Knox Hill - Love Is Blind

The heading is just the name of the song, without a descriptor, because I didn't know how to describe this post. It's not an Initial Thoughts post, because I've been sitting on these thoughts for few hours on and off yesterday and today. Yesterday, when I first heard the song, I had been awake for about 36 hours straight, during which I had worked two 8-hour work shifts (16h total)... In summary - I was dead. I typed down some thoughts - in Finnish, because I just couldn't think in English anymore, barely in Finnish either - and then gave up and decided to finish this the next day. And today I've been thinking about the lyrics a bit more. Didn't try and catch all the bars this time (like I tried with Killshot), just enough to make out what the song is about and how the bars I did catch (or thought I did) support my interpretation. So this isn't really a Lyrical Breakdown either. Hence, the heading is just the artist name and song title.

Musical aspects

Song starts off with a sample, a woman singing, and the audio has been distorted… The distortion is stylistically fitting for the song – she’s not slurring, but it kinda sounds like the audio is, and also it fits the relaxed vibe of the verses. I can’t make out most of what she’s singing, but she at least mentions the name of the song.

Although they are two VERY different hiphop songs, this song still reminds me of Ashnikko’s song Drunk With My Friends. The vibe is somehow similar – neither of the artists are slurring, but both have a very relaxed beat and tempo, and on Knox’s song the sample is distorted, on Ash’s song her voice is distorted (in post-production). Both songs sound like they’re drunk or on downers, but the artists don't, if that makes sense. :D Ash’s song is about the darker sides of the party girl lifestyle. I’ve done an entire breakdown of the lyrics, if someone’s interested: https://zinethasmusicblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/ashnikko-drunk-with-my-friends-lyrical.html 

The beat is very simple, with just drum-like computer-made sounds (they probably have a name, I just don't know it) and a portion of the sample, on a loop.

His flows/pockets/whatever they're called, the rapping - are impeccable, as always. 11/10.
I can hear rhyme schemes, internal rhymes, etc in songs, but I can't yet pinpoint them from a song that's in English. I tried with a song that's in Finnish and it was surprisingly hard even there... So yeah, I'm not gonna talk about Knox's rhyming, other than saying that it's very good, as always.

Video

Video is a one-take, with Knox sitting at a bar, going to an elevator. A guy hands him a package. In the elevator is a guy in a dinosaur/lizard mask (looks like a raptor to me). Knox opens his package and inside there is a cap. He puts it on. He gets to the bottom floor, gets a rose from a woman and then walks into a romantic restaurant table setting, where he sits alone with his drink and cap.

In the beginning, he's in the dark bar, walking and using the kind of hand gestures a drunk person would walk/use. When he steps out of the bar, into the light, he raps "fast-forward: I got my shit together now" and his body language changes. He's sober, and proud of himself, maybe even a little cocky. Then he slowly returns to the drunk body language as the lyrics progress to him relapsing.
In the elevator he pushes the button to go down and puts the cap on. I think he's also figuratively going down (giving into the addiction) and the cap means lies. He's hiding under the lies.
In the 'restaurant' in the end, he takes off the cap (stops lying) and asks the waiter for "another one", although it's not quite clear if he means another glass for a woman he's waiting there for, or another drink. The ending is left open to interpretation.

Lyrics

The lyrics of the hook are ”They say: ’love is blind’, huh? Gotta feel it”.

’Love is blind’ means that you fail to see someone’s flaws when you’re in love with them.

If someone is literally blind, they need to rely on their other senses, such as touch (feeling).

You can’t rely on the love you see someone have for you, you have to rely on the love you feel they have for you.

And when we apply this to the verses of this song, the metaphor extends to the love/hate relationship an addict has for their substance, or whatever it is that they’re addicted to. They’re blind, they can’t see the downsides of the addictive substance/whatever, they only see the positive things they get from it, the high. It isn’t until they give into their addiction that they feel the high and the low of it, and then they understand what it’s like. They can’t see it, they have to feel it.

The verses of the song talk about alcohol and drug addiction.

You ”peel out like the walls of [your] apartment, paint falling” – alcoholism or drug addiction will ruin your life. You can’t keep your shit together, you peel out, you fall apart. You ”sip wine [you] can’t afford” – you use all your money on the substance. Then you end up living in a crappy apartment (where the paint is peeling off the walls) and can’t afford to move out, and even if you were allowed to paint the walls and managed to buy paint and painting tools before buying alcohol/drugs, you still can’t paint the walls, because you’re always drunk/high, hungover, or too depressed to do anything (depression can cause alcoholism, yes, but alcohol in itself is also a depressant, so if you weren’t depressed before you became an alcoholic, you will be).

My favorite bar, however, is ”too many bars, I’m a fucking alcoholic”.

Not only is it the bar that straight up tells the listener what the song is about, but it also has so many fucking meanings I didn’t probably even get to all of them myself, and most of them work together, complementing each other.

That being said, I also have (at least) one extra meaning he probably didn’t mean but I found anyway 😃

1. Bar, like rapper’s bars, rap lyrics. The only meaning I can't connect to the other ones. What I mean is, that having rap bars doesn't make you an alcoholic. Maybe, although it's a stretch, you could say having rapping as a career can create pressure (see number 5), etc. and that's how it can be connected to the other bars...

2. Bar, like the place where they sell alcohol.

3. Alcoholism can lead to criminal actions, such as theft or violence, which could put you in jail, behind bars.

4. To bar is to close off something – if too many doors close in your way, you might feel pressure to turn to alcoholism.

5. Pressure (in physics) is measured in a unit called bars.

6. The meaning I’m 99% sure he didn’t mean: Breathalyzers. They are devices officers use, where a person blows into a tube and the device tells how much alcohol they have in their system. I googled them to find out what they are called in English, and in the image results I happened to see that they all give the result in numbers, not bars like I for some reason imagined in my head. Took me a while to figure out why did I picture them giving the result in bars (like a phone battery’s bars), because of course it’s in numbers, the officers need exact measurements to tell how drunk you are exactly… And I’m pretty sure I got that image because of various expressions we have in the Finnish language, when describing a person who is too drunk. Many of them give the impression of a concrete level of drunkenness, like bars are. So, this is just a bonus meaning I got from the lyrics, that Knox probably didn’t mean, unless the English language has similar expressions.

Sometimes things might be looking up (”got my shit together now… I think”), but then you often fall back down into your old habits and old addictions. The fight is never over.

Some (ex-)addicts say that if you’re an addict, you’re an addict for the rest of your life, and others believe you can overcome your addiction for good. What I think is something between those, based on the amount of psychology I’ve studied (Finnish high school level, plus developmental psychology at university level). Here's how I see it: First of all, if you’re still physically addicted to something, you’re still an addict. If your sobriety is very fresh and you still think about the addictive thing often, you’re still an addict. Until you find another coping mechanism to deal with your shit, you’re an addict. What I say next applies to the rest of your life, if you're past all the phases I mentioned above: Your brain remembers how the thing you were addicted to made you feel when you got it (the euphoria), but also the downfall. Over time, only the truly scary and traumatizing situations remain, because of how the human brain is wired (avoid what hurt you in the past, so you don’t get hurt again, part of the survival instinct). But, when time goes on and you get over your trauma, and then encounter something that reminds you of the good feelings the addictive thing made you feel, you might be blinded by the love (see the addictive substance/thing ”through rose-colored glasses”) and consider using/doing it again. So, in that sense, I think you are prone to becoming an addict again, for the rest of your life.

(In the last verse Knox moves on from alcoholism to drug addiction, even making a gesture like he's injecting something into his vein.)