‘Eavy Metal

Metal Monday: Indian!

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Heavy metal is immensily popular in large parts of the world outisde Europe and North America; surprisingly so for a genre of music often seen as only belonging to white suburban scum. Yet bands like Maiden regularly sell out giantic stadiums all over South America, as well as all over India, as Rajan Datar discovered for BBC Radio Four:

With the collapse of The Iron Curtain in the 1980s, a new frontier was open for Western Music acts to exploit. For years, fans in Eastern Europe had been starved of live performances by Western bands and singers due to the difficulties involved in trying to perform in countries cut off by ideology and politics. So where is the new frontier now? Perhaps bands should look east? With the rise of India and China as economic powerhouses, complete with growing middle classes, are these now the new territories for bands and artists to target as they seek new audiences and revenue streams?

Presenter Rajan Datar follows legendary British band Iron Maiden as they head to Bangalore for a sold out festival appearance. With exclusive access Rajan hangs out backstage with singer Bruce Dickinson, who not only fronts the band, but is also the pilot of the specially-converted plane which they use to travel the world whilst on tour. He speaks to the promoters who are trying to make India the new destination of choice for Western music artists and hears from fans who have travelled for days from all parts of the sub continent to be at the concert. He also discovers, with surprising results, which musical genres sell in India and which don’t.

The actual programme is much less obsessed with filthy lucre than the description makes it sound; the best part is when it’s once again confirmed that Bruce Dickinson is a sweetie, as he calls out to the Indian fan the programme had been following. Worth checking out.

Meanwhile, over in Germany, it’s Power Metal that used to be king, with Helloween its masters. Naff as only a German band trying to make serious music can be, but I still have a not too secret linking for them. This is “I Want Out”:



I already linked to another “classic” song of theirs back in October 2007, but here are two more. First, “Dr. Stein” in a so new it’s still wet 2010 version:



Then, “Keeper of the Seven Keys”, the obligatory pseudo-fantasy story each metal band had to do in the eighties. Includes lyrics for optimal enjoyment:



Metal Monday – Carcass & Cannibal Corpse

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Calvin and Hobbes

Death metal can be a very silly sort of music, not at all grown up. In attempting to shock its audience, or more often, the people judging its audience, it often resorts to the grossout, deliberate over the top stories of horror and revulsion, with decapitations and biting off the heads of bats and such. All a bit childish, an adolescent rebellion against authority, bought for the shock value. Certainly a lot of death metal fans, not to mention the musician share Calvin’s motivation in the strip above…

At first sight Carcass may fall in that category, but the band (which split in 1995, but has since reunited) has insisted that they have legitamite reasons for their grossout lyrics: they want to revulse people into stopping eating meat! (Of course, this is one of those things I’ve read a long time ago and can’t find any evidence for anymore) This may explain titles like “Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency” and “Vomited Anal Tract”…

Whether or not this helped convince anybody of the benefits of vegetarianism is doubtful; like so many death metal vocalists their lead singer is difficult to understand at the best of times and metal fans on the whole are a pretty unshockable lot

Reek of Putrifaction:



Exhumed to Consume



Cannibal Corpse is just as extreme in its lyrics, but perhaps somewhat more honest in their motivation:

“We don’t sing about politics. We don’t sing about religion…All our songs are short stories that, if anyone would so choose they could convert it into a horror movie. Really, that’s all it is. We like gruesome, scary movies, and we want the lyrics to be like that. Yeah, it’s about killing people, but it’s not promoting it at all. Basically these are fictional stories, and that’s it. And anyone who gets upset about it is ridiculous.”

Horror inspired, extremely violent and sexual (some would say: sexist) it’s no wonder such uptight countries like Australia and Germany banned their records and in the latter case, even the band performing songs from those banned records! But again, for me personally the lyrics are not the reason I like the band: it’s the music and the feel of it — heavy, sombre, aggressive — that I like.

Meat Hook Sodomy:



Butchered at Birth



So… Metal classics or just noisy filth?

Metal Monday

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I was both pleased and slightly annoyed last Friday on discovering BBC Four had decided to broadcast a heavy metal theme night. Pleased because metal rarely gets any kind of mention on the BBC, annoyed because if BBC Four was doing a Heavy Metal Brittannia retrospective it meant the genre had well and truly become obsolete. And true to form, the main documentary was indeed an exercise in nostalgia, focusing too much on metal’s pioneers, spending too much time on the sixties and early seventies, with barely a mention of the eighties and the N.W.O.B.H.M. and absolutely nothing on developments since. Even if the focus was on British metal, why was so much time spent on barely relevant acts like Uriah Heep instead of important post-1980 bands like Napalm Death, or Paradise Lost or whatever? Is it cynical of me to think that cutting off the story around 1980 would make metal still reasonably understandable to the BBC Four audience, while not having to mention the more extreme developments since? Still, it’s comforting to know the BBC’s usual slightly out of kilter view of music extents to metal as well — seemingly obsessed with roots and almost unable to move out of the baby boomers’ sixties-seventies time frame, as if everything that’s interesting in rock and pop got its start there.

But though I can fully appreciate the genius of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Deep Purple and the other hard rock pioneers, they’re not metal. These bands all fit in perfectly with the other big rock bands: the Stones, the Who, Cream and all the seventies stadion rock acts. Perfectly normal people could listen to them and go to their concerts and not be looked down upon. They weren’t metal. is metal:



And this.



Not to mention this.



Metal has always been a skeevy sausagefest sort of music, both thuggish and nerdy, listened to by the weird dorky kid with the Tolkien posters in his bedroom and the thicko failing woodshop with a habit of casual violence. It’s never been cool or top forty material, with some exceptions, yet remains popular everywhere anyway. Its image is violent, reactionary and misogynistic but apart from a few of the more loonier Christian pressure groups in the eigthies nobody ever got as outraged about it as they would get over a single fiddy cents video. And I love it.