The Old Chuggity Chuggity
This is a quick 'n' dirty repost via email from my tumblr. It's my first genuine blog post in months; I think it's fair to say that if you want to keep up with me on the net these days then twitter is the place to do it. I'd love to check in here more often but it's just so massively inconvenient that I do it less and less. I do have the decency to feel awful about all the people I'm gradually losing touch with; not quite enough decency to stop it happening though, it seems.
Anyway, here you go, a little ramble about how my preferred sound at this time of year isn't the jingling of sleigh bells, but the thrashing of guitars and pounding drums.
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You know, it's funny what the changing of the seasons does to my temprament. It's only taken me 30 years to pin it down- although, to be fair, I had plenty of other mental issues to sort through- but there's a definite shift in the gears inside my skull when the weather makes that sudden snap into proper cold around mid-November.
It's a long standing joke in my immediate family that I shave my head as soon as it gets cold. And now I come to think about it, it's true, more often than not. This year's no exception. It's not a conscious decision, and logically I understand why it doesn't make any sense- believe me, I know it as soon as the wind hits the back of my head- but that point when my hair gets so irritating that it absolutely must go always seems to hit once the nights are fully drawn in.
The big shift is my musical taste. Everyone who knows me knows that I'm more than a little partial to ridiculously heavy music. The old chuggity chuggity. But during the warmer months my listening habits are pretty diverse; as well as the Anthrax there's plenty of blues, country, more mainstream rock, experimental electronic music, classical music and so on and so on... this year I went on a little bit of a Malian blues kick, for example.
But once the sun starts setting around four, and the wind gets cold enough that my thumb goes numb when I'm texting, all that other shit goes out the window, and the Napalm Death albums come out. I don't know if it's a reaction to the temperature, a need to keep my base level of excitement up when I'm outdoors (which is where I do most of my music listening, on my mp3 player, travelling to and from work) so as to fend off hypothermia, or something else, but as the christmas season approaches, something makes me want to deafen myself.
This year, as is so often the case, it started with Napalm Death- their excellent Enemy Of The Music Business album was warming my eardrums for a while, before I moved onto their more recent Time Waits For No Slave thanks to my lovely eMusic subscription. From there I found myself drawn to Throwdown, who's latest album, Deathless, is not only awesome, but also sounds almost exactly like Pantera. And now I'm onto Hatebreed. Who, interestingly, appear to have begun a slow metamorphosis into Biohazard on their new self-titled effort.
I've been trying, lately, to pin down exactly what genre of music it is that I like. When I was young, we just called it metal; as I got older, it became easier to talk about hardcore, as metal became increasingly afflicted by highly emotional fourteen year olds with fashionable haircuts who wanted to warble about their feelings. And then emo came along, and suddenly those irritating little shits were fucking up all the hardcore bands as well. Wikipedia tells me that the kind of music I love so much is now known as "metalcore", which makes sense, I suppose.
I can't fully pinpoint what it is that I love about this kind of music. The most common criticisms levelled at this genre are that it's mindless and macho; now, while I shan't deny that this is certainly true of a certain section of the audience, I can't think of many genres of music that ISN'T true of. To level this particular accusation at this music is unfair though. It's definitely muscular, but I've known too many female metalheads (including my beloved) to think that it's gender specific; as for the "mindless" label, well, all I can say is to read some lyrics. For every deliberately anti-intellectual, brutally simple hate mantra, you'll find two or three carefully crafted, highly impassioned excercises in positive, plugged-in, politically charged empowerment. Primal, yes; primitive, no.
As for the simplicity of the music itself, the simplicity is the point. It's not about showing off how well you can play your instrument- if you want that, you need power metal, a genre composed almost entirely of hairspray addicted middle aged men who can't tell their guitars apart from their penises, and masturbate with both constantly- it's about connecting with the lizard brain, about producing a sound that will induce the fight or flight impulse and keep it pumping. It's about making a sound that feels like the gates of hell have opened, and an enormous horde of monstrous beasts are stampeding out of it in your direction. It's about simulating what it must be like to be inside a thunder cloud when lightning strikes.
It's about bludgeoning yourself deliberately in the brain. And I love it.
#####
Oh, and as an addendum:
You know that old chestnut about heavy metal and/or punk rock being right-wing and/or racist? the popular perception that anyone who listens to this stuff is a neo-nazi skinhead or redneck biker?
Anyone who thinks that is not only ignorant, but fucking stupid to boot. Again: read some lyrics. Fuck, look at the bands themselves: a pretty large proporation of the most beloved and influential bands in this sphere are multi-ethnic. Politically, they generally range between straight up anarchist and mainstream liberal. Authoritarianism and war are the traditional targets of the fury that fuels the music, with bigotry a close third on the shit list. there ARE nazi metal and hardcore bands- a lot of the scandinavian "black metal" satanist bands advocate that kind of poisonous shit, and there's a whole underground white power punk scen in the US- but they are very much their own distinct sub-culture, largely rejected by masses who listen to this stuff. I have no truck with that shit, and neither should you.
Just wanted to clear that up.
Anyway, here you go, a little ramble about how my preferred sound at this time of year isn't the jingling of sleigh bells, but the thrashing of guitars and pounding drums.
#####
You know, it's funny what the changing of the seasons does to my temprament. It's only taken me 30 years to pin it down- although, to be fair, I had plenty of other mental issues to sort through- but there's a definite shift in the gears inside my skull when the weather makes that sudden snap into proper cold around mid-November.
It's a long standing joke in my immediate family that I shave my head as soon as it gets cold. And now I come to think about it, it's true, more often than not. This year's no exception. It's not a conscious decision, and logically I understand why it doesn't make any sense- believe me, I know it as soon as the wind hits the back of my head- but that point when my hair gets so irritating that it absolutely must go always seems to hit once the nights are fully drawn in.
The big shift is my musical taste. Everyone who knows me knows that I'm more than a little partial to ridiculously heavy music. The old chuggity chuggity. But during the warmer months my listening habits are pretty diverse; as well as the Anthrax there's plenty of blues, country, more mainstream rock, experimental electronic music, classical music and so on and so on... this year I went on a little bit of a Malian blues kick, for example.
But once the sun starts setting around four, and the wind gets cold enough that my thumb goes numb when I'm texting, all that other shit goes out the window, and the Napalm Death albums come out. I don't know if it's a reaction to the temperature, a need to keep my base level of excitement up when I'm outdoors (which is where I do most of my music listening, on my mp3 player, travelling to and from work) so as to fend off hypothermia, or something else, but as the christmas season approaches, something makes me want to deafen myself.
This year, as is so often the case, it started with Napalm Death- their excellent Enemy Of The Music Business album was warming my eardrums for a while, before I moved onto their more recent Time Waits For No Slave thanks to my lovely eMusic subscription. From there I found myself drawn to Throwdown, who's latest album, Deathless, is not only awesome, but also sounds almost exactly like Pantera. And now I'm onto Hatebreed. Who, interestingly, appear to have begun a slow metamorphosis into Biohazard on their new self-titled effort.
I've been trying, lately, to pin down exactly what genre of music it is that I like. When I was young, we just called it metal; as I got older, it became easier to talk about hardcore, as metal became increasingly afflicted by highly emotional fourteen year olds with fashionable haircuts who wanted to warble about their feelings. And then emo came along, and suddenly those irritating little shits were fucking up all the hardcore bands as well. Wikipedia tells me that the kind of music I love so much is now known as "metalcore", which makes sense, I suppose.
I can't fully pinpoint what it is that I love about this kind of music. The most common criticisms levelled at this genre are that it's mindless and macho; now, while I shan't deny that this is certainly true of a certain section of the audience, I can't think of many genres of music that ISN'T true of. To level this particular accusation at this music is unfair though. It's definitely muscular, but I've known too many female metalheads (including my beloved) to think that it's gender specific; as for the "mindless" label, well, all I can say is to read some lyrics. For every deliberately anti-intellectual, brutally simple hate mantra, you'll find two or three carefully crafted, highly impassioned excercises in positive, plugged-in, politically charged empowerment. Primal, yes; primitive, no.
As for the simplicity of the music itself, the simplicity is the point. It's not about showing off how well you can play your instrument- if you want that, you need power metal, a genre composed almost entirely of hairspray addicted middle aged men who can't tell their guitars apart from their penises, and masturbate with both constantly- it's about connecting with the lizard brain, about producing a sound that will induce the fight or flight impulse and keep it pumping. It's about making a sound that feels like the gates of hell have opened, and an enormous horde of monstrous beasts are stampeding out of it in your direction. It's about simulating what it must be like to be inside a thunder cloud when lightning strikes.
It's about bludgeoning yourself deliberately in the brain. And I love it.
#####
Oh, and as an addendum:
You know that old chestnut about heavy metal and/or punk rock being right-wing and/or racist? the popular perception that anyone who listens to this stuff is a neo-nazi skinhead or redneck biker?
Anyone who thinks that is not only ignorant, but fucking stupid to boot. Again: read some lyrics. Fuck, look at the bands themselves: a pretty large proporation of the most beloved and influential bands in this sphere are multi-ethnic. Politically, they generally range between straight up anarchist and mainstream liberal. Authoritarianism and war are the traditional targets of the fury that fuels the music, with bigotry a close third on the shit list. there ARE nazi metal and hardcore bands- a lot of the scandinavian "black metal" satanist bands advocate that kind of poisonous shit, and there's a whole underground white power punk scen in the US- but they are very much their own distinct sub-culture, largely rejected by masses who listen to this stuff. I have no truck with that shit, and neither should you.
Just wanted to clear that up.