When my wife & I moved from Chicago to St. Louis in August, 2000, we decided to get cable. Reception in St. Louis is awful & we knew we’d want to be watching TV. Last time I had cable was in 1996, so that my brother & I could watch all the Bulls games. I used sports to justify the cable expense in St. Louis too —: the White Sox were leading the American League in 2000 & I expected them to make a serious run through the post-season (they got creamed by the Mariners). Sports was my justification. But cable satisfied a secret pleasure: 24-hour music stations. Last time I had cable, MTV was deep in “Real World: London” & VH-1 was playing old U2 videos. Now, I got TRL, Backstreet Boys (whom I’d never yet actually heard, though I’d seen Backstreet Boys lunchboxes & binders in a bargain store in Vienna), Jackass, & — best of all — Behind the Music installments (two faves so far: Mötley Crüe & REO Speedwagon).
But I also got MTV2, which plays videos just about all the time. I hadn’t seen an actual music video in four years. Besides a few personal discoveries — a kick-ass video introduced me to At the Drive-In; a sappy one hooked me, I’ll admit it, on Coldplay — & besides the obvious advantages of media access to new Madonna & Michael Jackson videos (& old ones: when’s the last time you saw “Scream”?), the main thing I found was that I had no idea what was happening in currently popular music — or “rock,” to which I’ll limit myself so as not sound foolish — & the more I learned, the more discouraged I became. Lots of “punk” bands with numbers in their names. Tough guys with chin-beards doing acoustic “jams.” No more Smashing Pumpkins. And numbingly pathetic metal, chunka’d-chunka’d with barely hilarious turpitude.
My first musical love was metal. I still love metal. I don’t listen to it as often as I used to, but when I do, I’m grateful for its honeyed alloys. Watching these metal-like bands on MTV2, I created categories for them: doofus metal — initially the chin-beard was the main qualifying criterion but its ubiquity demanded my refinement of this category to white tattoo’d guys with chin-beards rapping about getting laid, being tough, whatever: in short, Limp Bizkit & any band like it; ninja metal — chin-beards, natch, rapping of course, also some element of turntablism but not overwhelming, with an overall aesthetic that feels derived from kids who grew up watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: basically, Linkin Park etc. (I should add that white guys in dreadlocks are also a feature of many of these bands); and finally psycho metal — white guys with shaved heads, tattoos, croaking about how freaked out & sinister they are, how everyone’s going crazy, how you will lose your mind because of them, done so in grindingly unmusical drudgery: too many to list, but Mudvayne, Disturbd, Staind (tho these guys are psycho metal-lite; more like mood metal), etc. etc. This last category is the early 2000s metal equivalent to the hair metal of the mid- to late-1980s, when a sound became a marketing sure thing; its expiration date already rapidly approacheth. I watched the videos for these bands — & where do they get the ca$h to make these videos? who is bankrolling them? — with fascination but never any interest in the music itself. It’s just not that good.
Instead, I’ve turned back to my audiocassette collection, which contains all my best metal tapes (I didn’t get a turntable until the late 1980s). On recent roadtrips, I have attended to these musics as if they were lost liturgies, uncovered in some rock Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls of Metal, furrowing the brow but making the heart sing, as well as the neck muscles elasticate. Consider, then, the following five selections old ore for the serious metallographer, the poor soul who has lost his true anvil in this current world of synthesized, polystyrene nü metal.
1. Iron Maiden, Piece of Mind. Bruce Dickinson, Steve Harris at their best. “The Trooper,” “Revelations,” & a lengthy epic cut about Dune. In high school, I read the novel so I could understand this song!
2. Judas Priest, Point of Entry. “Heading out to the Highway” is an outlaw classic; “United” is one of the great unpraised anthems of Rock.
3. Metallica, Ride the Lightning. “Take a look to the sky just before you die / It’s the last time you will!” They peaked on their second album. “Creeping Death” is the best tune, so far, to incorporate Hebrew Bible.
4. Dio, Holy Diver. I wore this tape out! Killer solos by a 17-yr old Vivian Savage; the classic snarl of Ronnie James, who, legend has it, wrote the tunes for this album while watching Showtime-era LA Lakers on tv: Magic Johnson was his favorite athlete!
5. Rush, Hemispheres. Not a metal album but one of my all-time favorites. In idle moments — waiting in line at the grocery store, waiting for public transportation, waiting for night anxieties to recede — I find I can still recite all the lyrics to this album, as if they were the Nicene Creed. “Cygnus X-1, Book II” to the initiated.