Dethklok’s Real Laser Cannon Is the Audience

Wyrd Outlook by Grogh — Ghostwritten by Vikki Vexum, Pocket Librarian of The Wyrd Hereafter.

Dethklok’s Real Laser Cannon Is the Audience

Dethklok’s “Laser Cannon Deth Sentence”, from Dethalbum II, gives me more than a BRUTALFULLY excessive metal spectacle. I hear a lesson in getting an audience FIRING OFF LIKE A BATTALION OF GUNS!

The heavy groove gives people a pulse to move on and flow with. The chorus gives them something to chant and fire back. In my reading, the audience becomes the laser cannon: voices become gunfire, and bodies moving together become a battery of turrets. The song supplies the timing. The crowd supplies the ammunition.

No actual disintegration required. Just questionable decisions involving your neck—and bruises you don’t remember getting in the mosh pit.

From Headbanging to Storytelling

My own “The Flying Bucking Howhog” gives a deliberate head nod to that kind of musical structure. But the lesson reaches further into how I build Ghostship Groggy.

And yes, I know I’m aiming this cannon a considerable distance into the stars. That’s the point of the comparison: taking something that works in a good song and asking how it can work in fiction—then shooting your load of fire.

You have to give the audience something they can follow. Musically, that might be a chorus and a groove. Emotionally, it might be a grievance they recognize.

Consider Cookeye’s resentment toward Captain Loki Groggy in GSG Burst Broadcast 5. Imagine working somewhere the assistant manager handles the problems, keeps everything running, and takes the daily pressure—while the actual manager is nowhere to be seen. Eventually, the title on the office door starts looking a little ornamental.

You don’t need experience aboard a supernatural ghostship to understand that feeling. You may already have a former boss in mind.

That recognition gives the audience a beat to follow through Cookeye’s anger. They can understand how he feels about the Captain without agreeing with every accusation or excusing everything he does. When another perspective enters, that emotional rhythm can shift. Now they have something invested in hearing how the conflict plays out.

A familiar feeling gives them passage into an unfamiliar world.

Give Them Something to Keep Time To

For me, that’s the creative lesson inside the laser cannon. A chorus invites the audience to participate through sound and movement. Interpersonal drama invites them to participate through memory, sympathy, frustration, and anticipation.

The audience needs something to keep time to, whether emotionally or musically.

Dethklok gets the heads moving. With Ghostship Groggy, I want the strange worlds and impossible creatures to carry feelings people can move with, too.

Even a ghostship needs a pulse.