Word of the beast
In defense of metal writing.
By Will York
IF YOU'RE A music
journalist, writing about metal is a bad career move.
All right, writing about
music is a bad career move, period. –But covering metal certainly
creates more obstacles than crowing about Stephen Malkmus and
Yo La Tengo, sucking up to the new garage rock generation, or
offering postmodern "deconstructions" of the latest Christina
Aguilera or Avril Lavigne record. I've got it easy with my open-minded
editors here at the Bay Guardian, but tell most editors you
want to review the new Morbid Angel album, and they begin to look
at you like you're diseased.
Fear of metal is a deep-rooted,
almost instinctual feeling in rock-writing circles. It's the music
of black-clad, longhaired dropouts who picked on the sensitive,
smart kids in high school. It's the music of comic book-collecting,
suburbanite twentysomething dudes who live in Mom's basement, of
white-trash burnouts with "420" black-light posters on
their walls. Or so go the stereotypes. Not surprisingly, most people
don't want anything to do with that world. And if it were as bad
as people make it out to be, who could blame them? But making metal
look stupid – which is admittedly not always that hard
– has long been a good strategy.
"For many years,
there had to be agreement [among critics] on what was bad stuff,"
explains Deena Weinstein, the author of Heavy Metal: The Music
and Its Culture, a sociologist, and a student of the rock-critic
subspecies. "You could always say, 'Well, at least it's not
metal' " – implying that if you knew what was bad, then
surely you could be trusted to know what's good. This explains Black
Sabbath getting across-the-board one-star reviews in Rolling
Stone through the '80s, among other phenomena.
Additional scapegoats
have stepped in since – Korn and Limp Bizkit were popular whipping
boys for a time, as were 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys –
while the consensus on more classic styles of metal has softened.
Now everybody loves Black Sabbath, especially post-Osbournes.
Metallica were on their way to sainthood as well, before they screwed
up with Napster and failed to resolve their alternative-era identity
crisis with any good new albums. And a reappraisal of Iron Maiden
seems like it's somewhere in the works, especially with more socially
acceptable bands like the Fucking Champs and the new wave of clean-cut
emo-punk kids copping their majestic dual-harmony guitar approach.
But wider respect for
other groups, especially the more recent generations of underground
black, death, and doom metal bands, is still years away (Ian Christe's
recently published metal history Sound of the Beast: The Complete
Headbanging History of Heavy Metal notwithstanding).
This is partly understandable,
because these more extreme metal subgenres – outwardly recognizable
by such unwelcoming traits as impenetrable band logos, grotesque,
squealing guitar solos, and gargled, growled vocals – have
a built-in repugnance factor that wards off those who lack a certain
iron will to really listen to the stuff.
True metalheads
It's easy to point to
the strange paradigm that makes writing about metal (at least in
nonspecialty publications) trickier than writing about any other
genre. That is, the die-hard metalheads don't really care
what outsiders have to say about their music – we're just a
bunch of poseurs, right? – while people who dislike metal don't
want to read anything about the genre that doesn't confirm their
negative feelings toward it. That there could be something worthwhile
lurking in that dark dungeon of the music world is too much to think
about. It's best to just leave it alone, or snicker at it, and hope
it'll go away.
For what it's worth,
I fit into the category of "outsiders" because I'm by
no means a true metalhead. I didn't start listening to the stuff
until late in college (unless you count Fishbone, or Bad Brains'
I Against I), plus I've never had long hair, and, heresy
among heresies, I listen to the Bee Gees and the Four Tops all the
time. I was a Smiths fan in high school, for God's sake, and I still
listen to them sometimes.
So I have to agree with
Weinstein when she rhetorically asks, "Why can't [metal] be
covered like any other kind of music? Would it be so terrible to
enlighten, let alone turn on, people who are not metalheads?"
Here's someone who didn't start listening to metal until 1979, by
which time she was already a full-fledged sociology professor with
a master's in biochemistry. "I'm enormously, far, far, far,
far, far older than any [metal fan] you'll ever talk to,"
she claims. She's also the only person I've ever met to refer to
gory death metal bands like Exhumed and Macabre as "lovely"
or "gorgeous," but that's another story.
Book learning
It's nice talking to
folks like Weinstein, Christe, and Martin Popoff, author of the
brilliant Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal and The 500
Greatest Metal Songs of All Time, who has an MBA. It makes me
feel like slightly less of an underachiever, knowing that they can
reconcile their educational backgrounds with metal writing, even
though I also know my collegiate pre-med studies were supposed to
lead to something a wee bit more ambitious than reviewing albums
with songs titled "Clinical Colostomy." Positive reinforcement
aside, there's still a bit of shame involved in writing about metal.
Not because it's metal, but because it's music, period.
"It's fun because
it's a hobby turned into a job, which is good," Popoff reasons.
"But there's still a crappy thing about that – it is just
a hobby." Even if it's one that does pay the bills, in his
case.
"Sometimes I kinda
slap myself and say, 'Man, I'm writing about some rock guy's album
here,' " Popoff continues. "And when I read that stuff,
I think, 'Wow, this is cool.' And then I stand back and go, 'I can't
believe you wasted your time and all those brain cells thinking
about this.' " Building your heavy metal
library
Heavy Metal: The
Music and Its Culture, Deena Weinstein (Da Capo Press) The
title says it all. If you want to learn about the culture of heavy
metal – who makes it, who listens to it, and why everyone else
hates it – then this is the book. A scholarly sociological
study of the genre by a full-blooded academic (and metal fan), this
succeeds as a defense of the genre where a less evenhanded approach
wouldn't have. The pioneering tome was originally published in 1989,
but make sure you get the updated 2000 paperback version, which
has a more recent chapter on metal in the '90s and a new, very much
on-target list of 100 definitive metal albums. Elegantly written
and just about perfect – how many other rock books can you
say that about?
Sound of the Beast:
The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, Ian Christe
(HarperCollins) If you want to learn about the evolution of
metal on more strictly musical terms, then this is the book
you want. It's a tad surreal seeing bands like Possessed and Cryptic
Slaughter getting the luxurious hardcover treatment, but they're
worthy of it. I could gripe with Christe for glossing over or omitting
my favorite metal bands, At the Gates and Soilent Green, or for
leaving Mr. Bungle's Disco Volante off the list of defining
"Avant-Garde Metal" albums. But, really, Sound of the
Beast is a thorough take on a complex, difficult subject, setting
the bar high for the next person foolish enough to attempt such
a book.
The Collector's
Guide to Heavy Metal, Martin Popoff (Collector's Guide) Hands
down, my favorite example of record-review writing in book form,
even though I disagree with Popoff's opinions 90 percent of the
time. His descriptive abilities, combined with his stone-faced sense
of humor and fanatical attention to detail – 29 Hawkwind albums?
– elevate a traditionally lowly pursuit to a near-art form.
The scathing reviews of bands like Triumph and latter-day Def Leppard
are particularly hilarious. Sadly, it's out of print, but stay tuned
for its reappearance (revised) in the form of three separate volumes
– covering the '70s, '80s, and '90s, respectively – over
the next couple of years.
Fargo Rock City:
A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota, Chuck Klosterman
(Scribner/Fireside) This one fits the bill only if you count
hair metal as metal and not something else – say, Top 40 pop
music with pointy guitars or a dolled-up version of '70s hard rock.
Still, it's worth making an exception for this book because it's
so funny and entertaining and, from a fledgling writer's perspective,
so awe-inspiringly well written. Partly a childhood memoir, partly
an informal but convincing defense of hair metal, Fargo Rock
City puts it all into perspective for those of us who grew up
despising Bon Jovi and Poison. The part where he rates his favorite
albums by estimating how much someone would have to pay him to never
listen to them again is especially ingenious.
W.Y.
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