Counterculture and the Attention Economy in The Ghost of a Thousand, Bored of Math

Of distraction, destruction, and culture death

Back when I was a teenager, I picked up a demo CD with a copy of The Ghost of a Thousand’s ‘Bored of Math’ and ‘Left for Dead’ on it. I don’t know where. Presumably Subverse at The Underworld on Sundays. I didn’t really know them at the time, but those two tracks lodged in my head, and are still there years after the band itself has split. 

Bored of Math posits a Gen X punk rock crowd sniffing glue and spitting blood as a response to being “A generation bored out of their minds.” Conceivably a low-class parallel to the mechanical coke-inhaling sex-performing numbness of Less than Zero‘s yuppie burnouts, who despite the fact that they will never need for money, waste themselves in self-destructive spirals of apathetic hedonism.

What of millennials and Gen Z? The world went from a “generation bored out of their minds,” to generations for whom boredom is impossible. In the modern world, there is never a point at which there is not a fresh avalanche of content and distractions to sweep away any potential absence of stimulation. If not the leisure and digital distraction that characterises the splintered bubble-gum gloom of Gen Z, then there is always the equally torrential flood of work, hustle and grind that contribute to the blasted mindscapes and thousand-yard stares of anxiety-addled millennials. 

The refrains reveal a fascinating set of dependencies.

“Time to start sniffing glue again/Punk rock needs you again,”

Potentially, sniffing glue has no purpose if chasing the high is merely the result of escaping daytime banality. Daytime banality no longer truly exists. Until the Internet collapses, the dopamine tar pit has enough space for everyone.

You could read the exhortation to spit blood and sniff glue as being facetious – another demonstration of punk rock’s self-aware self-mockery, in line with the likes of Bowling for Soup’s 2002 hit ‘Punk Rock 101’. Despite the bands existing at opposite ends of the pop—rock punk spectrum of harshness (TM), spitting blood and sniffing glue, taken with the same flippancy as the uniformity of spiked hair, skate shoes, and rock hands, become emblematic of the tribalistic non-conformist conformity that naturally assails any counterculture scene.

However, the rest of the song doesn’t carry that facetiousness. Interpreting the intent as entirely comedic evokes the mistake of missing the wood for the trees. The opening lines establish the themes of desperation and damage as embodying a state of mind and condition of life, and the rest of the song howls along over that consistently frenzied tone. The suggestion that sniffing glue will somehow contribute to the salvation of punk rock is weaponised in its bleak humour. The proposal is recognised as being stupid, but the conclusion suggests that decisive self-destructive stupidity in the face of repressed directionless resentment, is a healthier outlet than simply letting those emotions fester. In our contemporary laminated landscape of plasticised mindfulness sermons, enforced competitive therapy, and hustle culture, choosing drugs and violence becomes just another form of self-determined self-actualisation. The TikTok lifestyle gurus and writers for Psychology Today might object to thinking of it as such.

“Punk rock needs you again/Generation X is dead,”

Generation X are set up as the generation on which punk rock relies – if Generation X is gone, it suggests, then punk rock as a genre and social scene is in serious trouble. But why would the genre need a replacement for Generation X in the first place? Bored of Math links the concept of boredom to Generation X, implying that their glue sniffing and blood spitting contributes to an odd symbiotic relationship in which both parties feed from one another – punk rock from Gen X’s restlessness, and Gen X from punk rock’s energy and provision of outlet. The indirect accusal is that contemporary generations are not doing enough to give the genre new life.

Does Bored of Math suggest, wittingly or unwittingly, that the scene survives on a treadmill of disconnected aimless youth, who gravitate to it purely for a lack of alternative; using the frenetic energy and anarchic fury to counterbalance the vacuum outside of it? But if nobody can be bored anymore, then there is nobody to sniff glue and spit blood. If nobody is sniffing glue and spitting blood, Bored of Math might conclude that punk rock inevitably joins Gen X in the grave. 

Gen Z would tell me ‘It’s not that deep’. They’d be right. But as a thousand-yard-staring millennial with a feral financial attitude and the trademark fixation on a constant blitzkrieg of new projects and ideas, in the hopes that putting out enough words will convince someone, or myself, that this jagged existence has some kind of dubious value; I invoke death of the author. Fuck you.