Fargo Rock City (29 page)

Bands like Marilyn Manson and Korn would seem like obvious extensions of '80s metal (Manson loves to rave about Judas Priest), but those antiaesthetic sensibilities don't wash with people who associate their tastes with the prettier, cleaner groups of the former decade. Industrial goth neo-metal suggests a different attitude, and—more importantly—it seems to specifically
belong
to a defined social sector within a defined demographic. Groups like Van Halen and Def Leppard were kind of made for everybody—guys, girls, stoners, bikers, farm kids, the JV debate team, even people who liked country music (in our football team's locker room, AC/DC was the original “crossover” band). This is part of the explanation as to why pop metal bands were so damn successful.

It's also a big reason why musical pundits were so dismissive of their style: Party-obsessed headbangers lacked the hipness of exclusion. Metallica was one of the few '80s metal groups who developed that kind of (ahem) “credibility.” They were painfully serious and seemed to be playing music for different reasons than somebody like Jon Bon Jovi, and—at least at first—Metallica offered a sound that was legitimately more intense than the rest of the pack. Idiots always say that Metallica “sold out” between
… And Justice For All
and their eponymous 1992 Black Album, but that's nothing compared to their evolution from 1983's
Kill 'Em All
to 1984's
Ride the Lightning,
an album best remembered for the suicide ballad “Fade to Black.” On their debut record, they had openly expressed a desire to go out and kill people; by their sophomore follow-up, they merely wanted to kill themselves.

It's my suspicion that when today's new generation of rock writers matures into forty-five-year-old bastards and starts running the media industry, Metallica will suddenly become more and more “important,” perhaps even on scale with Led Zeppelin and the Who. They've managed to sustain a career that has stretched nearly two decades, and they've cleverly excelled at both sides of the cultural equation: Metallica started as an uncompromising underground band who appealed to a fringe hardcore audience, but they've seamlessly evolved into a commercial juggernaut that seems to release a new video to MTV every seventy-two hours. They have been the Madonna and they have been the whore, and future historians will ultimately adore them for both.

But Metallica never meant shit to someone like me. In fact, they kind of pissed me off. When I was a glamour-starved sophomore in high school, James Hetfield was ugly and humorless; when I was an elitist sophomore in college, he made witless sorority bitches like speed metal. Even when his songs were good, I hated their social ramifications.

Metallica was influenced by the so-called new wave of British metal (NWOBM), a collection of Europeans who played raw, needlessly complicated songs and lacked mascara, lip liner, and irony. These are groups like the power-hungry Judas Priest, the Samuel Taylor Coleridge-obsessed Iron Maiden, a handful of groups that described “heads” (Diamond Head, Motorhead, et al.), and a band called Tygers of Pang Tang who I've never listened to (not even once).

Musically, these were decent groups that serious (read: unlikeable) metal fans worship, and they will claim that these particular outfits have “stood the test of time” better than the American pretty boys. A better description would be that they still seem about as fun as they did when they were fresh (read: not very). The best NWOBM music came from Priest and Motorhead, especially when they would lean toward a slightly commercial sound (
very
slightly in the case of Motorhead). The biggest thing they did was to provide the theoretical inspiration for our next
generation of unhappy fellows: speed metal (and speed metal's bastard son, death metal).

In June of 1998, I covered a Slayer concert at the Odeon Club in downtown Cleveland. The show was a sell-out, which surprised me at the time. It kind of illustrates how much blue-collar midwestern cities continue to love hard rock, regardless of how often the media tells them they should hate it.

This was the most intense show I ever attended. It was actually kind of terrifying, and I'm the kind of person who generally enjoys watching other people's self-destructive intensity. About a thousand people packed themselves into this tiny club near Lake Erie and went absolutely ballistic for two hours. Slayer would be Spinal Tap if they possessed even an ounce of irony, but—as it is—they are most serious band who ever lived. The result is absolutely punishing. Slayer is kind of like a guy who walks up to you in a bar and says he's going to rape your wife, burn down your house, shoot all your friends, cover your kids with acid, and then slowly starve you to death while rats nibble away at your emaciated flesh. Now, if this hypothetical guy is merely a drunken goofball, that kind of complex depravity seems hilarious (almost endearing). But if he's the one guy on earth willing (and able) to do all those things, you'd suddenly realize you're talking to the craziest, most sinister motherfucker who ever lived. Slayer is that one guy.

As a general rule, I'm an absolute media apologist. I constantly find myself defending depraved, socially reprehensible material, mostly because I genuinely support all of it. And like most social critics, I inevitably overlook the obvious whenever it comes to the marriage of art and life. And something happened at this Slayer concert that I cannot ignore, and it sure seems like a prime example of “the obvious.”

Late in Slayer's set, I was standing near the Odeon's door, probably the most sedate part of the club. Frontman Tom Araya was delivering some fairly moronic between-song banter, and I honestly wasn't listening. Suddenly, Araya screams, “It's raining … blood!,” which (obviously) meant they were going to perform
“Raining Blood,” the last track off 1986's
Reign in Blood,
widely considered the greatest death metal album ever recorded. I don't know what makes
Reign in Blood
a higher artistic achievement than any other death metal LP (or even what makes it better than any other Slayer LP), but I don't have any argument against it either. I'll take Ira Robbins's word for it.

ANYWAY, what happened next continues to baffle me. As soon as guitarist Kerry King played the first chord—and I mean the
first
chord—a guy about fifteen feet away from me inexplicably punched the person standing in front of him. By mere coincidence, I had been inadvertently watching these two guys for the last ten minutes (they were in my line of sight), and they obviously had no ill will toward each other; in fact, I'm almost certain they had no relationship whatsoever. And it's not like they started moshing, either. The first guy made a closed fist and cold-cocked the other dude in the back of the head. And a little closer to the stage, something similar happened about five seconds later: A man hit a woman in the face for no apparent reason.

All these hooligans were dragged out of the bar by a few bad-ass bouncers and thrown face down on the sidewalk outside of the club (the Odeon staff does not fuck around). Like any good reporter (or—more accurately—like anyone trying to
act
like a good reporter), I scampered outside to see if these people were going to keep fighting. They didn't. In fact, they just stared at each other with blank faces, further accentuating the fact that these people
had never met before.
They had no tangible qualms with each other at all, and they couldn't even come up with a decent imaginary argument. Yet, for whatever the reason, they had started throwing punches at each other before the band could even bleat out the first words of one particular song (which are—in case you're wondering—“Trapped in purgatory / A lifeless object, alive”).

Am I blaming this on Slayer? Well, no. These people were probably drunk, probably unstable, and almost certainly stupid. But there
is
something weird about how humans react to the sonic quality of speed metal. It has a funneling effect on one's mental
processes; everything becomes very linear. Somehow, that intellectual reconfiguration holds a strong appeal to a certain kind of personality. If I were a scientist, I would conduct tests on people who consider themselves loyal speed metal fans; I hypothesize they would generally share similar cerebral patterns for problem-solving and argumentation (however, I'm only a journalist, so I'll simply talk about this as if it were already a fact).

What I can't understand (or—more accurately—pretend to understand) is where this kind of hyperaggressive, no-love-till-leather thinking comes from (musically, there's no equation to explain it). The most interesting thing about speed metal is that it really
was
groundbreaking (at least for a while); while the new wave of UK metal is often cited as an influence, those bands don't sound anything like contemporary speed metal. Metallica and Megadeth usually claim they found their style by welding British metal with a punk philosophy, and the conventional hipster wisdom is that punk was invented when some kid tried to play “Communication Breakdown” in his basement and couldn't figure out the chord changes. So I guess we are left to assume that Led Zeppelin's eponymous debut was the first speed metal album ever recorded (that is, if “we” are “a bunch of idiots”).

My appreciation for bands like this—particularly the popular ones, like Metallica—varies from moment to moment. It is difficult to listen to any full-length Metallica record, or even to sit through an hour-long collection of the best Metallica songs played in succession. If Led Zeppelin can be viewed as the Babe Ruth of hard rock, Metallica is undoubtedly Hank Aaron: leaner, more consistent over the long haul, destined to break all the records—but somehow never
transcendent.
Still, their music can be incredible for short stretches, and it makes you listen to all other songs differently. It alters the boundaries of what popular music can be. Metallica's first three records were stunningly effective in creating a new kind of metal fan who perceived himself (or herself) differently from the other kids at school, and I think a lot of that can be explained by the technical composition of songs like “Seek & Destroy” and “Master of Puppets.” One is
tempted to explain Metallica—and all speed metal—in an all too obvious way:
Heavy metal played faster.
But that's not really accurate.

When a series of notes reaches a certain speed, a David Banner-like metamorphosis occurs. This is especially true when these notes are played on an electric guitar. Listen to the final two minutes of “Animal” from Vinnie Vincent, a brilliant example of guitar masturbation that works. As Vincent plays faster and faster (and faster and faster), the instrument reaches a critical point where it suddenly becomes the equivalent of a police whistle; it's similar to how the sound of a passing train changes pitch because of the Doppler effect. The same sort of thing happens with the sequencing of guitar riffs. Let's say Slash started playing a familiar lick, like the lead riff from “Welcome to the Jungle.” We all know exactly what Slash's style sounds like, so we'd recognize his musical signature even if he played it faster. This would continue as the riff would come quicker and quicker; it would still seem like Guns N' Roses, and it would still sound like a
rock
song. But at some juncture in the acceleration—and I can't specify when—it would suddenly become
speed metal,
and it would be impossible to connect with the original creation. Imagine watching a wagon wheel as the axle (or maybe in this case, the Axl) starts turning; at a specific speed, the spokes suddenly appear to be rolling in reverse. Granted, this is an illusion—but it's an illusion that's comparable to the very real way people consume speed metal differently from glam rock, even though the two animals are filed under the same section in any record store. There is a point of no return that changes the meaning of a sound.

What's always struck me about speed metal is that its fans are obsessed with lyrics, even though these lyrics are essentially indecipherable. Teenage speed metal fanatics inevitably write the words to entire songs in their school notebooks and place considerable significance on their themes. In the 1996 HBO documentary
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,
convicted teenage sadist Damien Wayne Echols scribbled Metallica
lyrics in his notebook alongside the work of antichrist superstar Aleister Crowley. While fans of party rock rarely cared about the words to their anthems, speed freaks demanded that their heroes write about
something
misanthropic, even if they didn't have any insight to offer.

That's probably how we got death metal. All of these speed metal bands were writing about dark, sinister issues, and eventually they made the logical leap to writing about the darkest, most sinister dude they could remember hearing about in Sunday school. Groups like Metallica and Megadeth (and Anthrax, sort of) were based around being unhappy, but somehow this evolved into upstart bands who wrote almost exclusively about killing themselves and/or their parents and/or the girlfriend they wish they had.

I've never seriously listened to groups like Deicide and Carcass and King Diamond, and I don't feel much desire to place their work in a cultural context. It's not that I think these bands are dangerous; on the contrary, I think they ultimately play a positive role in the lives of kids who (for whatever reason) have dark fantasies and a desire to dwell on social emptiness. What I don't think they do is cross over into conventional culture; I don't think we've seen much of a mainstream societal pollination from death metal. It's an insular subculture that doesn't have legs. I suppose it's possible that these kinds of groups inherited some of their ideas from the goth scene, and it's just as possible that savvy death metal groups simply stole the sexy brand of satanism practiced by the Crüe, Maiden, and all three of Glenn Danzig's projects. However, I ultimately suspect that these artists simply thought dying was the only subject that was interesting to write about.