Despite a path that was anything but linear, characterized by line-up changes, existential crises and sometimes even artistic direction crises, basically we’ve always been used to only one version of the Foo Fighters: that of the pricks who enjoy doing the thing they love to do. more.
Snubbed and criticized at the outset (how can someone who has played in Nirvana start over with a project like this?), underestimated for a long time and then, suddenly, elected new stadium rock heroes by an audience that over time has managed to grasp their coherence and honesty, the Foos managed to get the status they really deserved only after fifteen years of career. A goal achieved with stubbornness and with a path in some ways similar to that of the band that Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins had always looked to as a shining beacon: Queen. Think about it: mocked and judged by the critics as a soulless entertainment, but reached the public without filters to the point of becoming the main act of all the festivals in the world.
When I put headphones on to listen But Here We Are I can’t get it out of my mind that, as a drummer, Grohl lost the singer and guitarist of his band and then as a guitarist and singer, he saw his drummer die. If we then think that both had risked doing it some time before due to an overdose, the story takes on the connotations of a Hollywood screenplay.
I had no doubts that the band would go on without their drummer. Not because he considers Grohl a cold calculator incapable of suddenly leaving a money machine like that of the Foos, but because we all know that disbanding the band that had saved him so many years before would have meant the end of the man. Just look at him a little over a year after the tragedy: Dave looks ten years aged. Here, the first difference that I inevitably notice in the new course of the group is this: first the band enjoyed themselves, now they try to do it without success. Rocco Tanica’s words about the years without Feiez come to mind: I went on, but I didn’t enjoy myself anymore. The curtains will always be there (think of the presentation of Josh Freese), but nothing will ever be the same again.
For this, But Here We Are it’s just not the cathartic album that everyone has been talking about. It is an album in which the musical aspect is very solid, which not by chance recalls the period between the two millennia, but where the common thread of the whole career is missing, in which the spirit of all time gives way to a theme , the metaphysical if you will, that we never imagined seeing in a Foo Fighters record. It is full of symbols, images, research and voids: for the first time, attention is focused above all on Grohl’s texts.
It’s strange, but after twenty-five years, we’re still not used to considering the former Nirvana as a lyricist. Perhaps due to the same prejudices that have always pointed out only a few facets of his art. If until now his songwriting had developed on purely material, tangible, touchable topics with the hand in some way, now the research has moved to the invisible to the eye. On closer inspection, in fact, the only hint of the here and now lies in the title. We are still here despite everything. However, it is around that everything that the album revolves. To a whole evoked through images that have a strong esoteric and symbolic value, such as the mirrors in which you look at yourself looking for the other who is no longer there, the doors where you hope the person you are looking for will reappear to get in touch or the rumors that it is not clear whether they are real or just imagined.
Just think about The Glass, in which Grohl repeats: “I wait for the storm to pass, I wait on this side of the glass, but I see my reflection in you, I see your reflection in me. How could it be? How can it be?”. In Hearing voices the search almost takes on tones of resignation: “I saw you in the moon, I wish you were here. You promised me your words, a whisper in my ear. Every night I repeat to myself: nothing like you can last forever”. And in the ghostly The Teacher there’s a “who’s at the door now?” repeated until it becomes left.
The very choice of the number of pieces, ten, brings with it meanings, we don’t know if we wanted it or not, which perfectly represent the message of the work. In numerology, ten represents an end and a beginning at the same time. It represents the phase of accumulation of emotions, thoughts, physical sensations. Of anger or frustration on the one hand, like the filling of joy or endorphins on the other. He loads all the energy of the previous issues upon himself and explodes it into a new beginning, into a new phase. Being formed by the number 1 (full) and 0 (empty), it contains within itself the end but also the beginning. Somehow just what the Foo Fighters are experiencing. The major arcanum of the tarot number ten, the wheel of fortune, with its circular shape and crank, according to Jodorowsky means the end of a cycle and the expectation of the force that will set the next cycle in motion. Always Jodorowsky, in his Metaphorisms and psychoproverbs, he says: «Nothing disappears, everything changes. Death is just a concept. If we accept our transformations, we are immortal.”
Here, maybe Grohl after having inevitably lost that of fun, has finally found the alchemical formula of immortality.
