The Day of the Locust Music

One day while driving to who knows where, I had my music on shuffle and the song Hollywood’s Bleeding by Post Malone came on, and I couldn’t help but think of The Day of the Locust. In the novel, the painting Tod is curating is called “The burning of Los Angeles,” so right away I compared the names to each other. While the entire book focuses on how distraught Hollywood truly is and how the love life there isn’t what the media makes it out to seem, the song is more focussed on the fact that it’s crumbling, and will continue to due to all of the fake people and materialism that goes on. The lyric that stands out most to me in this song says “dying in our sleep, we’re living out a dream,” which to me says that all of these people had a life long dream of moving to L.A. and becoming some type of stat, but truly had no idea what they were getting themselves into at the time. The line then continues by saying “we only make it out alone.” Re-listening to this, it made me sad by realizing that at the end of the day, Post Maloe is right, and all these people truly have is themselves.