A Beginner’s Guide to Faking Your Death - ALBUM ANALYSIS
I’m always surprised to see that Jhariah doesn’t have a bigger audience. I like to describe his music style as musical theater meets My Chemical Romance, with a touch of alternative jazz that always tells an interesting story. Their singing and producing style are intoxicatingly energetic and it always gives 110%. Jhariah is a fantastic performer, writer, singer, and all-around talent that deserves more recognition for his projects!
PC: @vszbyleo
I began listening to Jhariah’s music in 2021 with their album A Beginner’s Guide to Faking Your Death, although he’s been putting out music since 2018. I keep coming back to this album as I’m still addicted to the creativity and energy it exudes, as well as the audio-visual story it tells. There isn’t much that’s been said about the storyline of the album, but I wanted to take the chance to dive into the lyrics and create my own theories on the bigger picture of the project. I highly recommend taking 30 minutes to listen to the album and develop your own ideas before reading the rest! Or don't, I just think it’s more fun that way.
All I could find thus far is a short explanation by Jhariah on the baseline meaning of this project, that "A Beginner's Guide to Faking Your Death “...is about reinventing yourself. It’s drawing up a perfect image of everything you want to be but aren’t.” This album is very personal to his own goals in creating art and a way to tell himself that his goals are able to be achieved. To me, this is a very authentic way of approaching art, and definitely reigns evident in the passion of the album’s production. It’s also evident in the first song of the track “Enter: A Beginner’s Guide to Faking Your Death”. This song opens up to an internal dialogue of how one might view themself before evolving into the person they want to be. It’s a loud, chaotic, enticing opening that immediately establishes the mood and primary information needed to proceed with the rest of the 9 songs. When I listen to this album, I like to envision a movie in my head. I associate a main character to the events unfolding. Whether that’s intentional or not is unknown to me. Additionally, I don’t know whether or not this character in my head should be Jhariah, an unnamed person, or both! Either way, it’s clear the person we begin the album with will not be the person we end the album with.
The album continues with the second track “Needed a Change of Pace”. Here we get a closer look at the “main character”. In my opinion, our protagonist is adventurous, cocky, agile, charming, and potentially controversial at times. You would likely have to be all of these things in order to fake your own death. They seem to be telling this story after the coming events have unfolded. They describe waking up in a new place as a new person who “maybe outgrew the last [place]”. They leave behind a sketchy past and embrace being known as “dead” to the people in the previous life. Although the main character puts on a facade of being an individualist, hard-core vagabond, under the surface it seems as though they are hiding a soft spot (“I’d rather flee than fight”). However, they do not seem to regret the choices they’ve made in arriving where they are now (“To fake your death is/The most honest life”).
The third track begins abruptly with “Pressure Bomb 3?!?!”. Before taking a closer look at the lyrics, I always continued with the idea that this album was solely telling a theatrical story and that the “main character” gets into a disorderly, destructive fight with someone else (“Pressure bomb in a goddamn knife fight”) and this causes a chain reaction leading them to fake their death. After further analysis, I refute this thesis and retract my theories back to the “main character” simply being Jhariah. This song is an incredibly relatable testament to being so in your own head, romanticizing the person you so desperately want to become that you can’t even live in the moment or truly know who this person would be, or if they would even be better than who you are now (“From idolizing a made-up man who one day could be me/But does that version sleep at night/Or even take a minute just to breathe?/Or just to be?”). The idea of a “pressure bomb” is not literal but rather figurative, symbolizing the messiness of the mind when you’re not content with yourself, unsure of the future, and unable to remain present. Jhariah asks very poignant and profound questions, along with the continuation of beloved theatrics!
Next, the album continues with the fourth track (and my personal favorite) “Debt Collector”. Coming back to my little A Beginner’s Guide to Faking Your Death world, my original assumption was that the “main character” was actually being summoned by their town’s “debt collector”, whoever that may be (the IRS?). This would in turn become another reason for them to conduct a plan to fake their own death. After getting in a wild physical altercation, as well as owing money to the state, who wouldn’t? However, I’ll have to set aside this theory, as Jhariah provides us with more life lessons. This song is about the pitfalls of running from your problems, personal issues, self-loathing, and past faults until it comes back around to make you suffer again (“Sooner or later, it comes back again”). What Jhariah seems to be saying here is that you can’t continue to pretend you’ve solved these problems without putting in the dirty work, without acknowledging this “debt” you’ve accumulated emotionally. Maybe you’re actually using money to distract yourself from these feelings (“Dollars and coins can’t cut your check/This time around”)!
These important lessons continue with the fifth track, “Whose Eye Is It Anyway???”, which was at first a bit harder for me to decipher the meaning behind, but what I eventually gathered is that at a certain point, you can’t fight fire with fire, and the pain you give will come back around to be the pain you receive in a consistent cycle (“When you seek vengeance, you must dig two graves”). When you eventually come to this conclusion, you begin to accept that this path will never fulfill you and that you need to put in the work to see the positive changes in your life and within yourself.
The messages continue to become more nuanced with the emergence of the sixth track, “To Take for Granted.”. In my mind, this is a tale of the hardships one faces internally when attempting to evolve from past mistakes and/or shortcomings. Sometimes, it gets worse before it gets better, and you get impatient and bitter waiting for your personal work to turn into personal growth (“Why can’t I get through”). It’s clearly not a linear process and it’s very uncomfortable (“The air in my lungs/It never comes easily”), but it’s all a part of change. It can spark feelings of loneliness (“Lonely wolf keeps friends as lambs/Starves when they are gone”), anger, pressure, and hopelessness (“Take me down”). It’s a very realistic testament to the experience of coming out of a dark place in order to better yourself for the sake of those around you and your own development.
This character development persists with the seventh track “Bad Luck!”. After the trials and tribulations of facing your past self and attempting to become better, we find the protagonist/Jhariah/etc. seemingly addressing their old self, or potentially someone who is currently experiencing their past situation, and reminiscing on the prior thoughts and assumptions they had before reinventing themselves:
“This time around’s no different
I’ve played with chance like you
I loved to toy with fate
But, oh, I didn’t have a clue
That I would lose, oh, I would lose
Between my life and right, one day I’d have to choose
‘You’re not like me, I’m not like you, I’m not who these things happen to’
And that’s exactly what you say before they do”
Even though there’s been so much change, they’ve lost a part of themselves (“I don’t have the same moves as you/But that’s okay, fortune find your way”), they’ve regained clarity and mindfulness, there’s nothing that would convince them to take away the past that made them who they are today (“I finally climbed to heights I/No matter how I try, can’t descend”). There’s a peace in this massive change that embraces the uglier parts of life (“Laughing ‘cause I got what I deserved”). Either way, it’s up to you to make those necessary changes (“You’ll never catch a break, you’ll have to make your own”). I thoroughly admire the last lyrics of the song, because to me it’s a beautiful acceptance of either those who stuck by before one becomes a better person and all the way through to the end, or to that past self whose flaws forged beauty later on. Despite these flaws, they didn’t give up on themselves:
“And I would do it again
I’m not sorry, but thank you
For enduring me as long as you did
That’s more than I’d ever ask of you”
I feel like there’s a bunch of ways you could interpret these lines, but I like to think that “I’m not sorry” signifies one’s peace with moving forward and “killing off” their old habits.
The eighth track is another of my favorites and the first song of Jhariah’s that I ever heard, “Flight of the Crows”. It’s an excellent ending to the story we’ve been listening to, and adds to the alleged storyline that I’ve created in my head. The protagonist is speaking to an unnamed woman in the beginning (“‘Please’, she said/It’s hardly a bother/The company’s quite nice on crimson nights like these”), but it is unclear who she is or what she represents. Does she represent a piece of the internal dialogue? Is she an actual character and my musical theater-esque visions were right all along? What is clear is that this is an official send-off of the main character in an effort to become a new person and “fake their death” (“Well, I think that I’ve gotta go and I don’t know why/But I need you to promise that you won’t cry/’Cause you’ll be fine, and so will I/So, just let the thought of me die”). In this instance, reinventing one’s person is a given for the future and surely a positive sequence of events to come. After doing a bit of research, the lyric “Feed me to the crows” becomes a very witty phrase that Jhariah uses to sum up several key ideas in this project based on the origins of that line. Whether this was intentional or not, this phrase alludes to the act of feeding crows to indicate gratitude and kindness, something one might feel after being given a second chance (“Understand that I will find a brand new life/My golden second try”). To feed crows, according to Hinduism, can also link life and death, which seems to be the motif we’ve been getting at this whole time. You’re fed to the crows, indicating care and positive intentions to yourself, those around you, etc., and then the crows disperse and fly away with your old self in the limbo of relevance and remembrance (life and death).
While the ninth and final track of the album, “PRESSURE BOMB 2!!!!” is marked as a bonus track, I like to add deeper meaning by saying it never hurts to look back on where you came to appreciate where you are now, even if that part of your life makes you uncomfortable to reminisce on. Also, if this were a movie or musical then it would be a great final number/encore, but I digress.
Analyzing this album was so much fun for me, especially since I’ve been listening to it for the past three years and only now decided to take a closer look at its meaning. I will continue to love this album even more now that I have formed more concrete theories about it, and what I’ve gathered from these discoveries honestly make me emotional on how honest, real, relatable, and important this project and its messages are. The theatricality of it all really adds to it, in my opinion. However, my original interpretations were clearly altered after writing this. It’s always so exciting when that happens. However, I’m still left with an important question; what does Jhariah mean by “faking your death”? I understand what death signifies, but to “fake” your death still leaves many meanings unanswered. If I had to hypothesize, I would come back to the idea of being stuck in between life and death. Meaning, your old self never truly leaves you. While your old self might not influence you in the present anymore, that’s still a part of your personal human experience forever, and it’s the reason you are who you are now.