Arts Vanity: 'Trevor Sucks': The Death of Intellect

At its pinnacle, art deconstructs the fluid fabric of time, elevating experience into inescapable infinitude, elucidating the contours of inexpressible minds. But some experiences are so deeply traumatizing—so heinous—that nothing short of divine intervention could result in the annals of memory allowing their existence to persist: “Trevor Sucks” by Big $haun is one such experience (alternatively spelled “TrevOr $U.c K.’s,” pronounced “Trev, Or Dollar Sign U. c K.’s”—the c being a soft c, akin to the French cedilla). It is nothing short of a paean to the lowest form of human consciousness—a polemic to post-thought modernism.

The dissemination of its despicable lyrical intonations feels morally reprehensible (but alas, my editors have forced me to write these words). “Trevor Sucks” begins with a six-minute 66-second assemblage of sounds from the sonic stomach of Satan. In a seeming response to the abrasive introductory synths of “Yeezus,” the opening sound of this affront to moral goodness is the slick splat of spit accumulating in a man’s mouth, only to be ejected onto his hand a few seconds later. Slowly, and ever the more horrifying for it, the saliva-covered hand slowly rubs against rustling hair, concluding in the song’s climax: a staccato snap, presumably of a hair tie, and a sound of despicable relaxed affirmation. Then, for the first time, we hear $haun’s macabre marble mouth pronounce: “Fuck your man bun.”

The title single, sadly, suffers the same fate as the intro. With metaphysical bankruptcy $haun promulgates, “Elucidating obvious audiences with my hydrolysis / my mind fires lyrical bullets faster than Aroldis / Chapman for all you chemists / STEADY STATE THEORY 1914 / Fuck your man bun.” The historical inaccuracies of these lines are deeply problematic: David Chapman, the lesser figure in the Chapman triple entendre (the other two being Aroldis, the baseball player, and Mark David, John Lennon’s assassin), proposed the steady state hypothesis in 1913—not 1914.

The stand out single (and by stand out, the writer wishes to make this song stand outside in the cold, freeze to death, have its corpse meet the fate of Polynices and then, naturally, burn in eternal hellfire—if hell is nonexistent, the writer will personally build a pyre) is “Cut The Fucking Man Bun.” Its melody features an organ from the French classical school undergoing parallel key modulation while simultaneously achieving polytonality; waiting with six-second pauses is $haun, who pronounces a series of seemingly random numbers. However, synthesizing every sixth number, adding consecutive multiples of .6 (rounded down) and assigning it a letter value produces a disgusting message: “Cut the man, bun.” Trevor should, of course, keep the man bun—and bring about the apocalypse: A world in which “Trev.or $U.c K.’s” exists is a world that does not deserve to endure.

—Aziz B. Yakub ’18 is the outgoing Music Exec and incoming Blog Exec. He is still in a bad mood and deeply overwhelmed by his life and wants to sleep right now and takes it out on poor musicians and still uses big words to cover up bad writing, can be reached at aziz.yakub@thecrimson.com, but please don’t email him, that will only make him more stressed.