What I talk about when I talk about metal

I’m a metalhead. This should be obvious from looking at me. I have two braids in my beard and long hair. I wear my Celtic Frost T-shirt to everything I really care about. Oddly enough, I’m gainfully employed, teaching university kids and after-school middle schoolers. Still, it’s probably significant that the one time I was actually searched at the border, the agent wanted to know if I was a Satanist, not if I was a Muslim, which is funny if you’ll consider I was born in the Middle East.

The first metal band I got into was Celtic Frost. I met them on their reunion tour. I shook Tom Warrior’s hand. Like so many others, I wept like a baby at the first “Oogh.” He does that, Tom Warrior. Ask any metalhead. They’ll set you straight. I was 17, I think, and crazy depressed. The only thing that got through to me was this one song, “The Usurper.” My best friend, Clement, the greatest guitarist I know, was randomly shuffling through songs on an MP3 CD someone had given him. It was mostly power metal (the only form of metal I sort of look down on generally…except you, Kamelot) but right in the middle was this random heap of darkness and fury. I’d just only started doing drugs. I was lonely. The girl I wanted had pledged her life to Jesus and I would have to go to church to have her. I’d become peripherally involved with gangs. I told Clement I really liked the Amorphis that was on that CD but I loved the Celtic Frost. All extreme metal comes from Celtic Frost.

Metal’s such a lower-class genre of music. It’s in a perpetual angry defensive crouch. I love it because of that, not inspite of it or ironically. It’s violent and furious. It’s powerless. It’s the music you make simply because you believe in it, in the belief that you can transcend your status/society/what everyone else likes through sheer will. It’s not music you listen to because you expect you’ll get laid though I’ve often found, in my mid-twenties, that it’s attractive in a rebellious sort of way. Listeners will have to defend their love all the time. It’s not an unfair charge, don’t get me wrong. Much of the issue, I suspect, even as metal revels in its filth, is that metal is naively aspirational. It believes a great deal in itself. Regardless of genre, metal has a sort of righteousness about it that’s very complicated. Whether through gore, evil, beer, brotherhood or gloom (thus covering in broad strokes: death, black, thrash, power and doom), it’s not music that’s accessible or inviting. It’s prickly because it’s so righteous. I don’t know any other genre so obsessed with message. It’s also what makes it the most innovative genre of music I know. I’m perfectly capable of writing an essay on French rap and Romanian rock and Arabic hiphop or any other such so don’t cross me on that It’s difficult to listen to Peste noire without thinking of French romanticism or Georges Bataille or carnival gypsy music. Anything can be folded into an aesthetic after all. Okay, so maybe electronica is just as innovative. But then again, there’s dubstep metal.

I’m a metal elitist. I’m one of those terrible people that will judge your taste in metal if I deem it to be of a lower standard. I’m not like that with anything else, except maybe soccer. While I love a lot of newer stuff and don’t usually call for perpetual reissues of bands’ demos and debut albums, I will take offense if you present false metal as your favorite metal. You’ll run into this issue with lots of folks that like black metal in particular. Black metal’s weird, by the way. There are a lot of racists in it, seeing as much of it’s all about Scandinavia and a glorious, simpler, more warlike time. I once jammed with a bunch of actual neo-nazis despite being quite obviously not-white. It was fun. We drank a lot of beer and they joked that it was a shame that I’d have to fight them in the coming race wars. But at the end of the day, they were just really pleased that someone, anyone, likes Morbid Angel and Immolation and necrophagist. I’m aware of the irony with neo-nazis that worship the guitar skills of a Turkish-German named Muhammad Suicmez but really, you’d have to be wilfully deaf to not recognize sheer talent when you hear it. Them’s the contradictions that make it all worth it though.

But anyways, I expect you have a metalhead in your life and want to get to the serious business of impressing them. Fans of different sub-genres typically don’t agree with each other on what’s good though there are some commonalities. The easiest subgenre to get into is melodic death metal. Stuff like At the Gates, Amon Amarth, Suidakra etc. You’ll actually like that stuff even if you hate all other metal. What I’ll suggest now you’ll classify as acquired taste. They’re not superaccessible but no matter what sort of metalhead you’re dealing with, he or she will agree that you’ve got unimpeachable taste if you pick these. If they don’t, they’re not really metalheads. QED.

My top five metal bands (by which I mean bands I will love always), in no particular order: Celtic Frost, Peste noire, necrophagist, Primordial and The Angelic Process.

Great video or greatest video ever?

Primordial has a DVD coming out soon. Buy it.

What I’m trying to learn to play right now and will probably never succeed at.

A smart dick joke

It is a well-known fact that it will take 5 smart dicks to change a lightbulb. At some point, we’re going to have to stop changing lightbulbs with our cocks.

nous sommes fanees

I used to have exactly two dreams, ones that I could remember anyway. The more notable of the two was a washed out grey loop of film that I often saw weekly for a period of four years. The central image is thus: Me, dangling my feet in a swimming pool I’m certain is back in Vancouver while an unnamed woman in a blue swim cap swims away from between my knees. Warm rain is falling on the surface of the pool. There is no one else there. The streets are deserted because the world may have ended the previous day. It is cold, but not insufferably so. Mist rises from my mouth as I begin to speak, to call out to her to return, but she does not stop to turn back. She is swimming to the other end of the pool when, inexplicably, the scene repeats itself and she finds herself once again between my knees. I can hear a strong thud below as her feet curl back against the side of the pool to propel her forward once again. If I reach down, my fingers will graze the soles of her feet. Watching myself from three feet behind my dreamself, I see that I am seated on a chair, carrying a warped guitar.

This is from Steve Erickson’s Arc D’X:
“. . . Tell me about your dream, she said. He shook his head. I don’t have a dream, he said. Once you did, she said; and he answered, It was someone else’s dream born in me, at the moment it died in someone else. And then it died in me, and I don’t know where it went, I don’t remember it at all. Lauren told him, I know where it went. She said, It was born again in my child, and it killed him . . . And now the dream is out there sailing the seas in a bottle, for anyone to find.”

A fable

This is my recollection of a fable I read ages ago in a book my grandma gave me.

The thunder god and his wife awake after a long night equalling about 500 human years and sees that the world is wracked by famine and poverty. The thunder god shakes his head but does nothing. His wife, on the other hand, says “well, do something. You’re responsible for these people,” to which the thunder god replies “So I am.” She looks at him sterner than he’s ever seen her and says “in times of famine and poverty, their faith in you only grows stronger. Surely, it is up to you to reward them. In every corner of this land, there is now a shrine to you. Your name is on everyone’s tongue.” The thunder god says nothing for an entire hour, which works out to about a century in human terms. “Fine,” he says, taking off his necklace, “I shall throw this in the path of my most ardent devotee. If he picks it up, he will be able to remake his town in the image of his choosing. He may eliminate hunger, war, poverty, anything he sees fit.” The goddess, finally pleased, nods her assent, and the necklace is thrown into the man’s path. The Saint is a thin, emaciated man, a former soldier in the thunder god’s army. He has not spoken a word that is not his god’s name in over twenty years. He chants his master’s name constantly, under his breath, at dinner, even in his sleep.

Of course, the Saint did not pick up the necklace. He was too busy chanting his god’s name to pay attention to the world around him.

I told my mom this fable a few years ago when I was at a rather dark place in my life. I tell her stories all the time. I call her my child and play with her like she is really my child. It’s funny, as I’ve grown older, I find myself giving her strength more than usual. After hearing this story, she said that it must be a reminder to simply live in this world. Alertness counts for more than your beliefs.