2011 in Review: Looking For Today
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Metal-archives.com claims that 7,675 heavy metal recordings were released this year. With so many new albums coming out this year, why bother going back to listen to albums from 2010, let alone from 1980? NWOBHM is sloppy, slow old man rock with shitty production. There was nothing in the ’80s but thrash, early death metal, and Bathory. Nothing good happened in the ’90s, unless you consider Neanderthal mosh riffs and rapping about nookie equivalent to Mental Vortex. Metallica didn’t get good until the Black Album. Our time and money and attention spans are limited. Those years and those albums are history, history best left behind.
Those are actual sentiments that I’ve heard people express. They’re sweeping excuses not to study heavy metal’s history. What does studying history accomplish? Is it useless trivia? Sometimes. Does it tell us how the modern world came to be and offer advice on how to solve current problems? Certainly. Does it help us predict what could happen in the future? Definitely. How does any of this apply to heavy metal?
Real life history works a little bit differently than the history of a musical genre. Understanding why the Palestinians and Israelis are at each others’ throats is useful information. Understanding how the past created current conflicts can help us find future solutions. Understanding how we got from Black Sabbath to Nile is interesting, but it’s not useful information. Using heavy metal’s history to predict heavy metal’s future won’t have any useful effect. Beyond that, the only things we can accurately predict are:
1) Someone will inevitably claim that the demos were better; and
2) Someone will inevitably claim that modern bands are copycats and suck; and
3) Every time heavy metal comes up with a new genre or idea, it will be mixed with hardcore and/or punk, and some of us will be furious about it.
If we don’t gain useful knowledge from listening to old albums, what’s the point? How is the result not useless trivia? Assume for a second that the following is true: Master of Puppets is the best album of 1986. That piece of knowledge is useless trivia. By itself, it won’t affect the next Presidential election. It won’t start a war. It won’t stop a war. It’s not absolutely true anyway, because it’s an opinion, useless in an argument, and as it regards a piece of art, impossible to prove.
However, since Master of Puppets is art, then by its very existence, it is not trivial. The role and the purpose of art is something far beyond the scope of this little essay. Suffice it to say, art is important. So how then is opining that Master of Puppets is the best album of 1986 not useless trivia? How is Master of Puppets really relevant today? That piece of trivia, imparted via the spoken or written word, might change somebody’s life by nudging them to listen to Master of Puppets. Knowledge about art history is trivia. Experiencing a piece of art is not trivial. When an album affects a person, that’s when it ceases to become trivia. Master of Puppets could help a person with their alcoholism or help them deal with a loved one’s alcoholism. It could merely make a person smile on a very bad day, help them keep their job, and thereby improve that person’s life.
That is one of art’s many roles, right? Music soothes even the savage beast, but it does so much more. Heavy metal can and does get us by the rough patches in life, supporting us, comforting us, sympathizing with us. It celebrates the good times in life. It gives us a meeting ground and a point of bonding, and thereby improves our lives in that way. It does all of this because it’s art.
Going back in heavy metal’s history and discovering a long lost gem is one of the genre’s great pleasures. It goes beyond simple pleasure, though. No listener can know the effect of a particular album until he or she actually goes and listens to it. That’s why we study heavy metal history. It’s about finding that piece of art that will serve us best in our time of need. An album is just as valid in 2011 as it was in 1981. Is anybody prepared to argue that time has diminished Master of Puppet‘s potential to affect a listener? What about any other album?
This last year, I’ve finally gotten Death’s Human to work for me. This is shocking considering that I love the albums that follow it. Leprosy finally clicked as well. So did Lightning to the Nations, An Evil Shade of Grey, Winterkill, and Onward’s Evermoving. Evermoving in particular got me through a very rough patch of my life. I can’t explain why, just that it worked, and that I’m eternally grateful to the band for that. I played the album several times a day for a few months, and there’s no other album I know of yet that would have helped me more. Evermoving was trivia to me, until I discovered otherwise. I shudder to think how I might’ve coped without it.
I wasn’t spending my time and money rummaging through heavy metal’s tombs because I had a duty to do it. I went back because I never know which album will help me out in my time of need. I went back knowing that those useless pieces of trivia could have a real world effect on me.
Keep this all in mind when you peruse the best of 2011 lists. Please don’t spend all of your time and money on the new stuff. Don’t dismiss the past, because it is not trivia. Go back and listen with open ears. Don’t do it to prove people wrong because ‘the old stuff is better’ or because it’s interesting trivia or to prove something to other people. Do it for the joy of discovery. Do it to enrich your own life. Do it because when forever comes crashing, when it’s the heart of winter, when the palaces burn, when it’s the time after the fire, you might need one of those old albums. Do it for you.
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