During my brief stint in the Bay Area nearly fifteen years ago, I managed to go to 924 Gilman Street—the Left Coast’s answer to 315 Bowery—a few times with my friend Brian Peterson. I know one time we went to see our favorite math-rock masters, A Minor Forest, and another time was to see them do pre-…And Justice for All Metallica covers for the Metal Madness Show.
jan 31 sat: Metal Madness Show: East Bay bands doing metal
covers:
Creeping Death, Rocket Queens, American Metal,
Iron Vegan, Motley Jews, Blizzards Of Schnozz,
Anal Tap at 924 Gilman a/a $5 8pm *** @
($1 off with proper metal attire)
Iron Vegan was comprised of members of Neurosis, Noothgrush, and Lost Goat, and was the closest I’ve come to seeing any of those bands play. Their set was all Iron Maiden covers, of course, which was the closest I’ve come to seeing them live as well.
Iron Vegan: Taste the Metal.I missed Rocket Queens (doing Guns N’ Roses songs) because this cute, blonde girl who wanted to piss off her boyfriend invited me outside to take a walk…
I made it back in time to catch A Minor Forest plus two (as Creeping Death, but not this one) and Brian shaking his head at me. A Minor Forest used to play some of the most intricate, tightly woven compositions ever conceived by a three-piece. As far as them doing other people’s music, Rush covers were what crowds wanted to hear when we’d see them play as A Minor Forest proper. Their doing old Metallica material, with the aid of the two additional members (a second guitarist and a singer), was impressive, but not quite as impressive as they normally were. They’d taken hints from Metal before though, using the line “A Minor Forest supports the destruction of humanity” in the inside cover of their first record, Flemish Altruism: Constituent Parts 1993-1996 (Thrill Jockey, 1996), which their guitarist Eric Hoversten told me they’d lifted from the masthead of a Black Metal magazine belonging to Steve Albini’s girlfriend at the time.
According to the Matador Records website, Creeping Death may have had a larger impact than I would’ve imagined:
With revolving members from A Minor Forest, The Threnody Ensemble and Weakling, Creeping Death could have been responsible for the short-lived metal cover band phenomenon, which swept San Francisco in the late ’90s. Headlining shows with such bands as Iron Vegan, Rocket Queen, and Sleigher, the members of Creeping Death found that being in a cover band paid better and drew bigger and more responsive crowds than any of their respective “real” projects.
I guess when your “real” projects play songs with gamelan structures and time signatures no one can follow, a good ol’ “Ride the Lightning” cover is just the break everyone needs. It’s not just esoterica versus Metallica though, as Chuck Klosterman illustrated while comparing a cover band to a “real” metal band, writing, “One can only wonder how the real guys in Dokken feel about being as popular as five fake guys in [Guns N’ Roses cover band Paradise City]” (p. 67). Something about the inauthenticity of a cover band makes the event more fun, lighter, more intimate. I would argue that this is the only reason Weezer ever had a career (well, that and creative, Spike Jonze-helmed videos). Something to do with the levity of enjoying a cover band.
There’s also the silent sting of nostalgia. No one goes to see a band from their youth do new material. Whether it’s a reunion tour or the latest of many, past-their-prime recordings, it’s all about the legacy, the hits from the day. It’s about reliving a piece of the past.
Memories don’t live like people do
They always remember you
— Mos Def, “Travelin’ Man”
924 Gilman Street Membership Card from 1998.
Somehow my 924 Gilman Street membership card has survived in my wallet intact since 1998. I wouldn’t still have it, but every time I’ve switched wallets, I’ve seen no reason to take it out. It’s a totem, a token from a time long past that was about another time long past, a copy of a copy of a copy. It doesn’t make me particularly nostalgic—I only went to Gilman a few times—but it does make me smile. As the best memories should.
Speaking of, the girl I made out with that night is almost in her thirties now. Memories don’t live like people do.
References:
Def, Mos. (1998). Travelin’ Man [Recorded by Mos Def & DJ Honda]. On h II [LP]. New York: Relativity Records.
Klosterman, Chuck. (2003). Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. New York: Scribner.
Though the concept album has a history dating back to the 1940s, prog rock acts like Pink Floyd, Yes, and Rush are probably the first bands to come to mind. Just doing an album-length story connotes prog leanings, recall The Mars Volta‘s De-Loused in the Comatorium (GSL, 2003) and Francis the Mute (GSL, 2005). Metal picked up the concept mantle in a big way. Devilish icons like King Diamond wouldn’t have records if it weren’t for album-long narratives. The same can be said for Coheed and Cambria with their multi-album and comic-book epic The Armory Wars, Voivod with their career-spanning, post-apocalyptic visions, and Mastodon‘s Melville-driven Leviathan (Relapse, 2004). Drummer Brann Dailor explains the literary influence on that record in a 2004 interview, saying that the summer before, he was reading Moby Dick…
We were in London in fact, and I kinda just spouted off why we should choose Moby Dick as a guideline of what to write about and what to go for. I was looking up all these passages and reading them to the guys and saying: look, they call Moby Dick the sea-salt mastodon, you know, it’s all in here. There are so many different images we can borrow from whaling and just the whole thing as a complete package.
As bizarre as it might seem for a metal band to be influenced by classic literature, it makes sense when you look at the histrionics of metal in the first place. It’s all a kind of theatre. The stories are endemic to the genre. “[W]e just chose Moby Dick ’cause we’re all really interested in any kind of folklore,” Dailor continues, “We’re totally into Sasquatch and The Yeti and The Loch Ness Monster and all that stuff, you know? We’re into that kind of subject matter.” Folklore is metal’s secret lifeblood. Slayer, Ghost, Bathory, and many others mine the story of Elizabeth Bathory for themes, Maine’s Falls of Rauros lifted their name from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Light Bearer‘s four-part saga, Æsahættr Tetralogy, is influenced by Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trology (Everyman’s Library, 2011) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Samuel Simmons, 1667), among other texts.
The now-defunct Fall of Efrafa took their name from Richard Adams’ Watership Down (Rex Collings, 1972). Their Warren of Snares trilogy (Halo of Flies, 2010) is an elaborate artistic, musical, and literary artifact based on the mythology in Adams’ novel. Watership Down is an allegory in which the endeavors of a group of rabbits — Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and Silver, “mirror the timeless struggles between tyranny and freedom, reason and blind emotion, and the individual and the corporate state” (Magill, 1991). Fall of Efrafa extended this allegory to rail against all forms of oppression. Vocalist and artist Alex CF described it like this:
From the point of view of the metaphorical tale behind the band; the story is about desperation, as the ‘Efrafa’ encroach more and more upon the earth, what is left for those who share this space with us? The story is a war of will, not only to stand your ground, but also not to give in to the crutch of misguided belief. From the point of view of us as a band it has a lot to do with our lives outside this; what we cherish and think about, what we read…
The Warren of Snares box-set comes with the trilogy on six LPs, a book, posters, and a silk-screened tote bag, among other paraphernalia. With delicately dark art work by Alex CF (who now serves vocal and art duties in Light Bearer and Momentum), the box is an artifact worthy of time-honored capsuling.
In another extended package, Swedish post-metal band Cult of Luna’s Eviga Riket tells the story behind their 2008 record Eternal Kingdom (Earache). During rehearsals for that record, which were conducted in an abandoned mental institution, the band happened upon the journals of former inhabitant Holgar Nilsson. The songs on Eternal Kingdom are based on Nilsson’s journals, which chronicle his torment by an owl demon (the Näcken), his drowning his pregnant wife at its command (leading to his institutionalization), and his demise in the ongoing battle between the herbivores and carnivores, the humans and other “malformed fauna.” Drawn from Nilsson’s journals (titled “Tales from the Eternal Kingdom”), Eviga Riket tells his story in full, in both English and Swedish, hauntingly illustrated by Joris Vanpoucke. The hardbound book also includes an audio version on DVD read by Anna Guthrie accompanyed by Vanpoucke’s visuals and new music by the band.
Cult of Luna also released a live DVD of a 2008 performance of these songs in Scala, London (Fire Was Born; Earache, 2009). With the self-funded and released Eviga Riket finishing the story at last, they’re planning to move on to new material.
In our day of downloading disposable sounds and music perceived as free window-dressing, it is heartening to see bands take the longview — without automatically looking backward.
————-
Fluff Fest: Here’s Fall of Efrafa performing “No Longer Human” from Owsla (2006), part one of The Warren of Snares trilogy during their last tour in 2009 [runtime: 7:29]:
I proposed a book for Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 Series on Streetcleaner by Godflesh. This being one of my all-time favorite records by one of my all-time favorite bands, I really wanted to tell its story. I knew it was a long shot: Bloomsbury received 471 proposals in this round and are planning on publishing a mere twenty titles. Today they narrowed the pile to a “long list” of ninety-four, and mine was not one of them. So, in lieu of the book, here is the Sample Material and Table of Contents from my proposal. Enjoy!
GODFLESH Streetcleaner (Earache Records, 1989)
“It’s just a matter of time, for me, before our ultimate extinction, and I can’t say we don’t deserve it.”1 This quote from Justin K. Broadrick sums up quite a lot of his motivation as an artist. His prolific career involving countless bands and projects spans over three decades. But it also says a lot about what many would call his most important band and their most important record. That band is Godflesh, and that record is Streetcleaner. “I don’t have a very optimistic view of humanity,” Broadrick said in the early 1990s, not long after Streetcleaner had been unleashed on the world. “Eighty percent of it is shit, and as a whole, mankind is very weak and without any kind of purpose. Once in a while, people need to be crushed emotionally and intellectually to be reminded of reality. That’s the basic purpose of our music…”2 Rebelling against their backgrounds and the very metal scene that spawned them, Broadrick says, “[W]ith Godflesh we were like, fuck everyone. And that was obviously cultivated even further to make an album like Streetcleaner.”3
In the late 1980s, metal was fast and heavy. The underground was ruled and regulated by thrash, death metal, and grindcore, each with its own set of stringent rules and rabid fans. Today’s wildly popular black metal was still in its infancy. Godflesh’s debut was sluggish in comparison, and they used a drum machine instead of a live drummer, anathema in the stodgy metal underground. “For at least the first year that we played,” Broadrick remembers, “there were people chanting, ‘Where’s the drummer?’ or ‘You’re too fucking slow!’”4 Their initial reception was not promising, but as Broadrick put it at the time, “It’s got a sound, and it’s unique. And it’s fucking heavy.”5
When Godflesh’s first full-length record came out on November 13, 1989, I was just out of high school. In an issue of SPIN Magazine at the time, Faith No More’s Mike Patton described Streetcleaner as the sound of your Walkman’s batteries running down. That was enough of an endorsement for me to seek out the record. As well versed as I was in the metal of the time, what I found was like nothing I’d ever heard. Streetcleaner plods along at the pace of some giant factory, guitars and bass pummeling to the sound of machines rumbling. “Godflesh is totally borne from those first twenty four years of my life that I spent in Birmingham,” Broadrick remembers. The bleak, industrial environs of Birmingham gave birth to other dark, heavy, canonical outfits like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. The oppression of being “amongst crowds of people, being surrounded by concrete,” as he puts it, shaped who Broadrick is, and the way he expresses it. “To me, I don’t think Godflesh would have existed if I’d come from another environment. It’s absolutely a reflection of the environment that I grew up in.”6 The overall sound is simply crushing, and Streetcleaner is a genre-defying and a genre-defining record. In fact, the newly reunited Godflesh performed the record in its entirety at Holland’s Roadburn Festival last year, illustrating its lasting influence. “It is an angsty record written by a couple of teenagers,” he said of the performance, “and it still resonates now. In fact, even more so, to some extent.”7
“With Godflesh, we try to aim at something quite off balance, off kilter, a lot different from anyone else,”8 he told me in 1996. Since its inception, Godflesh has been Broadrick and Christian “Benny” Green with their drum machine, and as strange as it may seem for a band as heavy as Godflesh is, hip-hop has been an obvious element in their overall sound. “I think hip-hop is more important than any sort of rock music,” stated Broadrick matter-of-factly. “Most of the beats are fatter and heavier than your average rock n’ roll riff.” One of the major sonic tenets of Godflesh is that under the monolithic basslines and ear-searing guitar riffs lie hip-hop’s most brutal break beats. Not realizing what a total hip-hop head Justin is, people tend to miss the often low-key references to the genre in Godflesh’s music. “I’ve done lots of interviews with these metal magazines and they’re really confronted by the hip-hop thing like, ‘what the fuck is this?!’ They really don’t get it that I’m really into hip-hop.”9 The next year, Broadrick was even more frustrated with trying to shed Godflesh’s metal skin: “All of these metal magazines are so pissed off at the way that metal has been treated that they don’t even want to take a look at something like hip-hop,” he told me. “I try to stress to them that I’ve always hated metal. I’ve just used and abused it. I think people like to think that before we made Streetcleaner that we were some long-hair band who’d just discovered industrial music when that’s not the case at all. The first music I was into was punk rock. It’s so hard to convey these ideas to these people. They always come to me with how metal should go back to what it was in the eighties, and I’m like, ‘bloody hell!’ I’ve always found metal rather conservative.”10
In a more recent interview, he describes the collision and collusion of genres inherent in Godflesh’s sound:
I guess one of the things about metal is that it’s really stigmatised, even with myself in Godflesh, when we first became somewhat popular, I was very eager at that time to distance myself from metal, and I think that’s because at the time there was very little like Godflesh. The most popular metal when Godflesh became popular in 1989/90 was the back-end of the hair metal thing, and Godflesh played with a lot of bands, a lot of tours in America like that, and I became quite repulsed by the whole circus of heavy metal. But, essentially, I’ve always been excited by what’s central to heavy metal, which is the sound, the texture of heavy metal. That was it, for me. Godflesh was about pure reductionism, minimalism, reducing heavy metal to its absolute primitives. But also… these elements of electronica, machines, quite literally the very primitive stages of being able to program computers and use machine beats, which for me, initially, was as informed by Public Enemy and Eric B. and Rakim records as it was anything beyond that and being able to create beats bigger than a human drummer could do.11
To wit, the beat on the song “Christbait Rising” from Streetcleaner was Broadrick’s attempt to copy the rhythm break from 1988’s “Microphone Fiend” by Eric B. and Rakim.12 “We have our own bastardized idea of what we can do hip-hop-wise… It comes out even more perverted this way.”13
Godflesh has always pushed limits in one direction or another. Streetcleaner is the germinal industrial-metal hybrid sound that bands all over the world are still trying to recreate — and Godflesh continued innovating and never looked back. Since officially disbanding Godflesh in 2002, Broadrick has been busy with a band called Jesu (whom he named after the last song on the last Godflesh record, indicating a continuation of sorts of their sound), and his original musical outlet Final, among other various remixes and collaborations. With the reuniting of Godflesh in 2010, Broadrick admits that he finds himself at home in the band. “I think Godflesh is still presenting exactly what I grew up with and exactly what runs through my blood, “ he said in 2011. “It’s really important that that sense of expression is back in my life. I think I’d lost it through Jesu. But really, it’s not just some re-visitation for me, it really feels like I’ve gone back to what I am in a way.”14
Justin Broadrick was born on August 15, 1969 in Birmingham, an “unpleasant” area that he describes as “the Detroit of England.”15 His first few years were spent on an actual hippie commune before his family – he, his mom, and stepfather; his real father was a heroin addict whom he didn’t see until he was fifteen years old – moved into a council estate, the projects of England. By the age of twelve, Broadrick found Punk rock and industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse, as well as krautrock like Can and Brian Eno’s early ambient work, all of which would inform his own musical output. He started messing around with some of his stepfather’s music gear, and taught himself guitar. “[W]hen I began to play guitar,” he explains “I mastered one bar chord and realized that I could any Crass song I wanted. That was pretty satisfying in itself. Music was like a dirty word when I went to school in 1978. Everyone was just into football hooliganism. But at home, I was absolutely inspired at a very young age to act in my environment, both in the form of music and to some extent against the oppressive environment I was in.”16
In the early 1980s, zines and tapes were heavily circulating through underground networks. Broadrick’s interest in extreme music and in finding like-minded individuals naturally landed him in the middle of this subculture. He started his first band, Final, and recorded many cassettes. Through these exchanges, he joined a band called Fall of Because. Benny Green, Paul Neville, and Diarmuid Dalton – all of whom Broadrick still works with in different projects – made up the rest of the band. Broadrick joined them on drums, replacing their drum machine. Fall of Because’s one recorded demo (which was compiled with live clips and released as the record Life is Easy in 1999) hints at the cold nihilism that would become Godflesh’s signature sound.
Broadrick had two more short stops before forming Godflesh proper: He played guitar on the first side of the first record by Grindcore pioneers Napalm Death, and drums for the down-tuned, sludgy, metal band Head of David. “Head of David already had an album out,” Broadrick explains. “They were the only people I knew who had fans and actually had a record in the shops. It wasn’t just opportunistic for me, that first Head of David album I actually adored. I thought it was fucking amazing. With Napalm Death, we played with them a few times, and they were absolutely stunning. When their drummer left, they saw me drum with Fall of Because and invited me to join.”17
His exit from Head of David was the real beginning of Godflesh “They wanted to lose a lot of the noise and the qualities that had attracted me to that band,” he said. “So, when they kicked me out of the band, I thought, right, I want to do something that takes the basic premise of where I wanted to go with Head of David, low-tune everything, make it brutal,”18 to take it “to the gutter, make it more machine-like”19 In the meantime, Fall of Because had broken up, leaving Benny Green free to join Broadrick’s new project. “Godflesh really became my vision, and Ben Green was really into the same type of stuff… and we already had our songs from Fall of Because so we began with those… I was really influenced by people using drum machines, most notably some of the hip-hop at the time: Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim. When I first heard some of those records, I was astonished at the brutality of their drum machines, and I really was excited by that sound. I really wanted something inhuman sounding and beyond human capability. And I was already a drummer, so I knew what beats I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear them in the most disgusting, heavy fashion going.”20 Their self-titled debut EP on Swordfish Records made the promises that 1989’s Streetcleaner finally delivered on: songs awash in wailing, scraping guitars, dirge-like, lumbering bass lines, brutal, machine-driven beats, and Broadrick’s anguished vocals. It was like nothing else at the time. The second wave of industrial music, a beat-driven and mechanistic subgenre that found its roots in Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, was in full swing. Though no one else was mixing metal with machines quite like Godflesh, fueled by the popularity of Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, and the output of Chicago’s WaxTrax Records, the movement gave audiences a cultural reference point and made Streetcleaner an underground hit for Godflesh and their label Earache records. It wasn’t long before the majors came courting.
“I remember being stunned when I heard that first Korn album,” Broadrick said in 2007, “because there’s so much Godflesh in that, but used in this commercial way. It was weird. Like, wow, I guess it had to happen at some point; somebody had to take these sorts of sounds and make them digestible.”21 Everyone from innovative rappers like El-P to more obvious followers like Isis acknowledge the record’s prescience. “At the time when Isis started,” singer and guitarist Aaron Turner said, “there weren’t a lot of other bands exploring that territory; Godflesh were one of the few founding fathers of that sound. They were taking influences from a number of different places and didn’t really fit in anywhere.” Isis covered the title track from Streetcleaner as homage to its influence on them. “Justin has been ahead of most musicians,” attests Alap Momin of noisy hip-hop group dälek, “reinventing genres from grindcore to hip-hop to drum and bass and more for almost twenty five years. It’s pretty insane when someone can pull that off once, but to do it repeatedly in a variety of genres is really ridiculous.” Burton C. Bell of industrial metal band Fear Factory said, “Streetcleaner is a fantastically produced and written record; every song is an opus.”22 The full reach of Streetcleaner’s influence is difficult to gauge, but it’s safe to say that much of what is considered metal in the twenty-first century wouldn’t exist without it.
1. Introduction: On the Grind: The Prequel – in which we find out where Godflesh and Streetcleaner came from, including Justin K. Broadrick’s fraught beginnings, his first band Final, Napalm Death and its separate ways, his brief stints in Fall of Because and Head of David, and his forming Godflesh proper. An introduction to the analysis of subcultures (specifically music subcultures; cf. Dick Hebdige, Simon Reynolds, et al.), which is imperative to understanding the formation of Godflesh and the creation of Streetcleaner, will be included here.
2. Streetcleaner: The New Blueprint – the record that’s a little bit grind, a little bit industrial, a little bit something else. This chapter will be not only an in-depth look at the making of Streetcleaner, including discussions with Broadrick and his bandmates, but also at the cultural conditions – socioeconomic, technological, and musical – that influenced its creation.
3. Hip-hop: Under the Influence – No drummer could do what they wanted done; it took the power of a machine. Making sense of the genre-bending and blending of Godflesh’s debut through Broadrick’s punk roots, metal beginnings, and hip-hop obsession, and how they all influenced the sound of Streetcleaner.
4. Stray Pavement: What Hath These Clean Streets Wrought? – which will investigate the influence of Streetcleaner, from its industrial Imitators (e.g., Fear Factory, Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills, etc.) to its contemporaries (e.g., Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Skinny Puppy, etc.) and its lasting influence, from the rap-rock fusion (e.g., Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, etc.) to nu-metal (e.g., Korn, Deftones, Tool, etc.), and what Broadrick thinks of his creation’s legacy.
5. Potholes in My Soul: Growing Pains and Dead Batteries – A brief look at the rest of the Godflesh oeuvre, the dissolution of the band, and why Streetcleaner still stands out as the classic that it is.
6. Conclusion: Go Spread Your Wings: The Soul of a New Machine – A parting glance at Broadrick’s post-Godflesh band, Jesu, and what the future holds for the recently reunited Godflesh as well as the recently reissued Streetcleaner.
————————
Many thanks for the time and consideration of David Barker, John Mark Boling, , and the whole team at Bloomsbury Academic for the opportunity. And congratulations to the ninety-four on the long list!
In anticipation of the new Justin Broadrick solo project, Posthuman, under his old Techno Animal moniker JKFlesh, I’ve been listening to lots of similar sounds. Not only old Godflesh (since I’m hoping to write a book about their debut long-player, Streetcleaner, for Continuum/Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 Series), but also other 3by3 Music releases (e.g., Cloaks and Dead Fader), as well as Ad Noiseam stuff (e.g., Larvae and Oyaarss). Thanks to one of my past students (Thanks, Felicity!), I’ve also gotten into Death Grips, which brings me to the point.
In the mid-1990s, there was an almost-genre that I still don’t know what to call. It consisted of bands like Jawbox, Helmet, Barkmarket, Unsane, Tar, Unwound, and many others. It was kinda Metal, kinda Punk, but really neither of those. At the time, everything that didn’t have a genre got lumped into the nondescript “alternative” bin. If it meant anything, it meant that Red House Painters and Helmet had something in common (They don’t, at least not aesthetically).
I don’t know what to call Death Grips. Having signed to Epic records this year and just release The Money Store today, their first “official” release (even though Ex-Military is as proper a record as any), they’re set to do something. Like those bands from the 1990s, their sound is a weird conflation of genres: It’s part Punk, part Industrial, part Rap, and part something else (Hella’s Zach Hill plays drums for freak’s sake). It reminds me simultaneously of the Sex Pistols, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Whitehouse, as well as Cloaks, Dead Fader, and Oyaarss with maniacally appropriate vocals. Here’s a video from their Ex-Military (2001) release [runtime: 3:47]:
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Honestly, what is that? It’s so dirty and gritty, yet so futuristic. It’s like the first time I heard Public Enemy in 1987, Godflesh in 1989, or dälek in 2002. Here’s one from the new record called “Get Got” [runtime: 2:52]:
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Speaking of Godflesh, I have their main-man Justin Broadrick to thank for my finding Cloaks. These two guys do a 21st-century kind of industrial music that is heretofor unheard. This is “Detritus Version” from their latest (Versions Grain), which is a collection of remixes from their last full-length (Versus Grain) [runtime: 3:33]:
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I don’t know what this stuff is, but if it isn’t the soundtrack to the apocolypse, then I don’t know what to call it.
Borrowing everything from the Scandinavians except the panda paint, America Black Metal bands blend the core aesthetic with other subgenres to great effect. Over the past few years, it has become my favorite accompanying sound for almost any activity. Its energy, its all-encompassing crests and crumbles, its sheer power moves me in ways no other genre has in many years. And I am not alone: The darkness of this stuff touches something in us, something buried deep in our beings, in our nature.
We cannot understand and fight evil as long as we consider it to be an abstract concept external to ourselves.
— Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Evil, p. 231
Among the best of this mix of subgenres (e.g., Seidr, Panopticon, Deafheaven, Liturgy, Krallice, Falls of Rauros, et al.), the undisputed masters stateside are Wolves in the Throne Room. Their Cascadian Black Metal is as majestic as it is monolithic, mixing the forest and the trees, their epic songs can be as dense as they are sparse. In a 2006 interview, they explain the draw of Black Metal:
True Norwegian Black Metal is completely unbalanced – that is why it is so compelling and powerful. It is the sound of utter torment, believing to one’s core that winter is eternal. Black Metal is about destruction, destroying humanity; destroying ones own self in an orgy of self loathing and hopelessness. I believe one must focus on this image of eternal winter in order to understand Black Metal for it is a crucial metaphor that reveals our sadness and woe as a race. In our hubris, we have rejected the earth and the wisdom of countless generations for the baubles of modernity. In return, we have been left stranded and bereft in this spiritually freezing hell.
To us, the driving impulse of Black Metal is more about deep ecology than anything else and can best be understood through the application of eco-psychology. Why are we sad and miserable? Because our modern culture has failed – we are all failures. The world around us has failed to sustain our humanity, our spirituality. The deep woe inside black metal is about fear – that we can never return to the mythic, pastoral world that we crave on a deep subconscious level. Black Metal is also about self loathing, for modernity has transformed us, our minds, bodies and spirit, into an alien life form; one not suited to life on earth without the mediating forces of technology, culture and organized religion. We are weak and pitiful in our strength over the earth – in conquering, we have destroyed ourselves. Black Metal expresses disgust with humanity and revels in the misery that one finds when the falseness of our lives is revealed (quoted in Smith, 2006).
The urge to return to our roots is a prevailing ethos in Black Metal of all paints. In Norway, it’s about returning to the Norse traditions that predate the Christian and Western influences on the culture there. For Wolves in the Throne Room, it’s about a return to nature. “Our music is balanced in that we temper the blind rage of Black Metal with the transcendent truths of the universe that reveal themselves with age and experience,” they continue. “Our relationship with the natural world is a healing force in our lives” (quoted in Smith, 2006). Drummer and one half of the brothers that make up the core of Wolves in the Throne Room, Aaron Weaver was taken by Black Metal upon first hearing it. “… it’s more about creating a trance effect. It’s really got more in common with shamanic drumming and with noise music. It’s not heavy metal, it’s not riffs, it’s not head-banging music at all… It’s meditative music. Most heavy metal is very extroverted. It’s about putting on a big show and head banging and drinking a beer with your buddies. Black metal is the exact opposite. It’s all about gazing inwards and trying to discover things about yourself” (quoted in Moyer, p. 42). Having seen these guys live last year, I can truly say that their music is introspective to the point of turning one inside out.
Weaver discusses the connections between Black metal and the radical Northwestern culture he and his brother are immersed in, both of which are about “critiquing civilization, yearning for a more ancient sense of the world, a connection with tradition and nature that we’ve perhaps lost as modern people.” That’s not the whole of it, of course, he adds, “Then the darker side of it as well exists in both worlds. In both the Black Metal world and the ecological punk world, a hatred of humanity and a strong sense of misanthropy as we look around and see what humanity has wrought” (Moyer, p. 42).
We are going back to the future and forward to the past, engaging all of history’s villains and saints in quick time… Ancient ethnic sores are belching fire while transnational companies linked by satellites conduct their business oblivious to the fuedal past below. — Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, Spiral Dynamics, p. 18.
Aside from Lords of Chaos (feral house, 2003) and the documentary Until the Light Takes Us (2009), Hideous Gnosis (CreateSpace, 2010) is the most in-depth exploration of what Black Metal’s not-so-joyous noise might mean to fans and to theorists of same. Though it’s a compilation of essays, documents, and thoughts from a symposium by the same name, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, New York, the book stands alone well as a collection of academic work on the subject. Edited by Nicola Masciandaro, it brings together pieces by Steven Shakespeare, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (of Liturgy), Eugene Thacker, Reza Negarestani, and Evan Calder Williams, among many others, as well as naysayers and haters from the blog’s comments section, “to bask in the speculative glory of the problematic,” as Reza Negarestani puts it (quoted in Masciandaro, p. 267). Whenever academics or nerds turn their attention to something so sacredly held as Black Metal, its fans are likely to be wary. But if you, like me, enjoy immersing yourself in as many aspects as possible of the things you love, this collection is a welcome addition to Blackened Theory, the literature, music, thought, and culture that is Black Metal — and the internal, eternal evil that drives it.
@1jamiebell: What’s the speed of dark? (Tweeted March 22, 2012)
Another symposium collection, Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium (punctum books, 2011) brings together scholars to discuss Reza Negarestani’s world-warping book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008). Not since Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (Pantheon, 2000) have I been so simultaneously intrigued and scared of a book. It is a return to the “hidden prehistory” (as Steven Shaviro describes it) of the dark global forces of the twenty-first century. It is at once philosophical fiction, nomad archeology, Middle Eastern occult study, object-oriented ontology, and straight-up horror, all centered on Western civilization’s lust for oil, the darkest of matters. Leper Creativity sets out to excavate this work’s dark secrets. Their own introductory language reads as follows:
Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place on 11 March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book’s own theory of creativity – “a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – original inauthenticity” – this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.
More than worthy of a symposium as such, Cyclonopedia bridges and problematizes the divide between modern, global politics and the dark forces of ancient humanity. Claudia Card (2002) wrote, “The denial of evil has become an important strand of twentieth-century secular Western culture” (p. 28). To deny evil is to deny ourselves, to deny a part of our positive nature. Cyclonopedia digs deep into both sides. It is a triumph in both form and content. We’re dropped into the first hole in the plot as a young American woman arrives at a hotel in Istanbul to meet an online acquaintance with an unpronounceable name who never actually shows up. She finds a manuscript in her hotel room and begins culling its clues leaving her to wonder if her friend from afar was real at all (as Johnny did Zumpano in House of Leaves). “Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates,” the jacket copy explains, “the U. S. is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil.” As Howard Bloom (1995) explains, “Behind the writhing of evil is a competition between organizational devices, each trying to harness the universe to its own particular pattern, each attempting to hoist the cosmos one step higher on a ladder of increasing complexity” (p. 325). The Middle East is sentient, alive, proclaims the embedded manuscript’s author Dr. Hamid Parsani, dark forces its lifeblood, its story the evil of all of history — human and nonhuman.
“Evil is a by-product, a component, of creation” Bloom (1995, p. 2) writes matter-of-factly. To understand its legion forces, we have to look extensively at the edges between nefarious, non-human history, as well as the insidious inside ourselves. It is in this way that the draw of Black Metal and the study of its ethos is something we cannot afford to ignore.
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Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium is available as a free download from punctum books. Many thanks to Kenyatta Cheese who emailed me about Cyclonopedia almost two years ago. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake.
References:
Beck, Don, & Cowan, Christopher. (1996). Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bloom, Howard. (1995). The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Card, Claudia. (2002). The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press.
Masciandro, Nicola. (ed.) (2010). Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Symposium 1. New York: CreateSpace.
Moyer, Matthew. (2011, Winter). Wolves in the Throne Room: From Mount Olympia. Ghetto Blaster, 30, 40-42.
Negarestani, Reza. (2008). Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. New York: re.press.
Smith, Bradley. (2006). Interview with Wolves in the Throne Room. Nocturnal Cult.
Described as “the most widely demonized and vilified music scene in rock history,” (O’Hehir, 2009), the Norwegian black metal scene of the late 80s and early 90s took Black Metal to new extremes. The bands and fans all wore head-to-toe black leather, wrist- and arm-bands and boots with spikes or nails, and black and white “corpse paint.” Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s Until the Light Takes Us (2009) tells the story of the scene in stark tones and up-close interviews.
Members of the bands Darkthrone, Mayhem, Burzum, Immortal, and Emperor provide more than a full cast of characters. The major players involved in the scene include Øystein Aarseth (a.k.a Eronymous) of Mayhem, Per Yngve Ohlin (a.k.a. Dead) of Mayhem, Varg Vikernes (a.k.a. Count Grishnackh) of Burzum and Mayhem, and Bärd Eithun (a.k.a. Faust) of Emperor, among several others. “Dead’s name was an ever-looming portent of his destiny” write Moynihan & Søderlind (2003, p. 58). Very much into self-mutilation, often on stage, Dead eventually shot himself in the head with a shotgun. His band-mate Euronymous found the body, took pictures, and reportedly took pieces of his skull and brains. One of the pictures ended up as the cover art for a live Mayhem record (Dawn of the Black Hearts; 1995), and Euronymous supposedly made stew out of Dead’s brains and necklaces out of his skull.
The sometime bass player for Mayhem and full-time one-man-band Burzum, Grishnackh, paranoid of an alleged plot by Euronymous to kill him, beat him to the punch: One late night in Oslo, Grishnackh stabbed Euronymous to death. Euronymous had been the figurehead of the Norwegian black metal scene. His record store in Oslo, Helvete, had served as a central meeting place for bands and fans, as well as a place to buy records and paraphernalia. It was darkly lit and Euronymous wanted it to be kept completely dark and to make customers use torches to see the records and their way around.
Underwhelmed by what he saw as posturing without action by Euronymous, Grishnackh allegedly set about burning down churches. Grishnackh’s philosophy is one of nationalism. He sees Christianity as colonialist, having moved into Norway and displaced the native Norse religion. His intentions did not keep the church burnings from being seen as “Satanically motivated” by the media. The heavy metal magazine Kerrang! ran a cover story that read, “Arson… Death… Satanic Ritual… The Ugly Truth about Black Metal” and the spread bore the quotation, “We are but slaves of the one with horns…” across the top of its pages (Moynihan & Søderlind, 2003, p. 100-101). “Copycat church attacks followed throughout the Northern Hemisphere, often accompanied with spray-painted pentacles and 666’s and so forth, and whatever had once been distinctive about the Norwegian scene just became, in Vikernes’ [Grishnackh] words, “a bunch of brain-dead, heavy-metal guys.”
The image of the black metal scene at large was one of darkness and evil. Hebdige (1979) writes, “In most cases, it is the subculture’s stylistic innovations which first attract the media’s attention. Subsequently deviant or ‘anti-social’ acts—vandalism, swearing, fighting, ‘animal behaviour’—are ‘discovered’ by the police, the judiciary, the press; and these acts are used to ‘explain’ the subculture’s original transgression of sartorial codes. In fact, either deviant behaviour or the identification of a distinctive uniform (or more typically a combination of the two) can provide the catalyst for a moral panic” (p. 93). The moral panic that followed the church burnings illustrates how easily such a scene is vilified and labeled “Satanic.” Subcultures are largely imagistic and operate on the level of surfaces: Never mind that half the members of the bands involved are or were serving prison terms for their actions. A movement as such quickly becomes regarded as exclusively stylistic. Attaching Satan to a movement that was largely nationalist in nature is a move that occurs on the surface of the phenomenon.
In order to get under the skin of this scene, filmmakers Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell moved to Norway and hung-out with Darkthrone’s Fenriz, Hellhammer from Mayhem, Frost from Satyricon, the guys in Immortal, and visited Vikernes in prison, among others. Throughout the film, it is the stalwarts of the scene who tell the story. Aites and Ewell make no appearance. Their placement in situ gives the film an immediacy that many narrated documentaries lack. If you’re at all interested in the Norwegian Black Metal scene or the chaos thereof, this film is indispensable.
Until the Light Takes Us is currently making its way around the country. Keep your eyes open.
Here’s the official trailer [runtime: 2:07]:
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References
Aites, A. & Ewell, A. (Directors). (2009). Until the light takes us [Motion picture]. United States: Field Pictures.
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. New York: Routledge.
Moynihan, M. & Søderlind, D. (2003). Lords of chaos: The bloody rise of the Satanic metalunderground. Los Angeles: Feral House.
O’Hehir, A. (2009, December 6). Sympathy for the devil worshipers: Until the light takes us movie review. Retrieved on December 7, 2009 from Salon.com.
I’ve often quoted my friend and fellow writer Adem Tepedelen as saying that “heavy metal isn’t dead, it’s just wounded and pissed off.” If there’s anyone who would agree and who has set out to prove that adage, it’s Albert Mudrian.
His first book, Choosing Death: The Improbably History of Death Metal and Grindcore (Feral House, 2004), traces the, well, improbable roots and history of two of the most extreme and enduring subgenres of metal, from the teenagers who started Napalm Death and Godflesh to the teenagers who buy In Flames and Slipknot.
His second is an edited collection called Precious Metal (Da Capo Press, 2009), wherein Decibel Magazine— of which Mudrian is Editor in Chief — presents the stories behind twenty-five extreme metal masterpieces (my aforementioned friend Adem Tepedelen has a couple of chapters in there). Everyone from pioneers Black Sabbath, Celtic Frost, and Slayer, to extremists Morbid Angel, Entombed, and Cannibal Corpse, to black metal stalwarts Darkthrone and Emperor, to relative newbies Dillinger Escape Plan, Botch, and Converge — among many others — all get their due.
Having grown up with this genre and having seen it grow up as well, it was a joy to see it taken so seriously. I was interested to see how Albert Mudrian came to document its history in these books and in the monthly magazine he helms.
Roy Christopher: What made you a metal fan in the first place?
Albert Mudrian: I think that heavy metal—and even more so, extreme metal—is largely an outsiders’ style of music. So, when you’re a confused 15-year-old—like I was when I first really started to embrace heavier sounds—it’s a very appealing refuge. I think as you get older, you can look beyond the visceral aspect of the music and begin to identify some of the other qualities (musicianship, independence, progressive-thinking) that so many of the bands and musicians who make up the scene have to offer. That said, it’s a lot of fun to headbang and lift weights to this stuff!
RC: Having only recently stumbled upon Decibel, I am surprised by its openness. I remember metal, metal fans, and metal magazines being especially narrow in their views of what belonged and what didn’t. When did metal as a genre open up (or start opening up) to all things heavy?
AM: Even though they’ve been treated as such by countless other publications over the years, I don’t think extreme metal fans are stupid, narrow-minded, or humorless. That’s not to say there isn’t a knuckle-dragging contingent that still exists in the genre, but I think the average metal fan in 2009 is a bit more open and accepting to music that doesn’t exclusively contain blast beats and growled vocals (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). But, really, between black metal, doom metal, noise, ambient, metalgaze, metalcore and all of the other sub-genres and micro genres that have germinated over the past 20+ years, it’s just inevitable that metal fans would have a wider palate today than they would have back in the “good ol’ days” of the late ’80s and early ’90s. I think that helps inform for the scope of what we cover.
I think many of underground metal magazines take things a little too seriously at times and live in a vacuum, where they don’t realize that there’s this entire world of music beyond extreme music, and not making any attempts to connect with people who are maybe only 25% interested in metal.
RC: What do you make of the distance between the theatre of evil/satanic imagery and the actual people making the music?
AM: I think it really depends on the individual and exactly when they are performing in an extreme metal band. I mean, I don’t know if Glen Benton from Deicide really worships the devil anymore. Now does he hate Christianity? Probably. But those are too much different things. Same goes for all of the Norwegian black metallers who were torching churches when they were teenagers in the early ’90s. I’m not sure they’d be so willing to take such drastic measures to “drive Christianity out of Norway” today. On the other hand, take a band like Watain, who are staunch defenders of their own brand of Satanism. I call tell you they’re serious enough to heave buckets of animals’ blood into their audience at the start of their shows/rituals—a friend and I were actually collateral damage a show a couple years ago. That said, burning down a church, and making a run to the local butcher’s shop are two distinctly different levels of “dedication.”
RC: It seems like the new thing is always the next step out. It’s not necessarily progress, but it’s a progression to the next extreme—be it speed, slowness, heaviness, gore, or technical proficiency. What’s the next extreme for metal?
AM: Honestly, I don’t know how much faster, technical, or more extreme things can get at this point. If anything, I think you’ll see a regression to the simple barbarism of the early days of extreme music. There was a thrash resurgence a few years ago spearheaded by the likes of new bands such as Municipal Waste and Warbringer, along with the strong return from genre pioneers Testament. Additionally, there’s an old-school death metal revival that has really taken hold of the scene as well, typified by my personal favorite band of the movement, Deathevokation. They claim their biggest influence is the not one particular band or scene, but simply the year 1990—that’s awesome! Anyway, I think it’s pretty healthy to have this movement happening side-by-side with the Obscuras, Origins, and Necrophagists of the world, who are all really pushing the technical envelope.
RC: Hey, congratulations on your forthcoming marriage. What else is next for you?
AM: Thanks! Really, Decibel keeps me so busy each month that it’s hard to imagine things too far into the future these days. That said, I can tell you that we’re publishing a special edition of Decibel that will feature our Top 100 Greatest Extreme Metal Albums of the Decade. It should be available through our site in late November. Beyond that, look for our us to continue publishing monthly—something that’s quite a challenge these days, or so I’m told—and perhaps doing a few more Decibel “Hall of Fame”-related gigs with some of our past inductees in the coming year.
There is no other metal band that compares to Slayer. No other band has been together as long, destroyed as much stuff, ripped as hard, nor kept their collective foot so heavy on the pedal. Slayer has never let up. Ever.
I finally got to see them wreck shit live on stage at the Mayhem Festival on August 14th in San Antonio, Texas. Thanks to Matt and Nate Bailie, whom I’ve known since the ninth grade, I can now die happy. The set list included “Psychopathy Red” from their forthcoming World Painted Blood record, but also featured highlights from their nearly three decades of chaos, including “War Ensemble,” “Dead Skin Mask,” “Mandatory Suicide,” “Born of Fire,” “Ghosts of War,” “South of Heaven,” “Angel of Death,” “Raining Blood” and “Hell Awaits.”
Here are some of the photos that Jessy and I took from the seething floor of the arena.
If you had to sum it up… That probably does it.
Thanks again to Matt and Nate for getting us there and getting us in.
The music scene of the 1990s was confused. At the turn of that last decade, Hip-hop was displacing Metal as the top-selling genre, and Nirvana was allegedly setting off the so-called “alternative revolution,” yet Guns ‘N Roses was all over MTV with opulent, twelve-minute videos and all over the charts with an epic double CD. The world was wild at heart and weird on top.
Underneath that odd veneer of mainstream schizophrenia, independent music was thriving. Dean Wareham is one of the unsung architects of indie rock. His bands, Galaxie 500 and Luna, helped define a sound and an era. Black Postcards(Penguin, 2008) is his memoir of the making of that sound, a glimpse at a time in music that is all but long gone: days of record stores, seven inch records and colored vinyl releases, vans and venues, maps and menues… Wareham did his share of time in this world, roaming the land beneath the radar. It was a time when, as he writes, “It was odd playing to an audience of eleven, and then being interviewed as if anyone cared what we had to say about anything” (p. 63).
Wareham’s stories are an in-depth look at band dynamics during a chaotic era and how the music industry worked at the height of its excesses, as well as how Wareham himself negotiated both — an era where label heads describe bands like Luna as “little boats,” saying, “There are too many small boats in the harbor. They’re all trying to get out to sea. But it’s crowded — so many little boats, the big boats can’t get out to sea. It’s terrible” (p. 176). This is when record store shelf space was at a higher premium, before the digital revolution made records in the long tail profitable.
Black Postcards is largely well written and a fun read, even if a bit snarky and nitpicky in places (plenty of venom for Seattle bands, digital technology, The Pixies, etc.), but who wouldn’t, if given such a chance to do so, try to even the score a bit? Even when he’s a grumpy old man about things, his insights are astute. In regard to the music business’s financial woes, he tackles the concert business as well, writing,
There were hundreds of bands out there, booking the clubs months in advance, playing their stupid songs. there is something tribal about it — different groups of men wearing different kinds of rock clothing, descended from different rock traditions, singing their songs and dressing up and dancing around, competing with other groups of men for an audience’s attention (p. 293).
Wareham is also the only other person I know of who likens Eddie Vedder’s voice to Cher’s. Anyway, couple this book with Matthew Buzzell’s Luna documentary, Tell Me Do You Miss Me (Rhino, 2006), and you have a crash course in Wareham’s world of the 90s, as well as two of its most critically renowned and respected outfits.
[Note: While reading Wareham’s book, I also started reading Alfred Jarry’s Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician which was most recently published by the Exact Change imprint. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Exact Change is run by Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang, also known as the other two-thirds of Galaxie 500. The coincidence was far too weird to ignore.]
Speaking of renowned, respected, and weird, Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips by Jim DeRogatis (Broadway Books, 2006) presents a wholly different view of the same era. If Galaxie 500’s records sounded like they came “from another planet,” then The Flaming Lips are still orbiting some other sun. Staring at Sound does a great job of following their formation from their old meat locker practice space to clubs all over the globe, from parking lots across America to the big screen in Christmas on Mars (2008).
Lead Lip Wayne Coyne talks about not being able to relate to bands from New York such as Sonic Youth, but feeling completely natural broing down with San Antonio’s Butthole Surfers. His musings on recording, filming, and performing are intriguing and enlightening. It’s funny, in some aspects, these guys are so regular. In others, their brains are in backwards. Both cases make their story thus far fun and freaky, and DeRogatis does a fine job telling it.
By the way, like me, Jim DeRogatis spent the 90s writing about music for magazines. Unlike me, Jim got his musings collected and published. One of his previous books, Milk It! Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90s (Da Capo, 2003) is one man’s close-up view of the build-up and breakdown of the music of the time.
On another planet still, but coming up during the same era, Pantera defined a different kind of 90s music. At a time when Heavy Metal was supposed to be dead (friend and fellow writer Adem Tepedelen wrote at the time that metal wasn’t dead, it was “just wounded and pissed off!”), the Cowboys from Hell were debuting records at the top of the charts — back when that meant selling hundreds of thousands of records in just a few days (1994’s Far Beyond Driven sold 186,000 copies in its first week). Their guitarist, “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott was adored and hailed by everyone who knew him and his playing.
Black Tooth Grin by Zac Crain (Da Capo, 2009) tells Dimebag’s story, from his birth in Arlington, Texas to his death on stage in Columbus, Ohio, from Pantera’s glittery late-80s beginnings to their chart-destroying reign as one of Metal’s most unrelenting acts. Through it all, Dimebag managed to remain a blue-collar Texas everyman while simultaneously becoming a certified Metal guitar god. He was a genuine guy no matter, always ready to buy a tray of shots for the friends at the bar. As friend and business partner Larry English puts it, “There was no fake Dime” (p. 258). He wasn’t quite on his way to burning out, but he never got the chance to fade away. Among many other things about Dimebag, Crain’s book sheds new light on that harrowing night in Columbus in 2004. Dean Wareham may have gotten yelled at by fans for breaking up Galaxie 500, but he didn’t get gunned down for it.
Metal always gets a bad rap when it comes to those who typically write about music. It’s often depicted as cartoonish and silly, the very antithesis of punk or indie rock (Hip-hop is often treated the same way, as if one genre is more “true” or “real” than another). This elitism, if I may call it such, is the antithesis of what I thought the whole punk rock/DIY idea was about. It often seems like less of a dislike for the genre, and more of a contempt for its fans. You might not enjoy Pantera, maybe you think they’re baffoons and their fans are worse, but they did exactly what anyone else who’s ever wanted to play music for a living did — and they never compromised what they wanted that music to be.
The 90s were a weird time for music, and one that we’re not likely to see again. These three books offer three different glimpses into that time and how three bands navigated it — all with varying degrees of success, bitterness, and carnage, but all with a damn good story.
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By the way, if you like the behind the music stories no matter the genre, I also recommend The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson and Neil Strauss (ReganBooks, 1998) and for added debauchery, check out The Dirt by Motley Crue and Neil Strauss (HarperEntertainment, 2002) and Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind (Feral House, 2003). Oh, and I can never say enough good about Continuum’s 33 1/3 Series.
GODFLESH Streetcleaner (Earache Records, 1989)
Godflesh has always pushed limits in one direction or another. Streetcleaner is the germinal industrial-metal hybrid sound that bands all over the world are still trying to recreate — and Godflesh continued innovating and never looked back. Since officially disbanding Godflesh in 2002, Broadrick has been busy with a band called Jesu (whom he named after the last song on the last Godflesh record, indicating a continuation of sorts of their sound), and his original musical outlet Final, among other various remixes and collaborations. With the reuniting of Godflesh in 2010, Broadrick admits that he finds himself at home in the band. “I think Godflesh is still presenting exactly what I grew up with and exactly what runs through my blood, “ he said in 2011. “It’s really important that that sense of expression is back in my life. I think I’d lost it through Jesu. But really, it’s not just some re-visitation for me, it really feels like I’ve gone back to what I am in a way.”14
Described as “the most widely demonized and vilified music scene in rock history,” (O’Hehir, 2009), the Norwegian black metal scene of the late 80s and early 90s took Black Metal to new extremes. The bands and fans all wore head-to-toe black leather, wrist- and arm-bands and boots with spikes or nails, and black and white “corpse paint.” Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s 
