Mastodon's Leviathan is one of the greatest concept albums in the history of metal. The band's rolling, driving sound is ideally suited to the sea, a mythologised space if ever there was one. On Leviathan, the ocean is home to ancient sea-beasts, Norse gods and Leviathan himself: the white whale.
But I don't respond to Leviathan out of romantic fascination alone. I grew up in the coastal floodplains of northern Germany, where only a dyke protects us from the sea. When the levees break, as last seen in 1962, the results can be disastrous. (A memorial plaque in the town hall places the 1962 high-water mark half-way up the stairs between the ground and first floor.)
Before there was a dyke system, the coastline shifted radically several times. In a fourteenth-century storm surge known as the Groote Mandrenke ('great drowning of men' in Low German), the area where we now live was torn off from the mainland and remained an island for three hundred years. Small wonder that in those days churches were built on artificial mounds, to provide refuge to people and their cattle in times of need.
The people here were peasants and fishermen, but they were not above deliberately shipwrecking passing vessels by manipulating signal fires. The sea could kill but it also presented opportunity, be it Hanseatic trading (and piracy!) across the North Sea to England and Scandinavia or, in later centuries, the international connections of Hamburg and Bremen. Old captains' houses sometimes have whalebone fences; a twentieth-century church in a nearby town is built in the shape of a ship.
With industrial society the importance of the sea has waned, but its mythic power is undiminished. There are annual windjammer parades and numerous museums and preserved spaces. When I was a child, I adored stories of the age of sail, people heading into the unknown on the far side of the world. Turns out I'm still into that sort of thing.
Reading Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta, Chuck Klosterman's memoir mixed with a plea for a reappraisal of glam metal, I experienced a fundamental disconnect: that odd feeling that I'll never be able to share the author's evident enthusiasm for his subject, because it can't ever mean to me what it signifies for him: you had to be there. It's possible to consider Fargo Rock City from a technical perspective, but the critic's ability or otherwise to relate to Klosterman's experience plays a pretty crucial part. Thus, my criticisms of the book say at least as much about me and the metal culture I grew up in as they do about Fargo Rock City.
Klosterman, born in the early seventies, got into metal when his older brother brought back a tape of Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil. Loyal to pop metal with a teenager's devotion throughout the eighties, Klosterman's metal fandom went underground when the industry collapsed in the wake of the grunge explosion. Fargo Rock City is an attempt to pick up the pieces, to explain what W.A.S.P., Poison and Whitesnake meant to a whole generation (and why Klosterman still rocks out to them).
That's a project I'm sympathetic to. The rock critics who scorned glam metal may be right (Klosterman argues they are, but only in part), but if millions of young people loved a cultural phenomenon then it is worthy of consideration - important - even if it's bad. Especially if it's bad, perhaps: for the very features that make music unpalatable to critics (juvenile, aggressive lyrics, simple but infectious hooks, ostentatious hedonism - in short, all that is lurid, licentious and vile) attract teenage men. In that respect there's a great deal of overlap between Klosterman's love for glam metal and one of my pet passions, the slasher film.
Fargo Rock City may be a product of eighties nostalgia, but it's far from a straightforward evocation of the time. Instead, Klosterman alternates schizophrenically between memoir (and musings on youth in general) and essays on aspects of glam metal or larger issues in pop culture as illustrated by glam. These are usually interesting, but the book just feels cobbled together. Some of the autobiographical bits, like the semi-infamous 'drinking chapter', bear little relation to metal at all, even if they help illuminate the author.
I can relate to Klosterman's experience. I grew up in a village of 250 people in the marshlands of northern Germany, the European equivalent of North Dakota. Nor am I really free to indulge my reflexive metalhead disdain towards the Sunset Strip bands, which have become the black sheep of the family despite popularising metal in the mainstream and acting as a gateway. That would be rank hypocrisy, for as a teen I grew up with nu metal, quite possibly the only subgenre as despised as glam. And not just any nu metal: my life's devotion was to Linkin Park, who could never shake off allegations of being a manufactured group. So I get Klosterman's desire to reclaim the value of his youth. As he stresses again and again, to 80s kids glam metal songs were full of profound meaning. Since the voice of my generation is Fred Durst, I can hardly cast the first stone.
I was thoroughly rankled by Klosterman's slipshod use of terminology: 'heavy metal', 'glam metal', 'hair metal' and 'hard rock' are regularly used as synonyms. Metalheads, you see, are obsessives: we spend at least as much time arguing over precise classifications within the metal family as we do actually listening to music. As a result, we've more or less eliminated synonyms from our language, which makes the job of journalists like Klosterman that much harder. But Klosterman is, he freely admits, not what passes for a metalhead today. When he grew up, glam was metal, while the bands whose influences are felt throughout modern metal were far less famous. For thrash acts like Slayer (whom he calls 'speed metal' - see above), Klosterman professes puzzlement: their sonic aggression and self-seriousness, he believes, is antithetical to the sheer headbanging joy he associates with metal.
That's where the circle closes. Klosterman and I share the fundamental impulse behind heavy music: a desire - nay, a need - to rock. Until quite recently, I believed this was a universal human drive, but apparently there are people for whom shouting along and rocking out to heavy riffs simply holds no attraction. Despite metalheads' occasional elitism, this desire undeniably links Black Sabbath and Mötley Crüe, Poison and Bathory. It's why we can appreciate what glam metal meant. Even if the music was a bit rubbish.
I've been listening to Watain recently. My journey into black metal had previously kept me on the melodic, viking metal end of the subgenre's spectrum (Falkenbach, Forefather). I knew Swedish bands were generally more melodic and polished than the Norwegian scene, so I decided to ease into a harsher, more chaotic style than I was used to with Lawless Darkness. To my considerable surprise, I loved it.
In Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, Sam Dunn calls black metal 'raw, yet also epic and atmospheric'. Virtually all Hessians - outside grindcore, anyway - are drawn to the epic nature of metal, the liberation from the strictures of radio-friendly three-and-a-half minute songs musicians enjoy. A ten-minute metal composition twists and turns, it repeats itself, changes, evolves and comes full circle. The strength of Iron Maiden's albums since Brave New World, for example, is precisely that willingness to explore, to create vast soundscapes.
Extreme metal is set apart by extreme vocal and instrumental distortion. In effect, the musical landscapes metal creates become uncomfortable, alien. The music is many things, but never pleasant. A track like 'Wolves Curse' or the titular 'Lawless Darkness' creates a vast, hostile and alien wasteland musically; and the lyrics are an important part of that, as in 'Death's Cold Dark':
To dare what's lit sole by the friar's lantern Through labyrinths so desolate and dark to travel far in solitude and silence 'cross thornclad deserts vast To witness the erection of a temple At the place where order dies and chaos unfold Its tower shall lean out over the precipice O the wonders those that mount it shall behold For there the waves of Absu smash the rocks of definition And feast upon them with erosive force Yes there the ancient giants of primordial waters Are hunting in the twilight near the shores
No, I don't know what that means either. But that's unsurprising: this is surrealism, and the parallels to psychedelia like Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets are worth noting. It's a dark version of apocalyptic literature like the Book of Revelation or - probably more accurately - the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter. Watain fancy themselves satanists, but Lawless Darkness doesn't exactly overflow with blasphemy. Instead, the lyrics' obsession with imaginary geography indicates the fascination with exploring strange landscapes that characterises so much metal, and if that exploration is harsh - there's a lot of shred guitar and blast beats - it's so much the more fascinating for it.
I can't pinpoint the exact moment I became a metalhead, but as for so many young men of my generation my gateway drug was Linkin Park.
Within the metal scene this is not considered a cool thing to say, to put it mildly. These days I merrily dismiss nu metal as nothing more than gentrified grunge mixed with hip hop, a bunch of whingeing poseurs ripping off Rage Against the Machine with none of the revolutionary politics or musicianship.
But those of us in our mid-twenties now headbanging to blast beats? We liked Linkin Park. We liked Korn. Some of us, God help us, listened to Limp Bizkit. On this now famous graph, we all started on the far left. When I was fourteen, nu metal was the heaviest, angriest music I'd ever listened to.
The point is that I can't possibly approach Metal: A Headbanger's Journey neutrally. Thankfully, director Sam Dunn doesn't just recognise that: he comes from the same place. Dunn got into metal with Metallica, Maiden and Slayer in the eighties, and has been a metalhead ever since. His film is thus openly, enthusiastically partisan: just like the genre, it wears its heart on its sleeve in a big, proud and sometimes embarrassing way.
Dunn travels the world to speak to metal musicians and producers as well as attending Wacken in northern Germany, the world's largest metal festival. The interviews are almost entirely delightful. Dunn himself - an immensely likeable, gentle man who nonetheless likes some of the heaviest music on this middle-earth - has a lot to do with that: he's a sympathetic but smart interviewer, always giving his subjects room to breathe, never cutting them off or leading them.
Anyone still clinging to the aggressive, even brutish image associated with metal will be flummoxed by the sheer friendliness of the musicians - from Tony Iommi to Alice Cooper - that Dunn talks to. The tiny, wonderful Ronnie James Dio (of Black Sabbath, Rainbow, and Dio) and Iron Maiden's warm, articulate frontman Bruce Dickinson stand out, but for my money Rob Zombie is especially baffling. Here's someone who's directed some of the nastiest horrorfilms in existence, and he seems like a great chap to have a pint with. (The gentlemen of Slipknot, who put forth intelligent, well-argued viewpoints while wearing horror masks, are another highlight.)
There are two interviews which are not what you'd call successful in ordinary terms, and both are with black metal musicians. First, Dunn tries to talk to Mayhem at Wacken, and only succeeds in provoking Necrobutcher to a profanity-laden drunken tirade against... something, while Blasphemer just sits there peacefully. The second odd encounter takes place in Norway, where Dunn speaks to Gaahl, then vocalist for black metal band Gorgoroth. The interview is worth watching:
DUNN: What is the primary ideology or primary ideas that fuel Gorgoroth's music? (Pause.)
GAAHL: Satan. (takes sip of wine) (Pause.)
DUNN: What does Satan embody, what does he represent? (Pause.)
GAAHL: Freedom.
This is theatre. Gaahl is controlling the scene by the setting, his Pinteresque pauses and laconic answers. He's presenting Dunn with the most evil man in Norway. (Wish to hear Gaahl discuss fashion and art? Here you go, provided you read German.) What I can't figure out is whether it's a serious performance - a genuine attempt to impress the ideology of black metal on Dunn - or whether he's pulling the film crew's leg, contemptuous of the media's feeble attempts to comprehend the scene from the outside and thinking he might as well have some fun.
Whether Gaahl's technically accomplished performance in this scene is effective depends on whether you find the ideology of Norwegian black metal compelling. I for one haven't laughed so hard in a long time, and Alice Cooper gently pokes fun at the Norwegian bands' constant attempts to be more evil than everyone else in their rather serious devil-worship. (Gorgoroth split up at least in part because of theological differences between Gaahl and Infernus, the latter insisting Satan is a real, divine being, not a symbol of the self.) But there is a more serious point, evident when Dunn asks about church burnings. Says Gaahl:
Church burnings and all these things are, of course, a thing that I support one hundred per cent. It's something that should have been done much more and will be done much more in the future. We have to remove every trace [of] what Christianity and the semitic roots have to offer this world. [...] Satanism is freedom for the individual to grow and to become the superman. Every man who is born to be king becomes king. Every man who is born to be a slave doesn't know Satan.
As Rolf Rasmussen, an assistant Lutheran minister at a church attacked by people associated with the black metal scene in the early nineties, points out, this is an uncomfortably elitist proposition. Though Gaahl is no fascist, the extreme individualism, worship of strength and associated contempt for other human beings associated with the scene help explain why there is a vocal neo-Nazi substratum in black metal.
Dunn rightly insists that outside the Norwegian scene, metal musicians have used satanic imagery primarily because it is transgressive and shocking, not because of any actual belief in the occult. (In Dunn's new television series Metal Evolution, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward are wonderfully frank about the use of occult symbols as a marketing ploy.) But I already knew that, and hence I was much more fascinated by Dunn's exploration of gender in metal.
Dunn observes that musicians and fans have historically been overwhelmingly male, but he doesn't stop there. As Dee Snider of Twisted Sister says, metal has tended to be both grotesquely macho and intensely homoerotic. (In all-male environments homophobia, machismo and anti-effeminacy often go hand in hand with all-out homoeroticism: watched 300 lately?) Rob Halford's leather outfits - generally preferred by metalheads to seemingly effeminate glam garb - originated in gay culture. Metal, Snider points out, creates a space in which men can still be men, by having another guy shake his nether regions at them.
But to say that metal is male is to ignore the women who've made their way into the culture over the years. Pamela Des Barres, 'the world's most famous groupie', rejects the claim that she was 'powerless' and 'objectified' because 'they're exactly where they want to be' - which may be true but nonetheless shows us the face of patriarchy. (Imagine the groupie gender-flipped.) Perhaps more positively, Dunn interviews Doro Pesch as well as members of Girlschool and Kittie on the pressures they've faced to be 'more feminine' and emphasise their looks.
Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy states that her tough stage persona as a death metal vocalist is important to her and has inspired young women. This is great, but I think Dunn is being a little too pat here, moving on to the next subject while leaving us with the impression that the gender divide has broken down. He observes that ultra-masculinity is associated with freedom, which should be the start of a debate - why is freedom gendered male? - rather than its end. As I see it, gender archetypes in the metal scene are still strong, with women encouraged to like symphonic metal and similar genres considered 'softer', while extreme metal is still overwhelmingly male. There's progress yet to be made, people.
A lot of time is devoted to the mainstream media's maligning of metal, the attempt during the eighties to brand the style as satanic and likely to inspire teens to foul deeds. While the footage of Dee Snider's testimony before congress is quite wonderful - and it's worth recalling a Gothic cathedral contains more images of demons, death & doom than any Cannibal Corpse cover - , my issue with this stretch of the film is that Dunn doesn't acknowledge that institutional attempts to suppress metal effectively ended in the early nineties. But the notion that metal is marginalised outsider music is hugely important to fans' and musicians' self-image: metal's counterculturality is constantly (re-)constructed, and those mechanisms would be deserving of their own documentary.
Dunn concludes that metal 'confronts what we'd rather ignore; it celebrates what we often deny; it indulges in what we fear most'. I think he's right. Metal shares that with horror (a reason, no doubt, why Rob Zombie is drawn to both genres). It deals with the ugly and abject, often transgressing boundaries and inverting established values: reckless abandon over the careful composure that would help our CV, aggression in a society that has monopolised violence. There is thus a countercultural core to metal: it is the Jungian shadow of a carefully maintained status quo, the garish reflection of societal aggression.
