Porcupine Tree Examine Tragedy and Media on 'The Incident'

Posted on Aug 19th 2009 2:00PM by Benjy Eisen
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Our culture is voyeuristic to a fault: we want to know the intimate details of other people's dramas, heartaches and heartbreaks, yet we're also impervious to it. This point was driven home for Porcupine Tree's Steven Wilson when he passed by a bad accident on the side of a highway, reduced by a flashing road sign to a "POLICE INCIDENT." As a culture, we become obsessed with certain such incidents while other ones, just as severe, remain footnotes in our collective consciousness.

"We live in a world where an incident such as a tragic earthquake that kills thousands in India, or the evacuation of a religious cult in Texas, will excite far less interest or emotional outpouring than the death of a pop star that hadn't made a good record for 20 years!" Wilson tells Spinner. He means no disrespect to Michael Jackson, he just wonders if the response was disproportionate considering all the unexpected tragedy and untimely death surrounding all of us, all the time.

After he got home from diving past the roadside incident, Wilson wrote a song about the experience and his thoughts on it, entitled 'The Incident.' With a cache of music already written for Porcupine Tree's next album but no lyrics, Wilson suddenly had subject matter to write about. "I started to notice the use of the generic and rather detached term 'incident' referring to many other dramatic/traumatic events in the media," says Wilson. "These gave me ideas for some other songs."

The finished product -- a concept album obviously -- is appropriately titled 'The Incident' and will be released on Sept. 22. As can be expected from Porcupine Tree, it is a heady journey that takes the listener through much art-rock and prog-rock territory.

Interestingly enough, much of the finished content for the album addresses more personal incidents to Wilson than the detached ones that formed the initial concept. After all, part of our obsession with media-reported "incidents" is knowing that our own lives are filled with them. "The more I worked on the album, the more the songs started to turn inwards again," Wilson says. "And about half of the songs on 'The Incident' are about events in my own life, both good and bad, after which things were never the same again for me."

Guess that means that the String Cheese Incident isn't one of the incidents Wilson ended up writing about. That would've been just plain weird.