Jester Race concept

[twiik]

I just found out I'd analyzed the whole of the jester race when REALLY high. Found a word document on my laptop, and though id share my thoughts and see if they make sense.

The Jester Race by In Flames


1. Moonshield

Tried of dull ages, I walk the same ground,
collecting the tragedies still
Hollow ambitions in a hollow mind
carried my cross to the hill

And how I lust for the dance and the fire
deep of the nectarine sunset to drink
spill me the wind and its fire
to steal of the colours - I m the moonshield

Shattered hope became my guide
and grief and pain my friends
a brother pact in blood-ink penned
declared my silent end

Naked and dying under worlds of silent stone
reaching for the moonshield that once upon us shone


A man (from here on called the Man) is bored with his life, which is just endless repeating hardship. He lusts for the 'dance and the fire' of excitement. But though he lusts for it, he does not attain it, and becomes blood brothers with grief, pain and shattered hope. He eventually dies, emotionally "naked" under "worlds of stone" (the weight of his failure in life pressing down on him), reaching towards the moon that represents everything beyond his understanding.

3. Artifacts of the Black Rain

Stood there leaning to the city moon,
casting silhouettes tall to grip her white rooms
the black-clad voyeur in his black-clad masque
in the serpentine sun of tragedy basked

Stood there cursing at the soul-dead mass
with their fabled illusions, the vain dreams that passed
splinters of a life rushing by in the whirl
a lone, silent warrior in a fantasy world

He cried for night / but night could not come
so, swept in the shroud of Misanthropia he went away
and fed the empty galleries
with the artifacts of the black rain
sunken into the shadows with a dry, sardonic smile

He made the footprints a part of his heart
to rouse a sacred confrontation

Stood there carving on the monument to lies
digging of the earth, making friends with the soil
as the all-mother rises and bares her bleeding thighs
he disappears into her cold, icy womb

This tells the story of the Man's life from a 3rd person perspective, in a more reliably objective, but certainly no less abstract way. It talks about how he realised that everything good in life was "fabled illusions" and "vain dreams". He went away in the shroud of "Misanthropia" (he started hating other people) and fed the empty galleries of his soul with "artifacts" (possibly bad deeds), which sunk him into the shadows. Eventually he dies, "making friends with the soil" and enters Mother Earth's bleeding thighs.

4. Graveland

Mankind - proud conqueror and king
swings its flag of primal glory to the winds
Titans of the power-myth that failed
Neanderthal hunger for the flesh of war so frail

So weak, so hollow-minded
the primat flock responds
the jester race submits

For each day of war is a failure for man,
enslaved to her mordial genes
Illusions bleed from their fetid cores
bent to their rotten extremes

We, the plague of Terra Firma,
nature s grand and last mistake
plant the poisoned seed of cancer,
set the severed fruits awake
Burning like frozen relics
in god s archaic graveland

Burn the visionaire
Kill the ideologies
Mankind must die

The doves and the angels return to their graves
with flames on their pestilent wings
while mushroom-clouds haunt their virginwhite skies
to rape their utopian dreams

Living the last days of evolution s end
from the nest of humanity, the graveland vultures rend

This song is simple - it is an overview of how humanity is a plague and that "Mankind must die". People are destroying each other through war, because it is all humanity can do, it is in their genes. This gives perspective on how the Man felt about humanity before his death, calling humanity a "Jester Race".


5. Lord Hypnos

I lie in your soothing arms, lord Hypnos
your garment alive with your song
I lie in your soothing arms, lord Hypnos

Steep the spiral to your far abode
in the wake of slumber, on visions I rode
and fell like history through the chasm of ages
into the charged, forbidden zones

How I have searched
through a million worlds and faces
yet unaware, I have not found
my own true face, traceless and profound

So, find me in these grandiose halls
where long ago summers eternally fall
and tune the strings of truthful longing
to the frozen music of gods

Hypnagonia s lucid horizons
play with the yearning I ve quelled
as I strike towards the Pantheon
and what therein is held

Here we pick up back with our main character again, who is now slipping into the afterlife, in what he describes as a type of sleep. "Lord Hypnos" was the Greek God of sleep and dreaming. It seems as if the Man is yet to discover his own true cosmic identity "I have not found/my own true face". He abandons even trying to find himself and ends up going to the "Grandiose halls" of the afterlife, living contentedly in the warmth of "long ago summers". However, as he gazes the "lucid horizons" of Hypnagonia (the realm of dreams/the afterlife), he yearns for the truth of his identity, a yearning which he thought he quelled by abandoning his quest. He goes towards the Pantheon (the Hall of the Gods) to find out who he is once and for all.

6. Dead Eternity

You ll never be alone again
You ll never die again
You ll never be born again
You ll forever be, stuck here in eternity

I bid you welcome to my world
They call me existence
You have just entered through the gate
to your journey towards eternity

This part I control

In the beginning you ll fear nothing
As I climb beside you
Time will be your master
in this laborious part of human subsistence

This part I control

Black clouds embrace your soul
Slowly passing through repeating lacunas of anguish
When time takes your life
I will transfer you into the bare grip of thinking tranquility
Voices filling the emptiness of the dead floating
Seamless across the surface into chilling stillness
Nothing can help you now

This is what the Man finds when he reaches the Pantheon. In a very abstract way, the Pantheon contains an almighty "God" representing the entirety of existence. He warns the Man that by seeking him, he forfeits his previous existence in Hypnagonia, and that we will be "stuck here in eternity". The Man has made his first step towards transcending towards Eternity, where time and space mean nothing. In this song, Existence/God tells the Man what will happen to him along the way, about the intense anguish and amazing tranquility that he will find. Nothing can help him now that he is on his way to transcendence.

7. The Jester Race

Rush faster on the one-way lane
the answers so silent

Rusty Gods in their machine-mind armours
grind our souls in the millstone of time
the "deathbed harvest" is a dead man's banquet
of mould ridden bread and black, poisoned wine

And we go... our steps so silent
And we go... our blooded trace
the Jester Race

Calling out to the gathered masses
their answers so silent

And we go...

Embracing the tools of the neo-wolf age
that speak of silence and silence alone

Offering the tokens, the reliced idols
to the heirs of the newly raped ground
inferior even to the transparent winds
- lesser in motion and sound

And we go...

There is no trace of me
in their altered blueprints of life

Gaia impaled on their horns and lances
the fumes from her body give chase
as the strong of blind men savour the scent,
dream-dead from Prosaic and hate

Possibly the song on the album that is hardest to decipher, it seems to show how humanity has progressed since the Man's death, existence in the afterlife and subsequent transcendence. It seems that humanity has become hateful of the "rusty Gods", as their answers to the questions of life are "so silent", so they turn to technology to make them stronger ("Embracing the tools of the neo-wolf age"). They "rape" ground through war and conquest, and offer it to the Gods in hope of salvation, in vain. At last, they impale and destroy Gaia (the Earth) with war and pollution.

8. December Flower

Towards the rich archaic heavens; towards the black diorama
you are the artist and the texture
that plays with the mantle of the Earth

When the bleakest of powders
lie rooted to the starched stones
and roots that feed the peaking trees
embrace the sleeping shores

Archaic pearls of sleep and death
the voice of December losing its breath
and the floweryard of white and grey is haunted

White as the down of flaking snow,
the heroic emblems of life

Green is the color of my death
as the winter-guise I swoop towards teh ground
Green is the landscape of my sorrowfilled passing

We are In Flames,
towards the dead archaic heavens
We are the artists and the texture
the alters the mantle of the Earth

The Man is a man no more. He is now a God in his own right. This song seems to be the Man in his Godlike state musing over his new knowledge about the cycle of life and death. The lyrics are in the form of a metaphor, comparing human life to snowflakes falling towards earth and melting, thus feeding the earth and "alters the mantle" of it. He describes humanity (collectively "We", acknowledging his past as a human) as "In Flames", destroyed by its journey to the "dead archaic heavens" described by religion. The narrative switches from third, to first, to second person, which could signify the Man's ascension into Godhood by eliminating his personality and ego, and his realization that everything is part of the same thing - existence.


Conclusion

The theme of the album as a whole seems to be that humanity is a "Jester Race", because they spend too much time trying to find answers from the Gods and end up destroying themselves through war and pollution. The irony is that death is the only way to find the answers, as proved by the Man who dies and ends up transcending life and death and becoming a God.

 

[FJChaos]

Mind blown
I never looked at it that way. I always saw it as some prelude to Whoracle.

 

[Clay-Man]

Really The Jester Race, Whoracle, and Colony are linked together. In an interview, Anders says the concept is about machines taking over our everyday tasks and we eventually use machines to the points of being cyborgs or something, hence the Colony album with the man covered and built out of metal structures.

 

[GraemeSinclair]

I've always seen TJR, Whoracle and Colony as a trilogy charting the downfall of mankind. However, I see them as a trilogy released out of sequence, Anders has in the past stated that Whoracle starts in the present day with Jotun. I then see TJR being about the aftermath of the events in Whoracle and Colony following on from TJR.

I've even thought about trying to re-interpret the albums as a work of fiction, so I'll offer a little insight into my interpretation of the story. *this may be a million miles away from what Anders and Niklas intended, but it's just what I take from it* Hope you guys find it interesting, but if not then feel free to rip it to shreds.

PART1: WHORACLE

Our central character is troubled by nightmares of a future where the world is dominated by sinister black towers (like those on the cover of The Jester Race). He has nowhere to turn for help but eventually encounters a woman who experiences the same visions with far more clarity; the catch being she can only achieve these visions during sexual intercourse. Compelled by the severity of what they see, the two form an uneasy partnership, the first half of the album is basically the revelations they encounter during their coupling. They see a society where machines enslave mankind (The Hive) and human society is all but eradicated. The Machine world reaches its peak in Jester Script Transfigured before nature begins to reclaim the world "Morphing Into Primal" eventually seeing the start of a whole new cycle of evolution with the world being overgrown ("buds abloom in all directions") in Worlds Within The Margin, a world with no traces that mankind even existed.

At this point the story returns to the present day.

Forewarned with this information, our two central character set about doing all they can to be prepared and alter the course of events to save the human race.

Eventually the machine takeover occurs (Episode 666) with the world media being employed as a weapon. Everything Counts is a futile attempt by the businessmen responsible for the holocaust to reap the economic benefits: "the men who sold the world". Whoracle ends with our female lead singing a lament as human society is torn apart and made subservient to technology.

PART 2: THE JESTER RACE

This story begins with our male lead from the Whoracle re-emerging from his place of hiding (Moonshield) to a world ravaged by the machine-apocalypse.

He reflects upon the state of mankind (The Jester's Dance) and infiltrates the machine cities to gather intelligence (Artifacts Of The Black Rain) He also visits the mass graves of those killed in the takeover (Graveland) reflecting on the futility of it all.

He discovers the computer programme which is keeping the human population subservient, kind of like the Matrix (Lord Hypnos) and manages to hack into it, broadcasting a message through the system of exactly what is going on to each and every human being (Dead Eternity), putting it as blunty as possible as a "WAKE THE FUCK UP!" call to humanity.

The turning point of the album is The Jester Race whereupon, liberated from the system by our central character, mankind marches on the machines to reclaim their freedom, you can really feel the anger and the backlash from all the oppression in the lyrics as mankind are sick of being made a joke of, and fight back. The Machines have not forseen such an eventuality and are thus unable fo retaliate effectively, the central character saying "there is no trace of me in their altered blueprints of life" shows they were unprepared to deal with him.

December Flower follows on and is about the humans trying to survive a harsh winter without any technology, some obviously will not make it, however the humans resort to primitive methods such as fire "we are In Flames!" to start reasserting their control over the land. Going from saying "you are the artist of the texture" to the heavens to "we are the artists of the texture" in defiance.

Wayfaerer begins on a similarly dark tone, however that glorious break to a major key in the middle suggests to me that that's when things begin to become a little bit easier and the fadeout is as the humans begin to progress towards founding a new society.

Dead God In Me strikes me as an afterthought, the central character who has experienced both worlds' reflection on the futility of religion and what they are left with (the Black-Ash Inheritance)

PART 3: COLONY

This is where the humans start to found a society from the remains of the machine empire trying to avoid the mistakes which were made before relying too much on technology. Embody the Invisible strikes me as a little bit about the quest for knowledge which was common before but has long been forgotten "All rivers run towards the sea, but the sea is never full" a renewed sense of wonder at the natural world. There are elements of the old society reemerging (Ordinary Story) as human nature basically never changes and other challenges to deal with such as whether or not to bring back technology (Colony) or the establishment of a Justice System (Zombie Inc.)

Overall Colony's a much harder album to read so I'm unsure of the overall story arc, but anyways; that's the way I see it. It probably is all bullshit, but I hope you fellow Jesterheads get a kick out of reading it or a kick out of pointing out the flaws.

 

[FJChaos]

^Makes way more sense than any other interpretation I've read. It's somewhat close to mine, except that I looked at the albums in order.
For only 4 posts, those are a hell of a first 4 posts.

 

[Suffocating Sight]

Thats a different interpretation of the albums, I like it very interesting.