Metal Jew

Die Nickleback scum!!!

I tend to avoid immoderate language on this blog, but I cannot believe that Nickleback's unspeakably vile 'Rock Star' has become so ubiquitous. The song is a celebration of the most venal, unpleasant aspects of rock stardom under a gossamer-thin veneer of irony. It's everything that is bloated, obsecene and dumb about North American rock culture. It's the final triumph of a rearguard action by a rock mainstream that never could adapt to grung's vulnerability but cherry-picked some of it's signifiers of 'authenticity' in order to make its cynicism appear heartfelt. It's metal's world-conquering pretentions without metal's sense of the fantastic.

I hated Nickleback before 'Rock Star' but now I earnestly wish for Ch*ck Kr*ger's slow and painful death.

Now, to make this vileness even more putrid, UK furniture chain DFS has used 'Rock Star' in an advert. Cudos to Vice magazine for articulating what any sane person should feel about this:

Hey Middle England! Congrats for winning the crappiest demographic in the world award. You've succeeded in inspiring the most abhorrent advert the world has ever seen. To appeal to your cringingly lame-ass tastes, DFS chose the vilest North American song in recent memory, assembled a cast of cunts and got them to perform some vomit-inducing choreography. I've had to quit watching TV in fear of glimpsing a second of this audio-visual excrement.

Coffee Table Metal

Following the last 2 postings on the tome All Known Metal Bands , it seems a good moment to link to my review of Peter Beste's sumptuous book of photos True Norwegian Black Metal.

Interesting that metal is starting to be the subject of arty coffee table publications.  The true ones no doubt hate this phenomenon, but superficial self-hating metallers like yours truly love it...

More on 'All Known Metal Bands'

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Dan Nelson's book 'All Known Metal Bands'.  A comment on my post alerted me to criticism of the book on the Invisible Oranges blog (which I usually read but haven't for a few weeks):

On one hand, this would surely make great coffee table reading. On the other hand, it is just as surely a copy-and-paste job from metal-archives.com. Essentially, the book is a print version of that website as of sometime last year. The fact that this book has an "author" (a Dan Nelson) is somewhat ludicrous. Does metal-archives.com have a potential intellectual property claim against Nelson/McSweeney's for theft of its idea, process, and/or content? Regarding the latter, probably not; metal-archives.com doesn't own the names of the bands it lists. However, it arguably owns the method of organization of these names, even if it's simply alphabetical. No other site has as complete a list of metal bands, and something feels wrong about a major commercial entity profiting off the backs of an all-volunteer community. In any case, metal-archives.com most certainly lacks the resources to pursue any action against McSweeney's.

Here is metal-archives.com, constantly facing server problems and asking for donations. Over there is McSweeney's, who copied the site's text in probably less than an hour and whipped it into a $22 hardcover ($17 on sale). The least McSweeney's could do is help defray the IT costs of metal-archives.com.

A more recent Invisible Oranges post reports Dan Nelson's defense of the book:

On his site, he has published a statement/defense detailing his book-writing process and intent. In it, he states, among other things, that Encyclopaedia Metallum was not the sole source of content for the book. A link to the statement/defense and excerpts from it follow below:

www.eyeoftheblackbird.net/metal.htm

Confusingly, the linked to page doesn't appear to contain the aforementioned statement, although Invisible Oranges does reprint bits of it:

First, the issue of credit. As stated above, the idea of creating merely a list of names and printing it as a book was my idea, and mine alone. Had it been another's idea, they would have done it. In art, which is granted a sometimes ambiguous sphere of culture, she/he who has the idea and executes it takes the credit. If a photographer makes a picture of a cathedral, those who designed and built the cathedral are not credited. Whether this is wrong or right I don't know and have no opinion. Ask Marcel Duchamp.

There are well-worn issues here about art and intellectual property. This is one those occasions when I can see both sides of the issue. On the one hand, the list of band names on metal archives is the result of a lot of people's (unrewarded) hard work. On the other hand, turning them into a book creates a work that transcends and recontextualises the work on the website. In any case, 30% of the names in the book apparently did not come from metal archives and these may well have been some of the most difficult to collect.

I think this is one of those pieces of art that either speaks to you or doesn't. As my rapturous review suggested, I absolutely love this book. It's a monument both to the awe-inspiring scale of metal and to its transcendent repetitiveness. It captures metal's essential paradox: that a musical form built on an ideology of individualism has despite itself created a monolithic mythic space that stands above the idiosyncracies of its practitioners.

As his deeply annoying website shows, Dan Nelson may have created the book as much out of a tiresome desire for tricksiness than anything else. He should definitely have put better credits in the book. But again, the book stands above Nelson and is a monument to the greatness of metal culture.

The greatest book ever published

Yesterday I received in the post a copy of All Known Metal Bands, a book that purports to list the name (and no other details) of every metal band. Ever. That's over 51,000 band names.

This is a self-consciously arty book. The gourgeous packaging is what we have come to expect from hipster publishers McSweeneys. The 'author' is an artist called Dan Nelson who, brilliantly, has the same name as the latest vocalist of Anthrax.

The short closing essay states:

For each name that is used by more than one group, that name is listed once for each distinct group. Should one presume that each of these bands had an average of four members, and multiply that by the quantity of bands, one might calculate that at least a quarter of a million humans have undertaken this quest - to unearth, embody, aim, and deliver power itself - and have brough that quest into the harsh light of the public world.

This estimate is almost certainly way off as so many bands share personnel with other bands. Ubiquitous figures like Stephen O'Malley and Hellhammer could fill a books of their own (well, small pamphlets) with the number of projects they've played in.

Nevertheless, 51,000 is a hell of a lot. I don't know what the criterion for listing is but I suspect it must be something like having released at least a demo and played a couple of gigs.

The book confirmed my suspicion that most of the good metal band names are already taken. A quick flick through reveals 9 Salems, 18 Nemeses, nearly an entire page of Eternal - , Funeral - and Necro - bands. Nelson has picked up some weirdly named, tantalising obscurities. Anyone heard of Bao Tap? Czernoknizhnik? Fuzzybearoth? Xaotiko Teloz?

I've been trying hard to find omissions, but Nelson's done his research. He even picked up Israeli bands like Arafel and Substance For God, although he misses some really obscure Israeli acts like Servant's Glory. So far the only surprising omission I have found is Anal Cunt side project Impaled Northern Moon Forest .

Train-spotter fun aside, this is a great book. There is a weird beauty to be found in purusing this extraordinary list. It is a monument to the obsessiveness of metal in mining a few themes beyond the point of their exhaustion. Indeed, it is precisely the glorious redundancy of most metal that is the source of its power (cf Bataille).