Helloooooo it's NEMI! Remember me? I’m baaaaack~!
(also when you read the title you are obligated to read it “process” like "pro-cess" in the Canadian way and not "praw-cess" in the American way because I have been watching too much Canadian YouTube these past weeks, more on that later.)
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Yeaaah life has been life, but I’ve done some stuff! I’ve written a few songs about experiences in Minecraft - and those are the songs we’re gonna be talking about today.
In the past, I only ever wrote songs about things that had happened to me, or other people. It was sort of my diary. Many people write songs and poetry and things this way, but the quarantine situation has put a halt on experiences. Most days I feel nothing (and I hate it honestly I’d rather feel sad than nothing) and that's not really the best thing to feel when writing. Believe me I’ve tried to write nothing songs. It does not work.
So what do we do now?
It turns out I had a skewed idea of what a song needed to be. For some reason, I thought that songs had to be experiences that you yourself had, or about something that you had witnessed, or felt about, or something Now, when I say it like that, it sounds really stupid, hey? My band (who is still trying to do music despite the pandemic) has introduced me to a whole butt-load of music that was just written just because. It was music written for the sake of being written.
For a while over the summer, then, I attempted to write songs like this. Songs that had no meaning to anyone. But that did not fit my fancy either. For me, songs had to mean something, or they lost their charm and feeling, they became background noise or elevator music. Such music went directly into the trash. Not that music that is written like this does not have value (I listen to a good amount and its awesome), it is just not the type that I want to create.
Very, very recently however, (read: last Sunday), I got the idea of making a song that matters not to me, not to a human being in real life, but a song that matters to a character in a universe. And thus, the idea of the “Griefling” was born.
The idea first came to me when I was watering my plants. I was thinking about the word “griefing” - a Minecraft term used to mean one person destroying another person’s buildings.
But what do you call a person who griefs? A griefer? That doesn’t seem right. A griefist? That sounds like a racist. Or someone who follows the religion of griefism. What. I certainly don’t know. What about grief-LING?
HEYA that’s fun! It sounds enough like “griefing” but it’s got a very small change to it - it makes sense and also makes the person sound like a demon or a gremlin or something.
Griefling. Nice.
So I finished washing (Washing? Watering? Who knows.) my plants and ran inside to draw this person (who had immediately become a character in my head).
The original sketch of the griefling, resembling Etho
It ended up looking like a teeny tiny Etho - because I wasn’t thinking about like hardcore griefing (and I was also thinking about awesome Canadian YouTubers), I was thinking about trolling-griefing like how Etho does with his Shade-E-E’s business.
Etho's shifty Shade-E-E's business that he runs in Hermitcraft Season 7
So how did we get from Etho to the song that exists today? I obviously wasn’t gonna write about Etho - that’d be a tad strange. So I started thinking about other griefers. But everytime, it was obviously a person, like an actual human being, and it's a bit odd to write songs about other actual human beings whom you don’t know in real life.
I ended up browsing Youtube at one point, and I came up on Dream’s recent video about Herobrine. In this video, Dream speaks about the legendary Minecraft demon who was known to empty items from chests, dig out huge, random 3x3 tunnels that were not put there by players, slice the world into chunks that did and did not exist, and make entities disappear entirely. In the end, he concludes that Herobrine was simply a personification of the many things that can happen to a world when it corrupts as it updates from one Minecraft version to the next - loss of items/inventory, faulty terrain generation, etc.
But the legend of Herobrine - the ultimate griefling - still exists.
Dream's video essay about Herobrine.
It did not strike me immediately to make this song about Herobrine. It simply did not fit the style I was going for - the griefling was a small gremlin-demon, not some absolutely horrid terrifying monster who gave you nightmares. Any song about Herobrine would have to be dark and brooding and horror-filled.
But inspiration strikes at the weirdest of times, and so one day as I was lying in bed, the recent lesson about rhyme schemes we had done in English class popped into my head. They had used a popular poem as an example, putting two separate rhyme schemes side-by-side to show how the rhythm and feel of the poem changed as the rhyme scheme did.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Honey is sweet
And so are you
/VS/
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Milk cows go moo
And I like swimming
The second one is so JANKY right? It almost calls for the Jankman.
Jankman, a character from Tantacrul's videos, pictured here being disapproving.
But I looked at that, and I went - HEY. I LIKE how JANKY that is. I wanna use that, because it puts you so off guard! Like you’re expecting ONE thing and it throws you for a loop and gives you a DIFFERENT thing and I absolutely love that, in songs, in poems, in everything. So I wrote my own janky version, but make it Minecraft, also violets are not blue.
Roses are red
Cornflowers are blue
I’ve made my bed
And now I’ve gone hunting
And for some reason, the cows came back and bit me in the butt because this is what I added afterwards:
Two thousand blocks
And the cows go moo
And when I come back
I found I’ve been attacked
But by whom? By what? WHOMST? Of course, it has to be the one we’ve been talking about this whole time! The Griefling finally found his way into a song!
I won’t spoil the rest of the chorus because I’m actually releasing this song in a few weeks over on my YouTube channel (keep an eye out for that O_o), but it ended up being pretty good if I can say something like that myself.
And it’s at this point that we come back around to the sheer jank in this song. I’ve written a chorus that ended up being in a very folksy, happy-type song. The kind of chorus that you’d expect some bar dance song from the 1800s to have. But guess what - it's about HEROBRINE. The most terrifying thing in ALL of Minecraft, reduced to the chorus-line of a folk song.
Herobrine, pictured here threatening to kill me because I made a folk song about him.
I had to somehow make this make sense. I hadn’t yet written the verses, but I knew that the verses were where the story of this song was going to take place. I also knew that I wanted the verses to stay relatively the same in character, shape, and melody, because I wanted it to be the kind of folk song that you can just add verses to spontaneously (my band has a song like that and it's a heck of a lot of fun to sing if you get going).
Inspiration strikes again! It's a folk song. About Herobrine. In the Minecraft game, who, which character is most likely to have a FOLK SONG about Herobrine? Not the player, of course, who lives on their own and doesn’t have anyone to sing spontaneous folk songs with. No, no it is not the player, but instead, the VILLAGER who has that opportunity.
Think about it. In the past, when people did not understand normal and natural goings-on of the earth, they created stories to understand them, and creatures to play characters in the stories, and songs with which to sing the stories from. We, the player, essentially God in this universe, know that “Herobrine” is the result of world-update glitching.
But the villagers don’t know that.
They don’t know, or see, or understand what we do. So in my universe, I decided, the villagers created Herobrine to understand the world-update glitches, and they see him as a sort of evil spirit whose whims cannot be understood and whose actions cannot be curbed. And as villagers in real life used to do, they wrote a song about him, so that they could warn the younger generations, and have fun singing around the bell-fountain in their hemming and hawing language when working hours are over.
Savannah Villager, sleeping after singing about the Griefling
With this lore firmly in my hands I set about writing three different verses for this song - each one describing one of the famous things that Herobrine is known to do, but I wrote them from the perspective of the villagers. Of course, each verse is written in the same way, to allow for infinite verse expansion in case we ever want to sing this song sitting around a campfire or something. I was so hooked on to this one tiny piece of lore that suddenly brought my entire song to life that I wrote all three verses and the token ending bit in the space of about an hour and a half on Wednesday morning.
This song is in no way close to done - only the lyrics have been written. There is no chord progression, or anything, and it being a folk song I want to get my band in on this and play a couple solos here and there, and I will probably be playing my own solo somewhere with my saxophone. The idea is to make the song as fun as possible, even though it’s about a horrible monster - because that’s what people did back in the day.
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Anyways, that’s all of my thoughts on this song for today - if i come up with anything more to say about this particular project of mine, I’ll probably write about it here again. This song is part of a bigger project of mine called World Infinite and it’s slated to release on October 10, so if you want to see that you can subscribe to my Youtube Channel.
I’m also probably gonna be livestreaming some of the more fun elements of creating this project over on Twitch, so you can follow me there and follow along with what I hope will turn out to be something super cool (this is turning into a bit of a shameless plug, innit? Lol forgive me).
Well with that, I’ll be off for now!
Make sure to follow us on our socials:
IG: @Q_uaranTEEN
TWT: @Q_uaranTEEN
And shoot us a tweet or a DM if you want to see anything from us, especially if you want me to check out a music genre and write about it here. That is something I advertised before and no one did it so :(
Have a good day everyone~!
~ Anemone out ~
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