This Album Was a Warning: Eat the Elephant and the Collapse of Narrative in the AI Age
Some albums are meant to be heard. Others are meant to be endured. A Perfect Circle’s 2018 release Eat the Elephant isn’t catchy in the conventional sense. It doesn’t hook you in 30 seconds, loop a mindless chorus, or cater to the modern listener’s algorithm-shattered attention span. It’s dense. Cinematic. Orchestral. Slow to move, and slower to resolve. In short, it is everything our digital age was conditioned to reject. And yet, it might be the most honest soundtrack of our time—a warning wrapped in strings and synths, whispering beneath the noise: You’re losing the plot. Longform Grief in a Shortform World Released just months before TikTok exploded into the mainstream, Eat the Elephant arrived at a strange cultural inflection point. The era of curated feeds and dopamine cycles was in full swing, but it hadn’t yet ossified into the attention economy’s dominant religion. The album plays like a funeral dirge for narrative itself—a slow, textured lament for depth...
