Knox Hill - The Pot & The Kettle (Initial Thoughts)

The tea kettle song is finally here! <3 I've heard a clip of this on a Knox Hill Patreon live a few months ago. We had an inside joke with a couple of other people on the live that there are sharks in the tea kettle :D No one else is gonna get that joke, but I will and I want to remember it, so I'm typing it down. <3

SPOILERS AHEAD! Watch the video and come back if you haven't seen it yet!

The video is basically a 4min mini horror movie. Knox is living in Britain, next door to an old lady. For some reason, he cleans her house all the fucking time. He notices that she has a tea kettle on the shelf, even though she never drinks tea. (My first thought after learning this about her, was that her ex husband's ashes are in the kettle.) He even sees her holding the kettle, like she's about to make out with it. :'D Knox decides to do a good deed and takes the kettle to be cleaned. Inside the pot are ashes (called it!). When he returns it to the lady, she has a demonic look in her face, shoots him with a rifle and puts him in the kettle. We don't see her do this, we just see a mini-Knox in the kettle.

I had already re-written whose ashes they were, and then she says they're her late husband's ashes... It's still an ok horror story, if we just take it as it is - an old lady kills her husband, puts his ashes in a tea kettle and cherishes it, then a young neighbor reminds her of her husband, so they become acquaintances, he makes the mistake of getting the pot cleaned and she kills him, too - but an even cooler one would have been if she was a serial killer, preying on young men in her neighborhood... Well, maybe she still has time ;) The whole thing is like a twisted version of Aladdin - you rub the lamp/kettle, you get stuck in it. No wishes for you.

There's also an alternative version to the surface-level story, that we get hinted at - Knox serves the old lady some tea and looks very suspicious doing it, like he's poisoning her; there are blue and red flashing lights and Knox with an ominous look on his face (like the police car's lights flashing, or the red and blue pill from Matrix, a movie where people live in an illusion instead of seeing the ugly truth), earlier the lady has a voice actor but in the end she has Knox's voice, AND the fact that Knox is telling us this story that happened in his past, which means he cannot be dead. Or we're all dead, haha. That's an option... Anyway, he seems like a very untrustworthy narrator...

Also, as to why is Knox cleaning the lady's house all the time? He mentions "she did me some favors" and in exchange he helps around the house. I still think Knox reminded her of her late husband. And as for the "favors" - pot is slang for marijuana and kettle is slang for... anal sex. (And yes, I had to google the latter one.) So, she gives him drugs, or a place to keep his drugs so the cops etc. can't find them from his house and he can pretend to be clean, and they're also possibly sexually involved. And in exchange for the drugs and the sex, he cleans her house.

From the song title and the untrustworthy narrator alone, we can already see Knox is referring to the saying "pot calling the kettle black" (possible slight reference to Tool's song The Pot?) which means someone's being a hypocrite, they're accusing someone else for something they did themselves. Like Knox accusing the old lady for killing him, when all evidence we have besides his story (told by the rap and the visuals of the video) points to the contrary - that Knox killed the old lady. Or whoever it is, we don't even know if she was old, or a woman... Or if Knox (the storyteller) is so high on something he's imagining the whole thing. The whole story seems such a cookie cutter horror story, if you take it as it is, that I'm pretty sure (the sober, real) Knox could do better.

And now, for the symbolism... I'm sure there's a coherent meaning to all of this, but I feel like I'm missing cultural or historical/political aspects that'd put the whole thing together (I'm not British nor have I ever even been to Britain, and I've never done drugs, and I just generally speaking suck at most history/politics related topics). But I'm pretty sure there's a drug-related cultural/historical/political tie-in to the things I'm about to say:

First of all, the tea kettle. A very ordinary item in a British home, blends right in, most people wouldn't even notice it being there. Knox only notices because he spends so much time there. An old British lady who doesn't like tea - she's odd, she stands out. But because she has a kettle and probably doesn't have that many people to invite over for tea (people only briefly visit her, apart from Knox), no one notices. It's like a Finnish person who doesn't like salmiakki or sauna - they exist, but if people learn that you do not like those things, they will fucking remember, because that makes you weird. You stand out. And if you've, lets say, murdered your ex-husband... you don't want to stand out. The tea kettle is a cover for this oddity, of her not liking tea, of being different from the rest of us. The psychopaths who don't like normal things live amongst us, lmao. :'D And it's literally covering the crime - she doesn't have skeletons in the closet, she has ashes in a teapot.

The saying "spill the tea" means to tell a gossip or a secret. The murder is her "tea", her secret.

Also, there could be symbolism for old people fucking (over) young people and (indirectly) killing them. The economy, global warming, generational trauma, emotional neglect by a parent, you name it. All this shit generations before have done to younger people. And continue to do.

Generational trauma takes like 3-4 generations to heal (= a parent does something, a child grows up and does it to their kid, etc, and the family line only gets rid of the thing being done in 3-4 generations), and by that point, they've already developed a new generational trauma to pass on... Because none of us know what the hell we're doing. Most people who have kids, I'd assume, have them in their 20s or 30s. I'm 31 and I know that I don't know shit about life. But I know people who are in their 60s and as baffled by life as I am. I don't think people ever truly "grow up". They just become better at pretending like they did. Anyway, so people have their kids in their 20s-30s, but they'd maybe be mentally ready in their 50s or 60s, but by that point your body is so old you can't really have kids anymore (at least people giving birth can't) or can't play with them anymore, which is a huge deal for kids, and if you don't play with them, that's another generational trauma right there. My point is, that no one is ready to be a parent. No one can teach another person wtf life is about, because very small portion of the adults, if any, have it figured out themselves. And so, assuming they're good people, they do their best. And then they fail, on some things. And the child experiences minor trauma. And that's just like... unavoidable. Kids are very sensitive - any thing that happens to them might literally be the worst thing that has ever happened to them, and also, they don't know how to regulate or process or express emotions, and are dependent on their parents for everything - so, screwing something up is bout to happen. It's so probable I'd say it's unavoidable.

People also do shitty things to their own generation - racism (pot calling the kettle BLACK), homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, etc.

She's old, which makes her seem harmless, but according to Knox's story, she's not. He's telling tales of how we do all this work for the older generations (the video has none of the stuff she did for him, and is all about the things he did for her), but in return they only fuck us over and kill us. We're the victims. But, he's the pot calling the kettle black. He's the one doing the harm, not her. And that's what makes this is great short horror film, and a great piece of lyrical poetry, an overall art piece instead of a mediocre horror movie. Idk Knox's exact age (I'm pretty sure he's a Millennial, my current guess is about 0-5 years older than me - 31-36, born 1987-1992), but the woman is implied to be decades older than him, a different generation, and that's the point. He's blaming the old people for doing all this shit, but he's the one who actually did it. And so, the story gets VERY dark, when you realize he's the bad guy, representing his generation (my generation) that's doing bad things to the generations that come after us - Gen Z, Alpha, etc. (Oh, the poor generation that's gonna be called Betas...) And that's a GREAT horror movie. A great piece of art. That doesn't just scare you with jump scares and gore (which the video did not contain, btw - good choice, in this case), but gets you thinking and when it gets you thinking, you're scared even more. A movie that's a "mindfuck" as they say.

But, for people who are not avid horror movie fans, the old lady killing her neighbor and putting his ashes in a teapot works just as well, like an urban legend/myth Knox is sharing with us. People new to the genre don't have to dig deeper, the main storyline will scare them enough to make an impression. And my definition for a good horror movie is one that scares me. The surface level interpretation is enough to scare someone who isn't avid enough as a horror fan to dig deeper than that.

There's sort of a glimpse of hope there, though, because in the end of the video (before threatening to do the same to someone else...), the lady puts the lid on the kettle. "To put the lid on" something, means to keep something under control or stop it from increasing. This can be interpreted as putting a lid on the problems, stopping the cycle where you pass on the trauma over and over again. But, it can be a bad thing as well, though. Controlling the generation before/after you, and shooting down their dreams (the older gen's hopes for the younger gen's future / the younger gen's hopes for their own future).

PS. Ren was the "murderee-e-eer". The voice actor of the old lady, that's obviously Ren's voice. Knox has repeatedly said it takes him about 6 months or more to write, finish and put out a new song, and he's known (about) Ren since January, so I figured it's about time we get one of them on another's song. ^^

PPS. Because I know someone is going to wonder about the time stamp, assuming this post gets any views at all - no, I did not write all of this in 9 minutes. I sat with my thoughts for about 9min after hearing the song, before I started to type, then I typed (and finished my dinner and did laundry for about 30min combined and answered a few messages I got) for a bit under 3 hours. It's 10pm now, I started typing at 7:28pm.