Friday Q&A: 5/9/2014

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Welcome to our first Friday Q&A. Every week, we’ll put up a question for the staff, friends, bands, and you, the reader, to answer. So, shake your Magic 8 Ball — “Reply hazy BECAUSE I’M NOT A FREAKING TABASCO BOTTLE, JERK” — and get ready.

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This Week’s Q

What band and/or album did you avoid when you were younger because you thought it was too evil and how do you feel about it now?

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Dying Fetus, by name alone. I used to see that name and think there was absolutely no way I could own an album by such a band. What would my parents say? They’d disown me! Of course, then I heard the music and discovered it was less about fetal death and more about anti-war politics. What a dumb fucking kid I was.

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Deicide. Partly due to the fact that the band was featured in one of those shoddily made “ROCK MUSIC IS EVIL” videos I was forced to watch as a kid, and also due to the fact that they were the “over-the-line” band for my older brother who interestingly had no issue with Slayer or Cannibal Corpse. I just remember the clip they used in that anti-rock video was basically a quick closeup of Benton’s face, and that was enough to scare the shit out of me then. Now I just listen to it and wonder if I can still get a copy of that old video to see if there were any other bands I never checked out.

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Anything with growling. It made absolutely no sense to me as a vocal approach and I couldn’t even begin to fathom what type of twisted individual could listen to it. I’m still not a huge fan of deep guttural growls (I am, in fact, a poser) and I tend to favor punk-influenced vocals, but my preference is a more informed one and my appreciation for a good harsh vocalist has definitely grown.

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We’re all a product of our times, right? What you don’t know about — what you don’t have access to — can’t affect you. In a similar vein, any one person’s reaction to a piece of art is more about the person at that moment in time than it is the art. So the first albums that I remember being legitimately frightened by were not, in any real objective sense, the most potentially frightening things out there.

Tool‘s “Aenima” and Slipknot‘s self-titled Roadrunner debut are albums that I bought in my teens, listened to so deeply and intently that they stirred something genuinely upsetting in me, and subsequently got rid of them. One I sold, and the other I gave to a friend — whatever I could to physically distance myself from the object.

In both cases, part of what was so striking — and ultimately frightening — about both albums was the totality of their presentation. The art design in both cases suggested that real care was put into visually representing the darkness of the themes involved. And with Tool, in particular, the sound of the album was so alien to me, and the vastness of the sonic world so complete that it really felt like I was physically transported to another place. (Sidebar — It was quite literally not until just a few months ago that I registered just how perfectly perverse a double entendre this line from “Stinkfist” is: “Relax; turn around, and take my hand.”)

Of course, at the time I encountered these albums, I was a bright but moody teenager seemingly preoccupied with Feeling All The Feelings, so my mental state was primed to be affected by albums like these in a more seismic way than if I had heard them earlier, or later, or in mid-summer rather than late autumn, or whatever the case might be. And even though I was fully Metallica-obsessed by this time, their songs of war, insanity, government corruption, and so forth felt, if not antiseptic, than at least far enough removed from my daily life that they didn’t register as threatening.

Though I purged myself of both albums long ago, I eventually re-purchased both of them. “Aenima” has since revealed itself to me as one of the absolute finest albums of the 1990s, and one that Tool has yet to come close to matching. Slipknot’s debut is much easier for me to put into context now, as one of the most successful successors to the nu-metal/groove metal/rap metal groundswell of ’94-’96, but even though I was fully enmeshed with Korn, Limp Bizkit, Staind, Hed(pe), and all the rest of that crew at the time, none of their self-lacerating paroxysms connected with me on the same level. I still have a lot of respect for all of Slipknot’s albums, though in retrospect the fact that “Spit it Out” sounds like Zebrahead might have tipped me off that I didn’t need to be afraid.

One of the great blessings — and great tragedies — of life is that you can never repeat yourself. In fact, the self you were 15 years ago no longer exists, except as a necessary predicate for the self you are today. The things you felt then you can sometimes feel again, but only as a reflex, a memory, a Proustian madeleine whose sensory immediacy dulls and blurs over time.

But I suppose those things are still there, somewhere, filed hastily in the desperate archive of the mind. I guess I still might see you all down in Arizona Bay, after all.

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I’ve never avoided a band’s music because I thought it was too evil, but I won’t ever go see certain hardcore bands live because of their fans’ reputation for random and pointless violence.

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When the 2003 paperback edition of Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderland’s essential Lords of Chaos came out, I was still pretty new to metal, so picking up that tome introduced me to black metal’s classic albums as much as it did its luminaries’ crimes. Perhaps naively, I forced myself to draw a line at the music of anyone who came off too crazy — for our purposes, too scary — in the book. So my early black metal education ran through Immortal and Emperor but not Mayhem and Burzum, and it was years before I sat down with De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas (effectively a main character in Lords of Chaos) and Filosofem and realized the genre cornerstones I’d been missing out on. Satanic ideology never scared me; neither did devilish tritones. But individuals did, and while I’ve learned to separate art from artists in most cases, I’ll always remember myself at 14, not wanting to even hear what Varg Vikernes, convicted murderer, had to say as a musician.

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I was an adolescent in the mid-1980s so there weren’t as many options for truly scary music as there is now. I started out listening to punk and hardcore and slowly made my way into metal, in large part because of Metallica covering the Misfits, and because I moved to another state at the age of 16 and the metalheads at my new school were the only people who would talk to me. When metal finally took hold, there was nothing that I avoided due to subject matter. The only music I avoided was music that wasn’t scary enough.

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The album I was intimidated by as a child? Honestly? The Slim Shady LP. My rents tolerated Metallica and Rage Against the Machine with EASE, especially when they found out Metallica did a thing with a symphony. (They found this a distinct sign of cultural validity and high-mindedness.) Any mention of Slim Shady, however, was met with looks of genuine concern. I did not listen to the radio or watch MTV, so all I knew about Em was schoolyard word of mouth — which was absolutely intoxicating, but not half as intoxicating as the thought of, Wow, here’s something that actually makes my super tolerant, open minded rents nervous. It freaked. Me. Out. I was DYING to hear that record at the same time though.

As the story ends, my mother eventually succumbed to the pop hooks on The Eminem Show‘s radio singles, and gifted me a clean version.

Little did she know my summer job’s meager earnings had already earned unedited versions of all Em’s big albums, not to mention all the classic SLAYER albums I could find.

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Probably Cryptopsy. This was because I discovered them bands at age 13, when I didn’t have a particularly developed ear for heavy music, and they were freaky in ways that the cartoonish death metal I’d hitherto been exposed to (Cannibal Corpse) was not. Cryptopsy (this was the Once Was Not period) had song titles and lyrics that were evil and violent without being over-the-top, and they had that strange off-kilter jazz influence that created a lot of dissonance to my impressionable mind. I remember “Keeping the Cadaver Dogs Busy” being one song that just weirded me right out.

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You’ve read ours, now what’s yours? Let us know below and enjoy your weekend.

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