Of all the art forms, music might be the most powerful and the least understood.
I saw a girl with a white dunce cap on leaving the concert, the word “WHORE” emblazoned down the cap in big red letters.1 I later learned it was a bit of merch pertaining to a song of the same name, all about “taking the power back” from that word or whatever, but when I looked up the lyrics, meaning was impossible to discern. I enjoy avant-garde poetry, but these lyrics weren’t too outré for my tastes; they were just bad. Drivel of the type scrawled by high-school kids in the margins of their composition book, the kind all writers need to get out of our systems before we actually, you know, learn to be good writers.
Except the lucky ones get to make a career out of this.
It’s not just that, though. It’s the thought that despite whatever subversive meaning the song has—the only meaning I can sort-of discern is aimed at men, telling them “Look at me (but don’t look at me)”2—there’s still at least one man’s daughter walking around in public wearing a dunce cap with the word “WHORE” written on it. There is no art anymore, no culture, only shit we’re told to take seriously. The ancient Roman plebes weren’t this degraded; the rot was mainly with their elites. The balance is inverted now; our elites push degeneracy while living as conservatively as our great-grandparents whom we’re told to despise did. There’s a lesson there.
A big part of me understands the power of music firsthand, and the other part wants to scream at people who base their entire lifestyle about whatever niche genre they like to listen to. “It’s just music!” I imagine myself saying until I remember that I, too, once based my life around music, having been a musician and all. And it isn’t just the notes involved that have power, but the messages conveyed when lyrics are added. There’s a lesson there too.
You are lashed to the mast. You know that the songs you are about to hear will drive you mad, will kill you and yours, but you must hear them anyway. You don’t even know what they’re about, you don’t know what the singers are saying, but you know they will drive you to ruin. It does not matter. You don’t want to think, you just want to listen. The singers look hideous but they sound beautiful. As their song caresses your ears, the singers start to change. You perceive them as beautiful, angelic forms enticing you with promises of good things to come. If only you turn off your mind. If only you hear without listening.
They are singing to you:
Odysseus, bravest of heroes,
Draw near to us, on our green island,
Odysseus, we’ll teach you wisdom,
We’ll give you love, sweeter than honey.
The songs we sing, soothe away sorrow,
And in our arms, you will be happy.
Odysseus, bravest of heroes,
The songs we sing, will bring you peace.
You damn your crew, curse them for not bringing you to the singers right now. But you know, deep down you know, that they are doing you a favor. Music is dangerous. Music is magic. Lyrics are magic spells. The gods know this, and so do you. If you want to listen, you know you must be careful. Some day, you will thank your crew for disobeying your direct orders. You will thank them for keeping you from the seductive lure of the sirens. But today is not that day. Today you want to be with the singers more than ever.
It’s important to curate what we listen to as much as it is what we eat, read, and watch, and who we spend time with. Many moons ago I watched an interview with notorious scumbag G.G. Allin on another notorious scumbag’s TV show telling a tearful father who wants his sweet little daughter back, a girl who is now in the thrall of a degenerate shit-eater—and I mean that literally3—that it’s not his fault religion failed this girl, or failed to offer an attractive lifestyle. Cue audience applaud, trained seals reacting to stimuli as they applaud a punk-rock “free thinker.” Confirm or be cast out.
Allin was disgusting, no doubt about it. It wasn’t “just music.” Even seducing one young girl to abandon her family and be like him is one young girl too many. I wonder how her life turned out. Did she get knocked up at a young age, left alone and destitute but too proud to go back to her “judgmental” parents? Did she realize the grotesquerie she had fallen in with? Did Allin’s death snap her out of it? Did his literal eating of shit repulse her?
We’ll never know. But it’s not “just” music.
We truly have no high culture, so this stuff matters. Culture is how values are transmitted, and pop culture is all we’ve got, God help us all.
I know I’ve told this story before, but I used to be young once, and I used to clubs with friends. At this particular juncture the song “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. was popular, featuring this charming chorus:
All I wanna do is- *sound of gun cocking*
And a- *sound of gunshot*
And take your money
And so on.
Everyone in our group is dancing. I, being a smart ass who can’t shut my brain off, say offhand to a friend “This is pretty awful. Don’t you hear what she’s saying?” Another friend says “Who cares? It’s catchy.”
And it is. It’s a catchy song. And believe it or not it has a much deeper intended meaning than “Whore.” But who listening to it inebriated in a club sweatily gyrating along to the beat understands this? We are all whores dancing to a stick-up. It’s catchy. It’s fun.
Thinking is hard. But when you stick stuff in your ears, it goes somewhere.
My mother sent me this article by someone called Mark Judge, a conservative, about how rock music used to be chock full of literary allusions and songs outright based on novels and poetry. It’s a good piece, even though it failed to mention Rush, who’s lyricist, drum-legend Neil Peart, was a voracious reader. Off the top of my head, he wrote songs based on, inspired by, quoting, or referring to works by J.R.R. Tolkien, Ayn Rand, Homer, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, David Foster Wallace, W.H. Auden, Edward Abbey, and Earnest Hemingway. There are more, but I digress.
Judge highlights the advent of something called “poptimism”:
The decline of literary rock mirrored the general decline of literacy, as well as the embrace of “poptimism.” Poptimism is, as Washington Post music critic Chris Richards put it, “anti-elitist, holding that all pop music deserves a thoughtful listen and a fair shake, that guilty pleasures are really just pleasures, that the music of an Ariana Grande can and should be taken as seriously as that of a U2.” Grande is a show-stopping singer, yet it’s difficult to imagine her writing a song, as U2 did, about Chiba City, a dystopian Japanese locale from William Gibson’s science fiction classic Neuromancer.
I’m all for poptimism — as a conservative, I think songs about cars, girls, and beaches can be just as important and poetic as so-called important songs about racism or politics. But perhaps poptimism has gone too far, excusing unchallenging music and venerating artists just because they’re famous. That’s a shame because while songs about eternal things like love and jealousy will always be around, an artist writing about a book that shaped their imagination offers insight into what makes a performer unique. It adds a subjective perspective, and without it, artists tend to become homogeneous. The Top 40 begins to all sound the same.
This is a good observation, but does the typical conservative thing of not realizing that the problem pointed out is a result of conservative philosophy. After all, if one is “all for” an anti-elitist, then one cannot expect the marketplace for rewarding anti-elitism. Taking shit as seriously as gold results in more shit, because it’s far easier to mine for the former than the latter.
Conservatism abandons the arts and then laments the state of the arts. It is oh-so populist but wishes rock musicians, songwriters, and lyricists were more intellectual than what the typical top-40 pop tartlet has to offer. Conservatives worship the marketplace without realizing that the marketplace—along with cheapness, efficiency, and the pursuit of profit über alles—got us here. If there is a hyper-popular song that rakes in boatloads of cash, the conservative will tell you that it is a record company’s moral duty to produce more of the same and rake in more cash, until every last cent has been squeezed out of that trend. And then they move on to the next one. Rinse, repeat. In the boardrooms of record companies, even the pinkest progressives act like Milton Friedman. If the system brought you to this point, of what use is the system, etc. and so on.4
You should be elitist and aristocratic if you want your art and culture to be a cut above what you consider to be intellect-devoid slop. You should gatekeep. You should demand more of other artists and yourself.
This all started, as much as I hate to say it, when serious musicologists and scholars took The Beatles as seriously as they took Bach and Mozart and Beethoven. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was analyzed with the scrutiny ancient Romans devoted to the Sybil’s surviving prophecies. Now, the Beatles actually had music talent and created complex, interesting compositions that did not destroy past cultural achievements, but built upon them. I think the real point of no return is when we started taking everything seriously for reasons other than actual objective musical merit. “Yes it’s trash, but it sounds cool and makes money.” Or worse yet, “If it pushes the critics’ politics, it’s good.”5
Culture became a commodity. Massification claims another victim. News at eleven.
Music is mostly background to YouTube ads and the pursuit of sex. As such, I don’t think a lot of people consider it to have power . . . and then you see a crowd getting out of a heavy metal concert. Black makeup and torn fishnets. Tattoos and long hair. Jean jackets and t-shirts covered in disturbing, demonic words and imagery. Consumption as a uniform. Rebel with the rest. I’m happy these people found their tribe—well all have a tribe, we all need one (sorry libertarians). However, I do wish this tribe had a slightly less infernal bent.
The paradox, of course, is that the heavy metal crowd is one of the nicest, most open and accepting musical subcultures out there. I have attended shows and played shows where I look like such a square, but metalheads never held that against me, because I treated them with respect. They were always quick to embrace newcomers, even hipsters with short hair. How could they know I actually like heavy metal?6
For the record, jazzers are the worst, followed by the hipster/indie rock crowd, and then punks. Metalheads and mustache-rock7 guys are the coolest.
This is why I wish heavy metal could stay away from an aesthetic that induces young women to wear dunce caps labeled “WHORE.” I know that satanic and sexually charged imagery have been a part of heavy metal since Black Sabbath (even though they warned against the devil), and pop music generally. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.
You imbibe the messages you listen to. You are what you eat, whether you eat with your mouth or your ears. Upon becoming Muslim, the former Cat Stevens refused to play music unless it glorified God. He, in fact, gave up music for years. I respect that.
Everything we do redounds to someone’s glory. Why do people, when looking for imagery for their band, only LARP as a fan of the evil one?8
Whatever you decide to listen to, take precautions. Be cognizant of what the singer is saying. Note how the music makes you feel. I had to abandon bands like Tool and Slayer for making me feel gross. This is also why I could never get into Nine Inch Nails—Trent Reznor’s music always made me feel bad. You don’t need that. No one does.
-Alexander
It looked like this:
Even though you might not want to admit that this phenomenon exists, you know it does. As a thought experiment, imagine how women would react if super-jacked, attractive men walked around in public wearing skimpy Speedos that accentuated their packages, and then complained that women were super-creepy for ogling their junk.
If you had been hitherto unfamiliar with G.G. Allin, I apologize for bringing him onto your radar, and I suggest that you do not research him further.
The actual line Cormac McCarthy wrote: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
This is basically how Pitchfork rates the musical worth of things. Bonus points if your band consists of, or is fronted by, a woman, someone trans, someone gay, someone not white, or some combination thereof.
I’m going to do that thing where the writer talks about themselves, but at least I’m relegating it to a footnote: a band I was in for a long time played pretty psychedelic hard rock. Think Pink Floyd crossed with, I don’t know, Black Sabbath and the Police. Anyway, we did a show where somehow we shared the bill with a bunch of metal and hardcore bands. So the three of us, short-haired with jeans and t-shirts, follow up some pretty brutal music and do our set. The other bands, and the audience, were really enthusiastic, and one member of the band that played before us said, “Wow, I feel like I just did a ton of drugs.” I took it as a compliment.
“Mustache rock” was a term coined by a guy in a band I gigged with a lot with that my brother and I both knew for music inspired by classic rock, named for the majestic upper-lip decorations sported by bands of that era. One does not require a mustache to create or enjoy mustache rock, but it helps.
I’d LARP as this guy:
For similar reasons, I no longer listen much to anything by Ministry or NIN. A couple song's off of Pretty Hate Machine, but, oh, god, the later albums?. Ditto for avoiding most of Powerwolf. I'll take cheesy Dragonforce "take on the bad guys" epic music over over-the-top satanic playacting, no matter how talented, thank you.
And why I love Sabaton
Even as a teenager I always thought it was strange how Congress would have hearings denouncing MTV, and the same people going on about moral decay would have another hearing the next day lamenting all the restrictions on business, and how if the market were more free, life would be better for everyone.
I got so much out of listening to heavy metal, both picking up on references to history and literature that inspired me to learn more and catching references as I got older that made me feel like I had some insider knowledge. Just the other day I was playing Holy Diver and I caught the line “ride the tiger” and thought, these guys get it.