I found this via rockcritics daily. And I’m gonna have to say that the cookiemonster vocal is what’s keeping me from even checking out new metal these days. I hear the undifferentiated growl and I stop listening. Am I missing out on anything? According to Michael Deeds, I am. I’m not sure, though.
Metal has always been about teen angst. Yeah, ostensibly some of it’s about pillaging Vikings and/or putting jelly in the donut (wink wink), but way deep down inside, it’s about pimply fifteen-year-old males with more testosterone floating around in their systems than they currently know what to do with. Aggression + sexual frustration (or, really, frustration of any kind; let’s be fair) = catharsis through loud shouty music. ‘Twas ever thus, ‘twill probably always be thus.
The thing that I’m missing these days is the fun. And I’m fully willing to admit that that may be due more to my advanced age than to an inherent lack in the music itself. It’s hard to back off from your own perceptions sometimes and get the proper amount of aesthetic insight, y’know? Be that as it may, it does seem that music in general, and metal in particular, has lost whatever sense of humor it once had.
I mean, some of that cookiemonster stuff is funny, but I don’t think it’s meant to be so. As I’ve said before, metal these days seems to be the realm of guys with intricate chin hair who can’t seem to lift their guitars up past their knees. Science Girl and I refer to this genre as the “Band of Jasons” phenomena… well, I do, anyway. We were watching TV one night, channel-surfing, and we came upon some non-MTV/VH1 music video thingy, playing clip after clip of the cookiemonster/ bad posture-type metal band. I started riffing on the image - every band looked like five guys named Jason jamming in someone’s garage. They’d seen somebody else’s video where the guitarist was slinging the axe low, thought the look was cool, and took it to its logical extreme. I swear to you on my copy of No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith, there was one band that night who were all literally bent over double as they played, I guess from all that heavyness. I wept tears of laughter.
I think I should probably quit there, before I launch into an ill-advised tirade about the good ol’ tongue-in-cheek metal I grew up with. Mostly because at the time, I don’t know that I considered it to be tongue-in-cheek. Honestly, I’m not sure. And I cannot tell you how fucking depressing it is to come to the realization that I’m far enough away from my teenage years to recall (at this particular moment, anyway) if I was in on the joke or part of the punchline. With punk, I always knew what the joke was. (Yes, kids, it wasn’t always Maximum Rock & Roll–style arguments over what is and isn’t kosher. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, just to pick one example, is a very funny AND political album.) With metal… I’d like to think that I was self-aware enough to get it, but there’s just enough niggling doubt scampering around the back of my brain like a bored hamster on a wheel to make me wonder if that’s so. I certainly never thought that Blue Oyster Cult were ever devil worshippers, of course, and I knew that Alice Cooper was all about Entertainment with a capital E. After that, well… I was a naive suburban teen turnip. You do the math.
At any rate, I did eventually learn not to take everything at face value. And once I did, I “got” a lot more jokes. So I guess what I’m saying is that either I’m not getting the jokes anymore, or there aren’t any jokes to get. Either possibility is equally likely.
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