Mark Shelton of Manilla Road was a personal hero and friend. A man of knowledge and honor, a musical genius who is greatly missed. While his music and legacy will live forever among his great songs and albums, a few days before the Tribute to Manilla Road at Up the Hammers Festival on March the 14th of 2026, I dive deep into an unsung epic of his late work. “Art of War“, the closing track of the Playground of the Damned album from 2011. A surprising choice I guess, that will be analyzed, adding personal thoughts in its deeper meaning. I regret that I didn’t do it while Mark was with us. I am sure he was going to love this small tribute to an exceptional and emotional song that could stand next to many of the classics, even if it is mostly unknown. After all, Crystal Logic is known for its “different” kinds of articles, and Mark Shelton loved this kind of story and approach to art.
Dedicated to Mark “The Shark” Shelton (02.12.1957 – 27.07.2018)
Mark Shelton photo by Erika Wallberg.
ART OF WAR – THE LYRICS
The winds of hell are blowing strong again
The bodies still are burning, turned to ashen death
Technology has made it easier
To sacrifice our brothers of the earth
We’ll have to pay the piper if we are to survive
The grapes of wrath are dying on the vine
Heed the rising of the crimson tides
We’ve turned the art of war to genocide
No honor left, no glory face to face
Unlike the time of ancients, of Odin and the fates
Inside our hearts we still believe the lore
The oath unto the hammer and the sword
Still hosted in Valhalla the brave behind the doors
Await the final call upon the horn
Come the crimson tides to every shore
So teach your children well the art of war
The Northern lights are dancing cross the sky
Above the fields of honor where braver men have died
The Valkyries across Midgard still soar
To claim the souls of valor true to Thor
Like Branwynne and the Yeth hounds who fly from Shining Tor
If not for magik we are nevermore
So hearken to the wisdom of the Norns
So teach your children well the art of war
ANALYSIS, MEANING & THOUGHTS
The winds of hell are blowing strong again
The bodies still are burning, turned to ashen death
The current status in the world is not as ugly as you think. It is uglier. It’s getting more difficult for people to live a normal and easy life, and everything changes rapidly. Life and the world are changing so fast, that the most insane or the worst thing you can imagine can happen at any time, or it could already happen, but you didn’t notice.
Technology has made it easier
To sacrifice our brothers of the earth
Mark Shelton, born in 1957, was 54 years old when “Art of War” was released. He formed Manilla Road in 1977, the year I was born, and my generation is the so-called “Generation X”. Gen X was born in an analogue age when society was different, just like personal needs. We were raised playing in the streets, mostly without parents always around us, and things were simpler. We lived with home video, visited video clubs, understood the meaning of respect, we were tough, and we were not easily offended. We lived through the evolution of the digital era, starting from the huge personal computers to mobile phones and all the electronic devices that started becoming smaller and smaller, until they fit our pockets. Then, the internet started taking over, with the next generations growing and living entirely in the dot-com and social media world. Often called the “Forgotten Generation”, Gen X is also based on independence and a different mindset and spirit that are closer to the generation of our fathers, than the generation of our children.
Growing up in a world where technology hasn’t evolved with the huge steps of recent years, we believed that technology has made everything easier, but seeing those huge steps, we also believe that technology has made it easier to sacrifice our brothers of the earth. And that is a metaphor which means sacrificing the world we grew up in, friendships of a different kind and era, and our older beliefs and habits. It is extremely difficult to explain to the next generations how we lived as children before the www-world and the fully digital era. However, our generation is the link between the two worlds. Born analogue, raised during the change and evolution of the digital era, living and getting older in the modern, digital world. That makes Gen X unique. This generation has a different view on technology and understands in another way the world “sacrifice“.
We’ll have to pay the piper if we are to survive
The grapes of wrath are dying on the vine
The sacrifice leads to the acceptance of its costs and the consequences of decisions and actions. They tried to fool the piper, but the survival had its costs, just like The Pied Piper of Hamelin folk-tale.
The Grapes of Wrath, a novel by John Steinbeck, was published in 1932 and in 1940 it became a film directed by John Ford. The deeper meaning is that people need to help each other and work together, but also, in Steinbeck’s words: “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”
Heed the rising of the crimson tides
We’ve turned the art of war to genocide
Written by Sun Tzu, the ancient text The Art of War was very influential on strategy, tactics and military theory. War is a vulgarity, something evil, the worst thing you can live through, along with natural disasters and the feeling of death. However, there was a philosophy of war, no matter how insane that sounds, and that has changed over the centuries. There is no method and discipline, and there are no moral laws. Just full destruction and genocide.
No honor left, no glory face to face
Unlike the time of ancients, of Odin and the fates
Mark Shelton was deeply into the stories of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, Edgar Allan Poe, ancient philosophy and mythology, and all of this is floating in his lyrics. For Shelton, honor was something very important. He was an honorable man, and he believed there was still honor in modern times, but it didn’t have the magical strength of the time of the ancients, and the Allfather’s sacrifice to gain wisdom and magical knowledge. In our lives, wisdom and knowledge don’t come without personal sacrifices.
Inside our hearts we still believe the lore
The oath unto the hammer and the sword
Still hosted in Valhalla, the brave behind the doors
Await the final call upon the horn
“‘Art of War’ is a reminder to all of us that we should not forget how to stand our ground when needed”, Mark told me during an interview we did in the summer of 2011. The next time we talked about it, he mentioned that it’s also about making our children, men. Bravery doesn’t have the same impact nowadays. It sounds like something that has no meaning, just like truth, honor and moral values, but still, it can live within the heart of men. If it is within you, it probably awaits the call.
Come the crimson tides to every shore
So teach your children well the art of war
The crimson tide is unstoppable. It is total destruction. Blood, death and weapons of mass destruction. Mark Shelton wrote lyrics many times about the “end“. In his words, as said to the author: “Who knows how the end will come. There are so many ways that the world could meet its end that the law of averages will catch up with the earth before too long. It’s really not a matter of whether the world as we know it will end. It’s more a question of when. All I really want to say about that is, if we are to survive as a race of beings in the universe, we should start figuring out how to expand our pioneering efforts into space. If we never explore the possibility of getting off this rock and being able to live in space, then our race will eventually be doomed.”
The Northern lights are dancing cross the sky
Above the fields of honor where braver men have died
The Valkyries across Midgard still soar
To claim the souls of valor true to Thor
Like Branwynne and the Yeth hounds who fly from Shining Tor
If not for magik we are nevermore
So hearken to the wisdom of the Norns
So teach your children well the art of war
Mark Shelton’s mixture of mythology, legends and other literature readings, created something like a private mythology and spiritual poetry based on ideas. Sometimes we used to make fun of stories by mixing different mythologies and legends, but Shelton’s use of them in his lyrics and stories, was the concept and meaning behind the name-character-entity, and not the actual name-character-entity. It was what the Valkyries, or Thor, or the Norns, truly mean, and not just what they are.
When the song ends with the same verse, there is a difference in the last line. Instead of “teach your children well the art of war”, it is just, “teach your children well“, and that’s something stronger. It is something that you can understand only when you become a father, because at that exact moment, you can achieve an understanding of the flow of life and existence itself (this is the Crystal Logic). Then, you probably understand if your father and mother really taught you something, and you realize that you should teach your child the life you lived and the life ahead. This is wisdom and the magik of the mind and spirit.
