly what I needed. Oppressed by a job whose vague responsibilities meant I either needed to do everything or nothing on any given day Lewis’ songs kept me afloat when I otherwise would have drowned. I’ll never forget stumbling around a hardware store listening to “Pressure” as I tried to meet my bosses’ demands or being grateful to be taking out the trash so I could listen to “Fade” just one time or riding home to Dysfunction trying to convince myself life was still worth it. The solace I found in Lewis’ music is the same solace millions of others found. And lots of those people weren’t as cisgender, or as straight, as I am. So when Lewis took to the stage last Wednesday and went on a violently transphobic screed that doesn’t need to be repeated here, how many of Lewis’ transgender fans were in the audience that night? Who cried to his music, found solace in it, and now listened to their one time hero slander them outright? 

Lewis is a victim of narrative. You never have to be wrong, you merely need to select a narrative in which you are right and refuse to deviate from it at all costs. Your transgender daughter could take their own life and you can find a Facebook group dedicated to convincing you the libs did it. If you post about it enough you could even appear on TV. So when Aaron Lewis stumbles on stage and demeans transgender people and stumbles off again, he never has to sit in silence with what he’s done. The trans people that wept to “Outside,” that heard themselves as the ones outside looking in on a life they’ll never have, Lewis never has to hear their voices. He can open Facebook, flip on his TV, scroll his Twitter feed, and be reassured that those people aren’t human. He’s a hog, feeding from a trough of cable news and algorthms that have learned you’ll sit and scroll if they keep feeding you reasons to be upset, that gets to go on stage to puke his swill into another trough for more hogs. The cycle continues.

All across America you can hear it. Like a swarm of cicadas, an ambient death drive resounds through us all. After four screaming years of Trump, we elected The Other Guy and still suffer the same mass shootings, the poverty, the climate change, the coronavirus, the unaffected wealthy that we have always suffered from. So, like the protagonists of Netflix’s Squid Games crawling back from a miserable freedom to the hell they deserve, we wander towards either another Trump presidency or someone just as evil but much more competent. For a long while, the sales pitch of conservatism was that the things that scared you actually were as creepy and weird as you thought they were and that you did not have to adapt to their reality. Now, it is a solemn vow to inflict as much harm and horror on those things as possible. No more will we stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” We’re gonna roll that fucker backwards over the commies and the queers. 

None of this will appease these people because what these people want is to be children again. They want to live in a world that barely extends beyond their own neighborhood. Where mom picks them up from school every afternoon and sings them a lullaby at night. Where the world makes perfect sense because it’s the world they were born into. Where they’re free to pick on the kid with the feminine voice at school and laugh at those racist jokes you just cannot say anymore. Since they can’t have this - and have firmly lost the war of ideas due to having none - they are instead going to use the power of the state to awkwardly mutate and capitulate as much territory as possible into something vaguely like their falsely remembered youth. Like alchemists trying to resurrect the dead, they will only ever create a shambling hell. 

Since they can’t have their innocence back, they have become a nation of kicky screamy babies. As the majority of us slogged through the pandemic doing our best to follow the rules, they raided food courts and scream at cashiers doing their jobs. They’ve forgone the vaccine, contracted COVID-19, gave it to everyone they could, and died in a hospital proudly choking on their own fluids. And now, as we seem to be facing down yet another contagious disease that threatens us all, they’ve decided it only affects the gays and isn’t worth caring about. The cycle continues.

Aaron Lewis is not a kicky screamy baby. Doesn’t have the energy. He is a sullen lump that happened to write a few good songs once upon a time. But that isn’t enough, not anymore. The man that once assured us he was on the outside looking in has revealed his true colors and they are ugly. He’s a man lost to nostalgia, manipulated by forces that couldn’t care less about him, slurring songs from decades ago to withered casino husks that cheer for the inter-song banter because they don’t care about him either. They only care that he never asks more of them than to be as hateful and unhappy as they are. So another round of Bud Lights before the Staind guy accidentally plays “It’s Been Awhile” for the second time tonight. Who cares, we’ve heard this song before and already know the words.