Sabbath!

79 Comments

1. It doesn’t get much more obvious than Sabbath’s Sweet Leaf.

   • No doubt.

     These guys…well, they RUN with it, you know?

     In the linked interview with the Sleep guys, they confirmed the story that they pretty much blew their entire third-album advance on custom or vintage amplifiers and high-grade weed (they did, however, dispute that they had delivered the master tapes to the label in a skull-shaped bong, saying “we wish we had thought of that.”)

   • BTW, that song is available as downloadable content for Rockband so now I get to play it. Fortunately, my 8-yr old doesn’t have a clue what the lyrics are about.

   • C’mon, man!
     That was obviously a reference to stevia.

2. Black Sabbath pioneered the use of the Locrian mode in rock and pretty much every metal band since has followed suit at some point, at least in 8 bar breaks.

   The Metal sound wasn’t really invented by Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. This is where metal was invented.

   • They obviously didn’t invent it, but pre- “Black Sabbath” was the use of the diminished fifth really popular in rock music?

     Apocryphally, that is the “devil’s interval”.

     • (Also, those links aren’t there so you’ll know what I am talking about, b/c I am sure you do – they are there to indicate that this is stuff that *I* learned while poking around on Black Sabbath – just so nobody makes the mistake of thinking that *I* know what I am talking about, because I promise I do not.)

     • Hmmm…re-reading your link, I think we may be talking about the same thing. Sorry.

     • I think we are talking about the same thing… the Locrian mode turns up a fair bit in jazz and some odd corners of the classical landscape. But mostly you hear it in Middle Eastern music. Here’s something reasonably accessible. Sounds like a minor but it’s not. But it sorta is…. all those flats kinda add up.

     • There’s a lot made of that diminished fifth, and a lot of it by people outside of the blues genre who don’t really get the concept of a ‘blue note;’ so for clarification purposes . . .
       Minor pentatonic (in A; let’s keep it simple): A C D E G A
       Relates back to the C major pentatonic: C D E G A C
       The blues scale in A: A C D Eb E G A
       The diminished scale was popularized by Randy Rhoads, much, much later.
       That E-flat in the A blues scale is a passing note. Technically, a blue note is any note a half-step (minor interval) below a scale tone. And they fit anywhere.
       One of the most popular places for a blue note is the third.
       Main riff from “Hair of the Dog” with blue note in bold:
       E / E G G# B E8

       That’s a blue note.
       The 7th & the 4th are also popular places for it.

       You can hear it in the riff from “I Think I’m Going Bald” from Caress of Steel at both the 3rd & the 7th, played in A.
       (Some of my favorite lyrics too:
       Once we loved the flowers
       Now we ask the price of the land)

       • I’ve thought about this (perhaps too extensively), and I was previously in error.
         This isn’t just a typical Will H. arguing both sides of an issue thing either.
         I was just plain wrong.

         The thing with the riff from “Hair of the Dog” is that is has both the major & minor thirds. It could be either major or minor.
         The chorus shows that it’s clearly minor.
         It’s the G# that’s the blue note, modifying the 4th.

         • Well, maybe a little bit of arguing both sides of an issue . . .

   • Dude. Wagner was metal.

     • Wagner could get the audience riled up, that’s for sure. A certain Austrian corporal thought Parsifal would make a great soundtrack to his European Road Trip.

       • I remember reading somewhere that Wagner petitioned the prison to allow certain executions to happen on his stage, as part of the opera, instead of in the back part of the prison. Come to the opera, hear a couple of tunes, see a decapitation. Bring the kids!

         He was GWAR.

   • I’ve actually applied an awful lot of thought over the years into the issue of what was the first band to play heavy metal.
     Had to be the Kinks.
     Hendrix & Cream followed shortly after.
     That’s it recording-wise anyway.
     I’m sure there was other stuff going on that never got set to tape.

     • It’s sorta like asking when the Renaissance started. Truth is, beyond a few little outposts, Florence, Siena, the Middle Ages went on, bleary, ignorant and dogmatic. If man was the measure of all things to the Renaissance, Aquinas was the measure of the Middle Ages… sigh. But I digress.

       My brother, whose head still remains firmly stuck up the ass of the 1960s and 70s says Heavy Metal began in earnest with Steppenwolf, the name “heavy metal thunder” from Born to Be Wild. The more beer you get in him, the firmer he becomes in his opinions. All that came before was just blues. Muddy Waters apocryphally said Jimi Hendrix was playing blues in double time at double the volume.

       Heavy Metal was shyte. All of it. I hear Led Zeppelin and I am taken back in my mind’s eye, the stench of incense covering the odour of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes in some friend-of-a-friend’s pad, the bitter scent of adulterated heroin boiling in a spoon over someone’s Zippo lighter, sunlight slowly pulsing onto the ceiling as it reflected off the slightly warped platter of Houses of the Holy as it spun on the cheap record player. Music allows me to do that: it’s like eidetic memory of a sort, I can remember the first time I heard almost every song I’ve ever heard.

       Metal was loud and it was stupid. Its fans were stupider than the musicians, if that’s possible: in the race to the bottom of the musical dumpster, it was hard to say who got there faster. They were all trying very hard. Even Clapton was strung out on the junk. You could hear the sick in their playing. When heroin had killed off its share of them, cocaine would loot the rest right through the 80s. And that perennial favourite, booze, the bane of drummers, would destroy plenty of them, too. They were not nice people, these metal types.

       The music fit the age, of excess of every sort, sex and drugs became a tawdry sort of pilgrimage without the necessary effort of actually becoming a pilgrim, donning the robe, taking up the staff and going anywhere. That would be too much work, you see. The mystery cult of musical ecstasy went corporate. It was small wonder to me at the time that heavy metal was so drawn to the occult. Alastair Crowley: “do what thou wilt”. They did, too. And it did ’em to death.

       Oh a few those assholes survived: Ozzy Osbourne would become a grinning revenant, wearing his brave state out of memory. County fair shit now, all of ’em, wrinkly and charmless behind their sunglasses, letting the guys in the shadows play the tough parts. Toothless vampires they always were. Now they wear dentures.

       • Ah, Blaise, you always rant entertainingly. 🙂

         From where I sat, Zeppelin was excessive, bombastic, stupid and silly, the music of heshers and dropouts, on classic rock radio constantly, a joke (get the Led out, man!)…until one day you wake up, and it hits you…no, Led Zeppelin (and Sabbath) really ARE awesome.

         The singleminded pursuit of seemingly-stupid excess can uncover new territory, and if plenty of these psychonauts, and just plain psychos, didn’t make it back from the outer reaches of innerspace with their minds intact, I for one am grateful for the risks they took and the sacrifices they made for the rest of us, and the art they made in so doing; just as I am glad that Lou Reed took heroin, so I don’t have to.

         Plenty of poets and writers and painters and sculptors were Not Nice Men with substance abuse problems too, metal ain’t unique when it comes to pitting the transcendence of the art against the venality of the artist.

         • I didn’t care for Zeppelin at all for the longest time. In fact, it’s only been recently that I’ve come to appreciate them.
           And I’ll say that it was the Zeppelin fans that really turned me off to them rather than anything in particular about the band. For all the hype, I had unrealistic expectations in listening to them. And the radio playing to death everything from II & IV to where I was sick of hearing it.
           Zeppelin had some leanings toward heavy metal (“Communication Breakdown” is almost the exact same as the first part of “Finale” from 2112), but they were, more than anything else, and R&B band.
           No wonder that Presence is my favorite Zeppelin album. It’s one that hasn’t been played to death.

           I do happen to have “Carouselambra” on my current mix cd for driving around.
           I have “Into the Void” from Masters of Reality on there as well.
           And the original British version of “Fox on the Run.” (another band that was Americanized for us)

           There’s really a lot of good videos here for me to listen to, and I want to thank you for that.
           Here’s one of a Japanese band from the late 60’s – early 70’s that we never would have heard of were it not for their move to Canada. (these guys are for real)
           But things were breaking all over the place at the time, as Blaise points out so well.

         • Led Zeppelin made some interesting music. Black Sabbath used some interesting modes but really, nothing particularly interesting. Blue Oyster Cult was making more interesting noises than Sabbath.

           See, Glyph, I was around when this stuff wasn’t yet classic. It was just rock. Just recently evolved from rock-n-roll.

           As for the psychonauts and their drug-fuelled excesses, there was nothing classic about that, either. Rule of thumb: any time someone starts glorifying anything, they’re either know-nothings or they’re trying to sell you something dangerous and maybe you shouldn’t buy it and furthermore these bastards have been planning it for years and there’s always a soundtrack. Glorifying war — dude, there’s a reason for military bands.

           Lou Reed. A genius in his own mind. Never worked out what anyone saw in him. The Velvets were important. John Cale was the only good part of that band. Lou Reed, ecch. Call me a cultural cretin, call me an old fart. I remember the New York he was writing about. It really helps to get 70s New York if you have a taste for pretentious shit. Literally. The official bird of New York City was the fruit fly in those days.

           Lots of artists had problems with substance abuse. They may have wrung some beauty from their crappy lives but Coltrane died at 40. I’ve been to Bill Evans’ grave in Baton Rouge: a crippled genius, a suicide which took from the 50s through to the end of the 70s to complete. The jazz junkies had taught rock nothing, seemingly.

           Don’t glorify what drugs do to musicians. I’ve watched drugs wreck good musicians. It’s not an inspiration.

         • Oh, I don’t mean to glorify it; I know plenty of musicians, and booze is the worst of all. I don’t believe in prohibition, but I understand why it happened; you see brilliant minds and talented people just literally piss it all away, and you think there must be a way to stop them.

           But without glorifying drug abuse, I am glad for those perspective shifts and sometimes-accidental artistic insights that have been produced as a result of the alteration of artists’ mental states. The world would be a poorer place without art produced under the influences, and I do look at them as adventurers who take often ill-advised risks to bring back to us news of faraway lands.

         • @ Will – sorry, I just noticed your comment in the filter and freed it.

           “And the radio playing to death everything from II & IV to where I was sick of hearing it.”

           Yeah, this was a big part of my problem too. In fact, even after I started to like them, I didn’t feel the need to buy their records because you were pretty much guaranteed to hear them every time you turned on a radio. It was only once I gave up entirely on radio that I bought the albums.

           Edited to add: that Sweet song reminds me of Cheap Trick (that’s a good thing).

         • I’ve messed around with enough drugs and enough music to know drugs don’t make better musicians. They don’t even make better music.

           Y’know what I just wrote about the pilgrim. A musician is that pilgrim. It’s easy to get off the path. You’re a long way from home and the closer you get to the goal, the farther from home you are. When you’re alone, when people tell you you’re great, when they want to go off somewhere and get high, that’s all part of the pilgrimage. You can’t rely on people telling you you’re great, you can’t recapitulate the thrill of the stage with the thrill of the drug.

           The pilgrimage isn’t a one-way journey, you know. You have to get back home again.

           … We are only undeceived
           Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
           In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
           But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
           On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
           And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
           Risking enchantment.

         • @ Blaise – I understand your point and sympathize, and would do (and have done) what is in my power to keep musicians (or anyone) from getting pulled under. I have an acquaintance, very well-respected in the local music scene, who has blown opportunity after opportunity due to self-sabotage and alcohol abuse. And it pains every one of us who know him to see this, because he is both a better musician, and a better person, when sober. And I don’t know how his story will end; I hope it ends better than I fear it will.

           But I maintain that our bookshelves and record racks (or hard drives) and our world would look very different if not for the existence and use (not abuse) of mind-altering substances, and that this change would not be for the better.

           i am a scientist – i seek to understand me
           all of my impurities and evils yet unknown
           i am a journalist – i write to you to show you
           i am an incurable
           and nothing else behaves like me

           and i know what’s right
           but i’m losing sight
           of the clues for which i search and choose
           to abuse
           to just unlock my mind
           yeah, and just unlock my mind

           i am a pharmacist
           prescriptions i will fill you
           potions, pills and medicines
           to ease your painful lives
           i am a lost soul
           i shoot myself with rock & roll
           the hole i dig is bottomless
           but nothing else can set me free

         • Ulrich Roth from the Scorpions was the only one I remember from the 70’s that was doing anything really interesting as far as scales, modes, etc. go.
           I still haven’t figured out what that one is in the intro of “The Sails of Charon,” and mostly because it’s in B, which I’ve always had issues with.
           Thin Lizzy had some cool stuff going on when they had Brian Robertson.
           (One of my favorite solos of all time here.)

           I’ve seen guys brought low by drugs, and many by alcohol.
           The illegal drugs tend to take less time until the big crash comes, but booze is just as sure.

     • In re: Kinks, I’ve mentioned this before, but I consider the guitar sound in “You Really Got Me” – by dint of being, if not the first, at least the first prominent, intentional, popular use of “noise” as intentional compositional element, rather than accidental artifact – ground zero for a lot of the music I hold dear.

3. Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, yes — but all these guys also ought to, and I’m rather confident that they do, look to Jimi Hendrix as a foundation.

   • Oh, no doubt. But Hendrix never sang about wizards and s**t, which I think we can all agree is an essential component of metal. 😉

     • OTOH, Jimi did taste plentifully of the sacrament, ifyouknowwhatimsayin.

       • The meaning of your purple prose is a bit hazy to me.

     • Dude. He cooked up multiple bowls of voodoo chili.

       (To explain the joke, there was a period of time when Hulk Hogan came to the ring to the tune “Voodoo Child”. Announcer Mike Tenay infamously referred to the song as “Voodoo Chili”, probably in reference to the song “Voodoo Chile (slight return)” which is, as I’m sure you know, *NOT* Voodoo Child. Anyway, since then, the circle of voices in my head has referred to the song as “voodoo chili” ever since. BUT! MY POINT! Jimi sang about magic and crap.)

       • I think there’s an interesting essay to be written (not by me, since it would require a perspective I don’t have, plus, you know, research) about how/why black musicians in America came to sort of cede rock guitars.

         What I mean is, black America invented rock guitar, twice: first by giving it the blues backbone that would go on to miscegenate with C & W, and the early rock and rollers; then again with Hendrix, as the possibilities of what you could do with the instrument got exploded wide open (not to mention Sly Stone, and Parliament/James Brown et al, and Arthur Lee etc.)

         But since the 80’s and the rise of the sampler/turntables as the primary musical tools for “black” American music, nothing.

         I mean, in my lifetime we’ve got Prince as the only black superstar rock guitarist. Fishbone, Living Color, to an extent TV on the Radio, are notable by dint of being pretty unusual – black men with guitars.

         So what’s the cultural shift there? It can’t be strictly financial, as I would imagine a sampler and some turntables and a soundsystem are going to cost at least what a cheap guitar would. It has something to do with rock music becoming “white man’s music” or “uncool” to black kids.

         I remember going to hip-hop shows and seeing, if not a 50/50 mix, at least a substantial number of white kids there. But punk rock/hard rock/indie rock shows? Maybe just That One Black Guy.

         Am I the only one that thinks that is sort of sad? I don’t think it is just a function of where I lived, because the pattern seemed to hold even when I attended shows in other parts of the country.

         • you should read this:

           http://www.amazon.com/What-Are-You-Doing-Here/dp/1935950053

           it delves into some of those questions (needs a better editor though).

           that said, i dunno.

         • Oh Glyph. You need to get Caught Up. Check out Cody ChestnuTT. What goes around comes around. It seems, contrary to the general slide toward the turpitude and laziness of the sampler kiddies, some Black Folk are actually playing instruments again.

         • This is interesting too:

           http://www.mtvhive.com/2013/01/16/the-only-black-guy-at-the-indie-rock-show/

         • @ Blaise – but in popular music, this guy is still pretty much an anomaly, no? I mean, it’s not like NO black guys are playing guitars – in the blues and jazz scenes, there are lots I’m sure. And Prince is worth at least 10 other guitarists.

           But in “popular” music the most explicitly, and wildly popular, blues-guitar-influenced acts in recent years (the ‘Stripes and the ‘Keys), are white guys – there’s nothing wrong with what they are doing, they are playing the music they love and doing it well – it’s just a little weird to me that they pretty much stand alone, with no current black stylistic counterparts (at least in the popular consciousness), at this point in history.

           This split (“Black Flight from Rock and Roll”) really seemed to take off at the start of the 80’s – prior to that, rock (and disco, and second-wave ska, etc.) was pretty racially-mixed. Was it cultural? Was it marketing? A bit of both? Did the sudden explosive popularity of hip-hop (which white kids adopted fairly quickly) use up all the available cultural air in the black community for a generation, so guitar wasn’t interesting/being taught?

           What happened, and why does the segregation appear to run one-way (white kids aren’t averse to “black” music, but the reverse is seemingly not as true, at least by anecdotal observation)?

         • Here’s my thinking on Anomalies. They’re almost all throwbacks. Anyone can sit down with ProTools or Ableton and knock out yet another remix of the Amen Break.

           This shit is getting Very Old. As surely as punk kicked Pop Rock in the goolies, I foresee, more than foresee, I observe a reaction to all this crappy posturing and plagiarising. Hip-hop began well enough. It has lapsed into an effete parody of itself. The cool kids will reject it as surely as they rejected Pop Rock.

         • if anything, hip hop has gotten weirder as it’s gotten more pop. and definitely more abrasive, though almost all popular “youth music” forms have – the palette of acceptable sounds being considered music has widened significantly. no one really cares much about how those sounds are made.

           i do think you drop entirely into the rockist wormhole by positing that an entire generation whose notion of “real” and “unreal” music is massively different than your own will snap back wholesale into recognizing your categories as such. if you’d come to me in 2002 and said “in ten years not only will an offshoot of the uk grime scene mutate into a hypercharged cacaphony of dueling lfo’s but also pack stadiums across the world” i would have laughed at you so hard. and yet you’d have been right.

           the only prediction of the future of popular music i’m willing to make is that it will be weirder than i can possibly imagine.

         • as per glyph’s question, i think it’s a soup of racism, peer grouping and peer pressure, the non-inclusive nature of some scenes, narrowcasting and selective hagiography by writers of said narrow scenes, and other population and class differences.

           and things are changing. it’s still unusual but no longer shocking to see minority fronted or even entirely minority-comprised metal acts. even really experimental fare across the city gets a mix of people despite sub 100 person crowds.

         • “a soup of racism”…I’m not so sure about this; like I said, white kids were pretty quick to adopt hip-hop – the styles, the stars, the music, the culture – and I have never gotten the sense that black people would be unwelcome (unexpected, maybe, but that is a self-reinforcing thing from experience) at the rock shows I attended – though back in the day there used to weirdly be skinheads that would sometimes show up to the ska shows, I guess looking for fights? – but it was always my sense that it was the skins themselves that were unwelcome, and they knew it.

           I used the word “cede” deliberately; it just seems like black kids lost interest in rock and guitars right around the time hip-hop blew up, and I feel like it was more that they were drawn away by something “new” and “theirs”, rather than driven away by white people.

           But maybe I misunderstand your meaning.

         • I think rock itself was pretty segregated going back at least until the 70s (maybe even the 60s, hell, even the late 50s). When hip hop emerged out of what was, really, a part of the black rock scene (funk, dance, party, that sort of thing), it began to subsume much of the black part of that rock scene, leaving just the white stuff remaining withing rock proper.

           I think there’s another, longer point that could be made about the directions that rock took starting in the late 70s and culminating in the 90s, that are fundamentally inconsistent with mainstream black culture, but that would be a really long comment.

         • “pretty segregated going back at least until the 70s (maybe even the 60s, hell, even the late 50s)”

           I know the markets were often segregated – in the sense that record labels wanted, say, a “white Chuck Berry that they could sell to white people” – but I mean the actual product, and its audience, seemingly wasn’t so much. Both black people and white people were playing rock and roll and listening to it, even if not always on the same stage or station; and the black rock and roll artists went on to surprise the labels by being just as palatable to audiences as the white artists were, if not more so.

           ” but that would be a really long comment.”

           Pixels are free (but I know time isn’t) 😉

           Now is the time when I mention again that Wednesday music posts are always open for guest submissions (hint, hint).

         • allow me to elaborate a bit.

           i’m not saying that events are openly hostile necessarily* but that it was part of the soup. i think both in and out group cultural pressures are more immediately applicable here. but it’s not a minor thing – i.e. the polyethnic, pansexual gloss of disco was part of the legacy of distrust against it. same thing happens with chicago house a few years later. but it’s also part of what made it unique, that there was so much social mixing in these safe spaces. early charges against jazz were that it promoted racial integration, race mixing, and ultimately, miscegenation.

           i think it’s worth pointing out that heavy metal was probably the last predominantly white working class musical form in america, which surely wouldn’t help it become particularly integrated very quickly.

           but as to why certain cultures glom onto certain things, man, that’s like a whole field of who knows what studies.

           *though the book i linked to above lists a few openly hostile to minorities crowds in both america and canada at metal shows; puzzlement and alienation is far more common in the author’s experience.

         • “though back in the day there used to weirdly be skinheads that would sometimes show up to the ska shows”
           Glyph, there is a lot more interconnecting history between skin’s and ska fans than most people realize, especially as most people just lump all skins in the racist/nazi category. Originally the skin movement came out of the original English Mod scene in the late 60’s, as a reaction to hippies. As the mod’s are who really pushed ska, they often go hand in hand.

         • i do think you drop entirely into the rockist wormhole by positing that an entire generation whose notion of “real” and “unreal” music is massively different than your own will snap back wholesale into recognizing your categories as such.

           I’ve been at this a long time. I spent a lot of time behind the desk, in the era of the big Studer decks, flinging a yard of tape past the heads every second. I spliced a lot of four track tape. I made Mellotron tapes for the 400. I was the first guy I knew to program a sampler and I’ve been at samplers and DWS ever since.

           My notions of “real” music boil down to this statement: if you didn’t record it, it didn’t happen. And if you can’t record it, you can’t do it. There’s a place for samples everywhere. It’s what I was doing back then, pulling out eight seconds of some good bit and bouncing it to the four track so I can cut it.

           Here’s my theory about Black Myoozik. Black kids have their own cultural identities — plural. They invent some great new musical form and the White Folx cop it. Elvis was a white guy playing black music. So hip-hop came along, all this poor kids, young and fine and keeping time, with their DJs doing exactly what I was doing, chopping that One Great Break loose from the rest of the record and playing it over and over, or dovetailing it with another Great Break, with the Amen Break on the B fader while the DJ cues up the next bit — so the dance party went to the studio and these wonderful things start coming out, Sugar Hill Records.

           And the white kids started aping it all. Which was exactly what all those Elvis fans had been doing, way back then when Daddy wouldn’t let them play Negro Music on the family gramophone.

           When that happens, dhex, I’ve been around for a long time, I’ve seen five, six iterations of it now, black kids go off in search of a new set of black identities. It’s good for the country, it’s good for music in general. In a very real sense, this is about “real” and “unreal”. When some pathetic suburban white boy is trying to style Stussy, the cool kids are snickering behind their hands. And those looking a bit farther into Daddy and Granddaddy’s collection of dusties. When they find Daddy’s old Fender copy guitar up there in the attic, that old Peavey amp and the cardboard box full of cables and effects, it will be hard to keep them away from it.

         • Aaron – sorry, my comment did not make clear – I am aware that skinhead culture did not start out as racist, as you note it was originally bound up with UK working class, mod, and 2-Tone ska culture, and had an explicitly antiracist bent.

           But by the time and place I was going to shows, it was pretty well corrupted and associated with neo-nazi racist homophobic Skrewdriver / Oi! BS (I grew up in the South, and we had a fairly big contingent of these chuckleheads, though even then there were a few that tried to hang onto the original, antiracist identity).

           There was a whole color-coding system of the “braces and laces” by which a skin would identify himself with “white power” or not, so you could tell which set you were dealing with. And the neo-nazi ones would, inexplicably, sometimes show up to shows by mixed-race bands, IMO looking to start trouble.

         • @ dhex –

           “i think it’s worth pointing out that heavy metal was probably the last predominantly white working class musical form in america, which surely wouldn’t help it become particularly integrated very quickly.”

           This makes sense in itself, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental question; it just gets us back to the chicken from the egg. That is, if metal’s foundations are largely black (Zep and Sabbath et al being explicitly blues-derived, and Hendrix, a black man, inventing the Electric Guitar As We Know It), how did metal become almost exclusively white to begin with? It just seems strange.

           And even leaving metal aside – in the US at least, other forms of “guitar music” like punk and indie rock were more popular with the middle- and upper-class than with working class; and even there, these color lines are pronounced. So it’s not just a class thing.

         • “a soup of racism”…I’m not so sure about this; like I said, white kids were pretty quick to adopt hip-hop – the styles, the stars, the music, the culture –

           I wonder how much older I am than you; this wasn’t the case in the suburbs that I grew up in. I don’t think hip-hop went mainstream until the mid-90’s. (though (white) people I knew did listen to NWA & Ice-T for shock value). Also, there are still a lot more white kids than black kids in the US overall.

           Though *manufactured* pop for teens throughout the 80’s and the very early 90’s was a different thing, and took influences and talent (or ‘talent’) from all over. (Prince, frankly, was part of the this, though he transcended it)

         • Kolohe – I was born in ’71. By the mid- 80’s at the latest, I can tell you that (MTV being the big catalyst for this) Run-DMC and the Fat Boys(!), among others, were really, really big deals amongst white southern youth – my cousins, who are pretty redneck, were HUGE rap fans and had their own (pretty embarrassing) rap duo, which I still like to bring up from time to time.

           http://youtu.be/jJewbFZHI34

           BRRR STICK EM

         • Glyph, I was going to say that I must be a hair older than you, but ’71 also. But as I didn’t grow up in the south (west coast liberal college town, FTL) we didn’t really have nearly the amount of racism. Then again, as a west coast college town, there were so few African Americans or Hispanics in town that much of those issues didn’t come up at all.
           Rap/hip hop really didn’t break in town until a couple of years after I grew up, mostly for the fact that the town was lily white, but also we had one of the legendary ’80’s college radio stations. In other words, it was not uncommon to see a cheerleader wearing a Smiths t-shirt.

         • We got a black guy from hereabouts singing Enka…
           (doubt that’ll catch on around here, but he plays well in Japan).

         • @ Aaron- yeah, in particular the area (now gentrified, and an entertainment district) where we used to go to shows had a big neo-nazi skinhead problem back in the day. This would have been late 80’s.

           One of my fondest memories (and this is terrible in a way, but also not) was waiting in line to get into the gay dance club there (that club being one of about three clubs/music venues in the area, which at the time was basically an abandoned industrial district and really crime-ridden neighborhood) and there was this scrawny skinhead across the street, yelling epithets. So two really burly bodybuilder-type gay dudes walked across the street and thrashed him but good, to the approval of the onlookers – nothing bad enough to send him to hospital or anything, but enough to let him know not to yell epithets at burly gay bodybuilder-types.

           Of course, there was also the time that I and a female friend were walking from that same club back to the car, and we saw a few skins kicking a homeless guy – he rolled under a car to escape the blows. We did not try to intervene, being scrawny kids and fearing for our own safety, and this was pre-cellphones, and this wasn’t the type of neighborhood where there were working payphones, and even if there were, you wouldn’t stop to use one at night.

           I have no idea what happened to that guy. 🙁

           Anyway, the neo-nazi skinhead issue seemed to resolve itself, but for a time there it was a real problem.

         • “This makes sense in itself, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental question; it just gets us back to the chicken from the egg. That is, if metal’s foundations are largely black (Zep and Sabbath et al being explicitly blues-derived, and Hendrix, a black man, inventing the Electric Guitar As We Know It), how did metal become almost exclusively white to begin with? It just seems strange.”

           well, first off, let me start by saying that i think the foundations stuff is overblown. not in terms of who was influenced by whom – that’s relatively clear, and often straight from the horse’s mouth – but that this influence should necessarily carry over with the populations in question. i’ve heard it put that sabbath initially gains this following because they were from birmingham, and birmingham was white and working class. and so custom becomes tradition, etc etc and so forth.

           this divide is both class and race; we all point to it with the true and heavily repeated lineage of a “white” music form influenced – or in the case of elvis, depending on the speaker – stolen from “black” musical forms. are we describing the audience, the lineage, the performers? all three, i think.

           that said, at least in nyc, audiences are a little more mixed – sorta. the swans shows i’ve been to are what you’d expect – the class of nukem high hitting their 40s a little hard, creaking vinyl and leather that’s a bit strained – but it was more racially mixed than i’d expected. that said, i’m taking a slice of a slice because these are very small market shows.

           most of the metal shows i’ve been to in the last few years are still predominantly white, though not nearly as predominantly male as they used to be in some cases. though that changes based upon how ahem “hipster” the following is. i.e. the wolves in the throne room show was fairly mixed (mutilation rites and thou opened, really great thou set), but the today is the day shows i’ve been to are far more likely to be almost entirely male (of varying races) than not.

         • More blacks at the King’s X shows that I’ve been to than I’ve seen with any other metal band.
           Not sure if Thin Lizzy or Hendrix had the same effect of a larger black audience with a black frontman, but there might be something going on there.

   • Don’t forget these guys.

4. drop out of life with bong in hand
   follow the smoke to the riff filled land

   huge sleep fan here. i crack open the extended version of jerusalem/dopesmoker a few times a year.

   earth’s very early drone metal material has about as much in common with la monte young as sabbath, though they too took their name from sabbath. and now they do beautiful slow motion film soundtracks, as you mentioned.

   speaking of metal and weed, are you familiar with cannabis corpse? it’s mostly the guys from municipal waste who started off doing a har har at cannibal corpse and turned into an extremely good (better than their namesake imo) throwback death metal band that just happens to have some of the intentionally dumbest lyrics on the planet.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIazEDTBUKE

   • Yeah, I was going to ask you if you liked Earth’s Hex; Or, Printing in the Infernal Method (a title like that, you just gotta type in full), which as I understand it was inspired by Cormac McCarthy, I know you’re a fan of his books.

     I haven’t heard Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I or II, but I think they got positive reviews.

     I am listening to “Dopesmoker” right now – it goes well with the coffee.

     When it comes to metal I am definitely a tourist; my main interest is the more drone-y or psychedelic end; trippier stuff focused on groove and/or weight/texture. Also, I prefer a SOH or at least some self-awareness, which is why Sleep are so terrific – the heaviest music, with the most ridiculous lyrics. I have a friend who’s a big metal guy and he tries to keep me posted on stuff that I might enjoy.

     But, the faster/more technical it gets, it often tends to lose me, and Cookie Monster vocals strike it right out, so I am afraid that Cannabis Corpse probably won’t make it for me.

     Some other “Heavy” bands that I like, that I couldn’t shoehorn in – Boris (who I LOVE, but they are way too all over-the-place for this post; like Jesu, they’re sometimes sort of “metalgaze”, not a million miles away from Mogwai or MBV – the linked track, when the vocals come in, reminds me a bit of Jane’s Addiction’s “Up The Beach”) and Torche.

     • i think you’d dig the angels of darkness works. they’re really, really, really soundtracky. but very pleasant.

       have you seen boris live? they’re basically a musically versatile hair metal band. i like some of their stuff quite a bit (flood and heavy rocks, and the merzbow collab “sun baked snow cave” is really good) and some not so much. but they’re a good live band. the drummer is a bit much with the antics.

       st vitus (esp. “born too late”) and melvins need to come into this discussion of course. and harvey milk. and i suppose sunn, though they’re not my thing.

       or even more modern, the body is pretty nutso but probably too screamy for you. maybe thou? i love thou. subrosa would likely cheer you, being an all female clean vocals outfit.

       when it comes to modern doom, this is quite possibly my favorite song of all time. it may be too growly/screamy for you, but give it a shot. i promise you that the riffage near the end is INTENSE
       http://youtu.be/Nci4g7Iy0Pg

       i’m not much of a traditionalist, i.e. i find the nwobhm to be largely unlistenable. (i make an exception for dawnbringer but that’s a modern throwback) there’s something so fake about it to my ears. and most of the modern doom is kinda samey, there’s a few bands that do new stuff – locrian, for example – but a lot are stuck in a template. though i don’t like them, sunn is certainly unusual.

       • (Returns from YouTube, pale and shaken).

         Dude. I TOLD you I’m a tourist here. I was a teenage Smiths fan. Why you takin’ me down a seedy alley to the meth’d-up biker bar?! 🙂

         (The worst was the “recommended” track title in the right sidebar – you know, the one that starts with “Spitting…”)

         Haven’t seen Boris live, though I’d like to. Like I said, they are just all over the place; metal, garage-y/punk-y stuff, noise, shoegaze, they’ve even done synth-y and ambient stuff.

         Sunn was recommended by my friend, so I got Monoliths & Dimensions, but it never grabbed me. I even listened to it again recently to see if I could slot it in here, but it just does nothing for me (at least yet).

         Listening to “Up The Beach” reminded me, again, of how good Jane’s used to be before they blew all their cred (Nothing’s Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual are both still solid, IMO); they were the rare band that the metal kids and the hippies and the goths (Perry’s pre- Jane’s band, Psi Com, was basically a Banshees/Bauhaus tribute) could all enjoy.

         Are there any bands doing that sort of shamanistic/tribal thing today?

         • “Are there any bands doing that sort of shamanistic/tribal thing today?”

           i think the whole of psy trance turned that into a lifestyle/religion. more seriously, i dunno. i get wary when people use “shamanistic” to describe their band. i have terrence mckenna releated ptsd on the subject of late 90s insane cultural bandwagons that (mostly) went hell all nowhere. but in that vein, hmm, i mean i’d probably point to the gang gang dance/black dice/etc resurgence of noise acts as trying to do so. swans v2? would they count? i prefer my sublimation via obliteration, so i’d slot them in there though others might disagree.

           heh, i mean, coffinworm are great. capital GREAT great. i tried. i got so excited when i heard they were recording a new album.

           sunn bores the hell out of me. and i like la monte young. i like charlamagne palestine. i like boring drone music – just not theirs.

         • Yeah, maybe “shamanistic” wasn’t the right term, I just couldn’t think of one. Jane’s had great chemistry for a while there – Avery’s melodic hooky basslines leading the songs, a trick picked up from the postpunks; Perkins doing all that tribal-tom stuff on drums; Navarro basically splitting the difference between Zeppelin and the Banshees; and whatever Farrell was up to with that weird mosquito-like insinuating whine buzzing around the edifice, coupled with lyrics that were pretty arty/thought-provoking for the genre. No idea how it worked as well as it did (though the “funky” RHCP-style stuff hasn’t aged quite as well).

           “Three Days” came up on in the car the other day, and as a piece of epic rock music has lost none of its power; supposedly, that one was recorded live in the studio, the band all playing together, and also supposedly, they don’t remember large chunks of doing it.

         • Jane’s Addiction were, in the Nothing Shocking and Ritual de lo days, my Smiths (I guess that would make Farrell my Morrissey?). They were sort of the launching point for my musical taste (with the Pixies and maybe Pavement). I like Porno for Pyros too. Sue me.

         • I’m with you on “Shocking” and “Ritual” – I went through a phase a couple years ago where I dragged those out, and they do hold up. If you haven’t listened to ’em in a while, put ’em on, I think you’ll find the same (you can edit a few of the weak songs out, and get one solid disc-length playlist out of them, with even a few tracks from the s/t on there!). For such a self-consciously “arty” band, they really appealed to a wide swath of listeners.

           Never really got into P4P….

         • You know, with the benefit of hindsight, Farrell and Morrissey sort of occupied similar spots within their scenes: extremely distinctive, yet technically-limited singing; sexually ambiguous and theatrical performers, with ace guitarist sidemen; unusual lyrical fare that was concerned with sex, violence and class in ways that were not really mainstream at the time. A clarion call for outsiders. “Shoplifters of the World Unite”/”Been Caught Stealing.”

5. I remember a conversation, a brief argument really, that my brother and I had circa 1995. He, a really big Kyuss fan, was mocking the technical sophistication of the musicians on the Weezer album I was listening to incessantly at the time. So I mocked the fact that Kyuss songs basically sounded like some guys got high and started recording themselves playing their instruments really fast and loud, with no idea what they’re doing (or they forget what they’re doing as soon as they start). Basically, “Sure, Kyuss is made up of better musicians, but at least Weezer can write a fishin’ song.” I think this is my attitude towards that late 80s/early 90s metal in general (the stuff that resulted in Dream Theater as its apotheosis).

   • Kyuss is OK (I prefer QOTSA’s first few records – better vox, and more variety). I wasn’t a Kyuss fan back in the day, but I find them all right now (=Blues For The Red Sun).

     I never got the mania around that Weezer record. I liked it OK, but “Sweater Song” was just a Pixies rip, and “Buddy Holly” was fun, but inconsequential.

     But man, people loved it then and they love it now. I STILL see Weezer stickers on cars!

     • Calling something a Pixies rip is sort of like saying, “It’s from the mid-90s.”

       I love Weezer, at least the first two albums. They are two of the few albums that I listened to a lot around that time that I can still listen to regularly. Most of my other music from the time just hasn’t held up (Ruby, mentioned last week I think? Ugh.). And if I’m in a car and “Say it ain’t so” comes on the radio, I will sing it loud, and I will sing it earnestly!

       • Yeah, but there are Pixies rips, and PIXIES RIPS…come on, sing “As loud as hell / a ringing bell / behind my smile / it shakes my teeth …” to it, you know you want to…:-)

         And now, I have Hall & Oates in my head. Thanks a lot. 😉

         I don’t mean to rag on Weezer, like I said I think they are OK. But people (many of them friends of mine) really took that band to heart in an inexplicable (to me) way, and just love them really, really deeply, almost cultishly. It’s a bit baffling.

         • I can understand that. I suppose I’m one of the people who took them to heart. I mean, I don’t have a bumper sticker or a t-shirt or one of those weird caps that I used to see in the early 2000s, and there were bands that I liked better at the time, but I think their music, even if it’s not all that original, holds up.

   • i’m of the admittedly bigoted opinion that anything with “progressive” in the name is bad. progressive rock, progressive trance, progressive metal, etc.

     i do like a few tech-death albums aka progressive death metal but such are the vicissitudes of life.

     • Sometime in the early 90s (’93 maybe?), Dream Theater played a free show at Nashville’s big amphitheater (which is gone now), and all of my friends and I got tickets at the local Dillard’s and went. One of the guys we went with was a guitarist in a metal band, and he spent the whole concert saying things like, “Oh my God, did you hear that? I can’t believe they can do that live. That is fishin’ amazing,” while the rest of us sat their thinking, “Man, this is really, really boring.” I mark this down as the moment at which I began to not only dislike this sort of music, but actively despise it and its overzealous fans.

       • i think we’ve all been that guy in part – the difference being the prog nerd zealtons tend to be on the edge of “it is a shame that a lesser being such as yourself can’t appreciate such transcendent musicianship” which puts people on edge for the obvious reasons.

         • How many chords do you need *REALLY*?

         • Allow me to quote Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3:

           “Three chords good, two chords better, one chord best.”

           Words to live by.

         • Prog and I have this agreement. If they write songs, I’ll buy a few. I already have all the Hanon and Czerny etudes in the piano bench. Great for learning to play, no substitute for song writing. Don’t try to wow me with your blistering runs and bizarre chords, hanging them like so any musical towels on the clothesline. Write songs. Even the metal guys can write songs.

           Prog became an abomination before the Lord. Joining classical music to rock was a marriage made in hell. For all the evil things I’ve said about metal, the metal guys actually understood classical music rather better than the prog weenies.

6. all this talk of stonery stonerness and i forgot red fang:

   http://youtu.be/WQPfQvLIseA

   i think everyone likes this song.

   • Hey, that was pretty good! Never heard those guys before. Fun video too. The s/t was cheap so I just ordered it.

     Because it’s never a bad time for this song:

     http://youtu.be/df1A5liUBuU

     I read an interview with Homme where he was talking about Neu! and I was like, “that makes TOTAL sense.”

     Also, it strikes me that Sleep was sort of the metal Cypress Hill. Just completely over-the-top-Cheech-and-Chong-style obsession with the wacky terbacky, coupled with genuinely sonically innovative music that’s equal parts malevolent and absurd.

     • all of the red fang vids are excellent.

       i like the sleep as cypress hill comparison.

       • It took a while for the violence in some of Cypress Hill’s lyrics to sink in, because it just sounds so cartoonish and spacey.

         There was a pretty great interview with CH, where they mentioned they were driving through LA in their van when the Rodney King verdict came down, and riots were going on; they hadn’t been paying attention to the news, and, being Cypress Hill, were in the usual frame of mind you’d expect, now just driving red-eyed and oblivious through the chaos.

         They had no idea what was going on. I love to imagine the conversations in that surely smoke-filled van – deadpan Jake-and-Elwood-type comments like “man…there sure are a lot of PEOPLE out on the street today….”

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