by David Boyd · MMXXVI · audio ⁄ visual ⁄ written
the visitor enters.
fourteen rooms wait below.
"I'm a good kid.
Forgive me for causing you harm."
a chamber of concrete and dawn light. the first room of the exhibition.
"Started in the basement.
Now it's time to rise.
The world is mine."
"I'm reigning down
like the Lord.
I survived the storm.
I've been reborn."
"Don't worship like I'm your idol.
Look to the sky and
scream my name."
"I found peace in silence.
But the wolves will fear
my violence."
"Back from the dead
to take my throne.
Surprise."
"He's back, baby.
He's back.
He's back."
This work is often misread as ego. It is not. It is what survival sounds like after a long silence.
The artist had been buried — not literally, but in the way modern men are buried: by depression, by industry abandonment, by the slow erasure of a self that no one was looking for anymore. He stopped fighting it. He agreed with the burial for a while.
"hE'$ b@ck, b@by" is the first sound he made when he refused to stay there.
The language is mythic on purpose. Lords. Swords. Storms. Thrones. Reborn. This is not arrogance — it is the only register a buried man has when he is loud enough to be heard at all. Survival is not quiet. Survival is not polite.
The most important line in the song is the one that interrupts the bravado — "don't worship like I'm your idol; look to the sky and scream my name." The artist is not asking to be elevated. He is redirecting the glory upward.
The room ends with the figure standing in dawn light. He has not conquered anything yet. He has only refused to disappear. The rest of the exhibition is what happens after.
The visitor leaves this room different than they entered it.
Thirteen chambers remain.