No, I Wasn't Drawn By Par Olofsson
By NCS contributor Rev. Will
The dusty wind blew across the frosted landscape with a ragged rasp. A clump of dust rolled by clumsily, slightly bouncing up and down as it traversed the bumpy forest floor (What the heck is dust doing in a frosty forest?!). Birds chirped their last call for their nest mates as the day drew to a close, with the sun turning a red-orange hue as it slowly descended beneath the horizon, disappearing into the ravenous maw of the icy cold night.
Snap.
(I got sort of caught up in all the year-end Listmania we’ve been feeding you on this site, and am therefore late in publishing this guest opinion piece by Jesper Zuretti of The Binary Code. Check this out and let us [and Jesper} know what you think. Are we putting too much emphasis on recording quality?)
We Are the 3%: Recording Quality v. Song Quality
a novice attempt at history, psychology, and temptation
Many people hearing music in this day and age tend to put the quality of the recording in the forefront, even ahead of the quality of the composition and music. But how much does the music-hearing individual really understand about the quality of the recording they’re listening to? Should they need to understand anything at all? Should music be over-scrutinized and classified into the depths of genre segregation, with fine-tuning into multiple combinations of classification?
The best part about music, in my opinion, is the freedom you have with it, and yet people are probably pickier about music than they are the food they eat. The history of music proves to us that recording (although it’s the conduit to our musical stream) is but a small aspect of music’s place in the entirety of human existence. I’m no certified musicologist (although I’d like to think I am), but maybe we’ll open some minds – just bear in mind that I’m a long-winded typist! Stay with me:
Human beings have been making music as long as the species has existed. The human voice is considered one of the first instruments we ever used to make music. And beyond that, Humpback whales also spend a great deal of time creating music (and by “great deal of time,” we’re talking Frank Zappa amounts of time). So it’s very safe to assume that music was being created even before mankind came into existence. On that assumption, if you subtract the amount of time during which humans have actually captured music on recordings from the length of time whales have been on this planet (speculated to be 54 million years), you end up with less than 3% of music’s supposed development time dedicated to recording.
Last year, I vented about Christmas — at length — in a post creatively titled FUCK CHRISTMAS. It seems to be getting a renewed surge of web hits this month, which I suppose proves that the sour taste I have in my mouth this time of year needs to be spit out by other people, too. Except this year I don’t seem to be feeling so bloated with hostility that I need to vent. I’ve been questioning myself, trying to understand what has changed.
ME: So what’s going on with you this year? Are you feeling more charitable, more filled with love for your fellow men and women, more kindly and gushy and huggy?
MYSELF: Fuck no. Also, fuck you.
ME: Well, that wasn’t a very nice answer. Let’s try this again: Have you changed your mind about all those nasty things you said last year about Big Business using Christmas as an excuse to guilt-trip people into spending money they don’t have on presents people don’t need?
MYSELF: Nope, not at all. This year, like last year, retailers are still acting like a horde of vampire squid, sticking their blood funnels up your bunghole and trying to suck out all the cash you’ve got while pretending everything is happy and jolly. It’s tough to remember the event that Christmas is supposed to commemorate when you’ve got a groping blood funnel up your ass. Also, fuck you.
ME: Okay. Well, are you enjoying the Christmas season music more this year? Is it putting you in a cheerier mood?
MYSELF: Surely you jest. Did you see this?
(A new music video from a Long Island hardcore band called Stray From the Path provoked a discussion last night between me and TheMadIsraeli, and that in turn led the MadIsraeli to pen this post, which raises some interesting questions. Comments please!)
Let’s take things back a couple of decades . . .
The 80’s.
When I think of the 80’s, I think of three things. The best action movies, fucking Slayer, and the tape-trading scene. I’m only 22 and had the misfortune of missing out, so I can only imagine how exciting it must’ve been to get together with some friends, swapping old demos of greats that were to come or underground legends that were never to be heard from again.
From what I’ve heard and read, there was real community there, the manifestation of the love of music through human interaction and true brotherhood, all with a common unifying purpose and affection: The metal. Really, not just the metal, but heavy music in general. Hardcore also had its own thriving tape-trading circuit. So where is this taking me exactly?
Opeth’s new album, Heritage, leaked at some point in the last week or two, I forget when exactly. The official release date isn’t until September 20, but lots of fans have already heard it — and as of today you can now hear the whole thing in a stream at NPR — and flame wars have already begun here, there, and everywhere. Mikael Åkerfeldt has been giving interviews about the album (here, there, and everywhere). Among other things, he has said (here) that although the album isn’t “a massive departure for me and for the guys in the band,” some of the band’s legions of fans may find it “different.”
In the same interview, he said, “We don’t make albums thinking about the fans too much. We have been fortunate to have people who have accepted what we put out so far. Because we were just doing what we wanted to hear and apparently other people liked it too. So I’m hoping it’s going to be the same for this album.” When asked about fans who shout “treachery” whenever a band decides to tread off the path they have beaten, he replied: “Well, they wouldn’t be fans if we hadn’t started as a band. We have fans because we did what we wanted. Our success, or whatever you want to call it, is based on the fact that we do what we want as opposed to doing what the fans want. So it doesn’t apply to us.”
Oh, I beg to differ Monsieur Åkerfeldt! You can’t so easily escape the ire of fans who are already up in arms over Heritage, calling it “boring”, or “lazy” or “70′s prog rock”, or worse. Of course, there are at least as many defenders of the Opeth faith who, while agreeing that it’s “different”, admire the music on Heritage and support the freedom of the band to do whatever it is they did on the album.
I’m not entirely sure what they did, because I’ve only heard the first song that premiered back in July — “The Devil’s Orchard”. I liked much of the instrumental music on the song, didn’t care for the vocals, and decided I probably wouldn’t listen to the song again (after the first four times). But that’s mainly because of my own taste in music. This just isn’t the style of metal (if it is metal) that I want to hear. But I wouldn’t say the song is bad, for what it is. Which leads to a few thoughts and a few questions about “music criticism” and fan response (after the jump).
We all live in two worlds: the face-to-face world, the world of flesh and blood, populated by the people with whom we interact in person on a daily basis, and the electronically enabled world, in which we interact with people we’ve never met. In my face-to-face world, most of the people I know aren’t metalheads. The people I work with and most of my friends aren’t into metal, and don’t have any idea that I have this blog. They’d be terribly confused if they knew.
I do know people in the flesh-and-blood world who are into metal — people I see at Seattle clubs pretty regularly, a handful of musicians, and a few people I’m very close to, but in my circle of friends, they’re outnumbered by people who don’t get the attraction of metal at all. The truth is that I “know” far more people who are metalheads in the electronic world than I do in the face-to-face world, and I’ve “met” most of them through NCS.
The headbangers from those two worlds, as a group, aren’t a statistically valid sample, and I’m certainly not a trained sociologist, but when I think about all the metalheads I know and I throw in the ones I read about, I draw some conclusions about why I’m drawn to them. In most ways, I think they’re like most people. They’re not any smarter or dumber than anyone else — it’s basically the same Bell curve. They’re not any more or less fair, any more or less conscientious, any more or less moral or “deviant”, any more or less hard-working, no more immune or susceptible to pain or joy, no less needing of love and friendship, no more or less heedless of the feelings of others.
Despite the vaunted extremes of the metal scene, I don’t even think most metalheads are any more individualistic or independent than the average person either. Because, let’s face it, human beings are social creatures. We’re herd animals. We need standards and we conform to conventions, and most of us tend to be followers instead of leaders. It just happens that our herd is smaller than the big herds that swarm around us, and our conventions seem alien to the members of those larger herds. Having said all this, however, I do think metalheads are different in certain ways, and those differences are what draw me to them. Yes, part of it is that they use the words “fuck” and “fucking” more often than most people, but there’s more. (after the jump . . .)
To recap:
An earthquake of historic proportions hit northeastern Japan on March 11. That triggered a massive tsunami that flooded a wide swath of the Japanese mainland. Millions were left without power, and the loss of power also caused malfunctions at a nuclear plant, which has been leaking radiation ever since. More than 9,800 bodies have been recovered so far, another 17,500 are still missing; the majority of those are probably dead. Even now, more than 600,000 homes are without water, more than 200,000 still without power. Hundreds of thousands remain homeless.
We have a faithful reader named Phro whose frequent comments make me laugh or feel queasy (or sometimes both). He’s an American living and working in the Tokyo area. On March 16, at the end of one of our more widely read posts, called “Our World”, we passed along an appeal from Phro for contributions to the relief effort in Japan. And then, in an update to the post, we explained that Phro had offered an extra inducement: if NCS and its readers could meet or exceed the goal of raising $500 for Japanese relief, Phro promised to do something inappropriate and ridiculous (e.g., wear a maid skirt and dance around akihabara) and send us photographic evidence.
We exceeded that goal — and Phro has now paid off. (details – and photos – after the jump . . .)
Think of our world — the human part of it. According to the most authoritative current estimates, Earth is populated by nearly seven billion souls.
Now think about the number of people in the world for whom music is a part of their daily lives. I have no idea of the number. But for whatever reason, music is part of what it means to be human. There is historical evidence of music dating back approximately 100,000 years (in the form of Neanderthal whistles made from animal bone), and it surely dates back far longer, before the time when Neanderthals or homo sapiens created any kind of record or artifact that would survive to the modern era.
Certainly, music is not a part of everyone’s life. Some people are literally comatose, and others lead lives that are duller than a pothole of muddy water after a rain. But I have to believe that some kind of music means something to the overwhelming majority of people in the world every day.
Now, think about the number of those people who listen to music they would call “metal”. Suddenly, the number plummets dramatically. Again, I have no idea about the actual count (and no one else does either), but it has to be a tiny percentage of the whole, on a global basis.
Now, let’s subtract the people who call their music “metal” when it really isn’t metal at all (but instead is just hard rock or worse) and the people whose definition of metal means music that hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 80s, or earlier. Let’s get down to the people who listen to the kind of music we cover on this site, and on sites like this one — the kind of music you can’t discuss or even explain to people who don’t already get it.
Again, I have no idea how to estimate the number on a global scale, and no one else knows either, but it has to be vanishingly small — an infinitesimal fraction of a percent of all human beings. (I do have a point, and will get to it . . . after the jump.)
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, but the relentless commercial onslaught that is Christmas is not done with us yet — not by a long shot. To borrow what Matt Taibbi vividly wrote about Goldman Sachs, the commercial Christmas machine will continue to wrap itself around the face of Western humanity for the next 30 days like a great vampire squid, “relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” As you’ll see, even some metal bands turn into vampire squids this time of year.
Yes, we need to vent a bit. That’s all. To be brutally honest, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at NCS, we have nothing original to say about Christmas. Will that stop us from expressing our opinions? Fuck no! If incisive original thought were a requirement for NCS posts, we’d be in very deep shit. Lacking any such constraints, however, we will proceed — and you can’t stop us!
You might infer from the title of this post that it will just be an atheistic diatribe against Christianity, but you would be wrong. From our point of view, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian, an adherent of some other faith, or someone who has concluded that God is a myth, that Jesus was just a man, and that religion is for feeble-minded sheep.
Really, it doesn’t matter what you believe or don’t believe: All right-thinking people, Christians or not, theists or atheists, should raise their voices and middle fingers in unison and repeat after us: FUCK CHRISTMAS! (more after the jump . . .)
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Today we have another guest post from our Midwestern correspondent, BadWolf. This one has the potential to ignite some heated commentary, pro or con, so don't hold back. After all, "ignition" is our middle name (or one of them). So please let us hear from you!]
I feel a great deal of the time bloggers put an excessive premium on the music itself as art.
This makes sense, we are music bloggers, after all. But there’s more to metal than just the song or the album; there is the all-important live experience. Maybe bloggers sometimes ignore the live aspect of metal because it’s more difficult to share via the internet, or maybe because it’s just plain expensive at times.
Regardless, the live arena is where metal was born and what keeps artists afloat. It’s where the musicians we love get the money to make the music we love. And it’s also where metal as a community subculture congregates. Today I want to talk about those two aspects of metal.
But first, let’s talk about hypocrisy for a minute. Not the band, the phenomenon.
Pretty not-metal, right? A professor of mine once told me the first adjective she associated with metal music was honesty. Black metal purists clamor on and on about ‘trve’-ness. We, as a community, put a premium on truth (this has something to do with the endless sub-genre debate, methinks).
So what do live shows, the metal community, and hypocrisy have in common? Straight-edge. That’s what they have in common. (more after the jump . . .)
