Metal Jew

D.O. Dodd's 'Jew'

Disclosure: I was sent a promo copy of D.O. Dodd's new novel 'Jew'. I probably wouldn't have  read it otherwise, but I'm really glad that I was 'compelled' to do so.

The blurb gives a reasonable flavour of the book:

A MAN REGAINS consciousness to find himself naked in a mass grave, with no idea who he is. His thought is survival, but in a religious war survival depends on knowing which side you are on.

Donning another man’s military uniform, he drives off and enters a nearby town to discover that the occupying soldiers have been waiting for someone very much like him.

Suddenly, he finds himself in power.

His first act is to save a woman about to be murdered by soldiers. The woman, as it turns out, has a history with the man, and knows more of him than he knows of himself, or does she actually have the right man?

If that sounds mysterious, even Kafkaesque (a cliche, but quite an accurate one in this case), that's because the book is mysterious and Kafkaesque. It's also extremely disturbing, not just because of the explicit violence (some of  it sexual) that permeates the book, but also because of a strange, indefinable, unsettling feeling that leaves the reader (like the book's central character) adrift in a world where nothing is clear.

Jew's holocaust resonances are clear - mass graves, genocide, an occupying army - but as the book progresses the reader is increasingly wrong-footed as the actual specific historical and geographical location becomes less and less clear. At times the victims in the book appear to be Jews, but then occasional Arabic words imply a more contemporary - and for many Jews, much more unsettling - context. At the same time, many of the details seem to correspond with no 'real' war or genocide.

We are left then with a text that disturbs, that shakes the readers complacency. I put down the book (which is pretty short and I read in the course of an afternoon) knowing little more than when I started. I'm not sure that Jew is a satisfying book and it's certainly not an enjoyable one, but it's worth the attention of anyone who takes pleasure in enigmatic literature.

Review of The Spiritual Significance of Music

It's safe to say that The Spiritual Significance of Music is an unusual project. New Zealander Justin St Vincent has taken upon himself to solicit statements and interviews from hundreds of writers, musicians and religious leaders. He asks them all the same question: 'What do you believe is the spiritual significance of music'. The answers have been compiled online in a number of free editions and my own response is here. Now he has compiled a hard copy featuring a selection of the interviews which can be ordered here.

What makes the hard copy interesting is the diversity of the respondents. Many of them are metal musicians, including members of Enslaved, Naplam Death, Dragonforce and others. There are also Christian musicians and preachers, New Age artists and writers. It's a very strange mix but there lies the curiosity of the volume - it's fun to compare how self-proclaimed Satanists, funamentalist Christians and New Age  flakes see the spirituality of music. That's also the main problem with the book: most of those interviewed share a similar lack of imagination and an inability to articulate what they believe. It's quite clear that some of them have never really thought about the question before and have little of note to say. It's safe to say that the thoughts of metal veteran Paul Speckman (of Master) on the subject could have safely remain unrecorded. But even many of those who deal with the spiritual on a daily basis aren't that much better, rarely rising above the conventional hippyish wisdom that music is in some way spiritual. In fact, it's often the hardcore Christians (such as Mortification's Steve Rowe) who are the clearest and least flaky on the subject.

None of this is neccessarily a criticism of the volume though: I see the book as a fascinating case study of the impoverishment of both musical and spiritual vocabulary. Music is hard to deal with, hard to talk about without resorting to cliches. The same is true to spirituality which, when uncoupled from religious practice, tends to be so nebulous as to resists incisive talk. Put music and spirituality together and all too often you have a recipe for verbiage.  You can see the respondents in the volume struggling to find a vocabulary to talk about the ineffable.

So cudos to Justin St Vincent for attempting this project. If the spirtual and the musical are to attract clearer and more penetrating thinking, these inducements to talk are needed. For now though, I'll still be turning to the experts to aid my thinking on music and spirituality: critics, academics and intellectuals are still ahead of the pack...

The Big Shiny Prison by Ryan Bartek - free pdf book

Ryan Bartek forwarded to me a copy of his free pdf download book A Big Shiny Prison. It's well worth a read and cudos to Ryan for being brave enough to go down the free self-publishing route.

Bartek is a seasoned underground journalist and the book details his year long, ultra low budget US road trip, interviewing bands, having strange encounters and musing on America, subcultures and music. It has to be said it's pretty exhausting to read (perhaps more so as I read it on my iPhone screen) and its endless nervous energy can be draining. Still, there are some moments when his observations really hit the bullseye. For instance, towards the start of the book he surveys the various extreme music scenes and this is what he has to say on metalcore/tech metal:

The metalcore and tech crowd come from a bridging of newer styles towards the end of the 90’s. Metalcore is basically hardcore with a diverse spectrum of influences thrown in (thrash, death,and prog). All-out tech metal (or “math metal”) is the sound-freak, we-practice-eight-days-aweek, “so complicated your head explodes” style.

It’s newer, and thus hated by the “you’re a poseur” death, black, and thrash-heads. But
any musician -- be it a blues artist to a symphony conductor – appreciates the jaw-dropping complexity of the often jazz-based fusion rhythms. Tech is the most disciplined metal outside of death, and is truly a 21st, post-modern variation of it. Tech metal is traced back to early Dillinger Escape Plan, with newer bands like Between The Buried And Me & THE END upping it to the next level. The “Repulsion of Tech Metal,” consequently, is a generally unknown Seattle band named SWARMING HORDES who in 1995 released the first album of its proto-genre…

Since metalcore and tech have become mainstream with bands like Unearth, All That
Remains, and Job For A Cowboy, there is a huge influx of hipster metallers that wear tight pants and have girlie emo haircuts, lots of streaks -- this weird offspring of the YouTube generation the old guard don’t really understand but pretend to…

They’ve infiltrated to the point where all the old metalcore bands (all of whom maintained the DIY of punk) are abandoning their old styles. Having a sea of clone bands before them, this vastly confusing apparatus, it changes things…

It’s kind of a mess right now, honestly, and it seems everyone is jumping ship to play
oldschool thrash, doom, or crazed experimental styles. The trend will die, as they always do, and all the underrated, overlooked bands like The Nain Rouge, Psyopus & Signs of Collapse will go down in history, wholly accepted by the “Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame” & pimped through tourist shops alongside Ozzy toothbrushes and Jimi Hendrix coffee mugs…

Good stuff. You can download the book here.

My unwritten masterpiece

A few years ago, I wrote the first page of what was intended to be a lucrative blockbuster thriller and never got any further. I've decided to share it here for no particular reason. 

I’m aware that this first page is not evidence of a remarkable lost literary talent - quite the reverse. It's probably representative of the thousands of attempts to write a thriller that are scuppered by the lack of a plot. When I wrote the piece (in 1996) I had a great idea for a scene and an opening but no idea how to turn them into a novel. I thought the process of writing the first page would help – it didn’t. Enjoy:

On 19th March 1996 a man calling himself Nigel Lawrence asked for a room in the Green Guest House, Tsimshatsui, Hong Kong.  After a brief series of questions and answers, the bored owner, Rajind Shah took a weeks money in advance and gestured towards a room at the end of the corridor.    To Mr Shah, Nigel Lawrence appeared little different to the stream of travellers that constantly entered and left his small set of rooms.  A week’s money in advance was perhaps unusual but even this caused no more than a few seconds of flickering interest.  Rajind Shah did not see himself as an observer of people and had no interest in any of his guests.  But then, the Green Guest House bore little resemblance to the grander international crossroads clustered on Kowloon and across the water on Hong Kong Island.  It was situated in Chunking Mansions, a hellish warren of small guesthouses hostels on the upper floors and restaurants and electronic shops on the lower.  The Green Guest House consisted of one corridor with five window-less boxes on either side.  Each contained a bed, chair and had a tiny shower room attached.  Decked almost entirely in white tiles, the rooms were clean but lit with a harsh fluorescent strip that made them feel like interrogation cells.

This mattered little to the steady stream of western travellers like Nigel Lawrence.  In fact even having a room to oneself would be seen as a luxury by many backpackers and the steamy maze of Chunking Mansions offered a certain flavour of romance, intrigue and excitement to some.  But there was no romance in the place for Rajind Shah who wondered whether the steady living he made for him and his family justified a life without sun or space.  And there was no romance for Nigel Lawrence who was certainly not short of intrigue or excitement.

Yet Nigel appeared like any other traveller.  He was tall (but not too tall), tanned with unruly long hair, stubble and a ring through his nose.  He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt and battered blue jeans and carried a large backpack with a water bottle attached.  In his hands he carried a well-used copy of Lonely Planet's "South East Asia on a Shoestring" which he juggled with an equally tatty money belt.  Once inside the interrogation cell he did what travellers the world over do when they reach a new place - stretch, examine their surroundings, have a shower, then out again to explore a new territory.

There comes a point when an actor lives a part so comprehensively that he almost ceases to be acting and on that day in March Nigel had long ago reached that point.  He had spent two months in Thailand before he flew to Hong Kong that day.  He had done the usual traveller things in the usual traveller places.  He had trekked in Chaing Mai and Mae Sot, smoked acres on grass in Ko Tau and Krabi and met other twenty-somethings, students and assorted drop outs from all over the world.  On reaching the Green Guest House he was part of the subculture with a thousand checkable stories and sightings to prove it.  Yet that day in Chunking Mansions was also the day the acting stopped and the game begun.   

New publication

For all my many Russian-speaking fans, I have just had a chapter published in a Russian publication. Here's the full reference:

‘Sozdanie evreiskogo repa: parodija, pastish, sinkretizm’ ['Creating Jewish Rap: Parody, Pastiche and Syncretism’] in A. Smirnitskaya (ed) Muzyika Idishkaita [Music of Yiddishkite]. Vol. 4.Moscow: MAKS Press, 2008, pp 128-150.

I don't actually speak Russian - it's a translation of an article on Jewish rap that I haven't had time to find a publisher for in the English-speaking world

Possible title

With the help of my editor at Berg, I've come up with a provisional title for the book:

    'Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge.'

If anyone is reading this and has comments to make I'd be really grateful.