Heavy Metal
... and how I came to love and appreciate it. Thank you, Ozzy ...
A lot of people will never understand why heavy metal works.
What it is, even.
A lot of people don't get the sound, the raw emotion, the genius of it, or the subtlety.
There's an awful lot of really crappy metal out there. REALLY awful. But when it's played by a band that knows what it's doing, it's the modern version of jazz.
Where brilliant musicians create something new and innovative based on something known and often comfortable.
Many years ago, jazz was explained to me (a very daft teenager who didn't understand why it was amazing) through a TV-series called "the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles". I never watched more than a couple of episodes for various reasons, but one I did watch had the titular character learn how to play jazz in New Orleans.
He thought they were just random, cool notes thrown together and the musicians laugh him out of the building. But one of them takes a measure of pity on him and teaches him how to "jazz up" a simple piece ... in this case, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", and he ends up getting it.
It is a gross simplification and at best helps to understand the simplest basics of one kind of jazz, but it made me stop and think, and listen, and instead of wrinkling my nose and turning off the radio next time jazz was played ... and it still was on the radio back then ... I actually listened.
It may never be my favourite style of music, but I suddenly heard other things I had never noticed before. Above all, I heard energy, and fun and a love of life and music and CREATIVITY in it ...
Then, in the late 1980's, I visited a place called Vikane, in southern Norway with my family. It was an amazing place to go for summer holidays, with the most beautiful fjord a few hundred meters down a steep road (the only downside was that it did not, at that time, have a toilet installed and so you had to use the ... well ... the outhouse). It later did get a toilet.
One day while there, in 1988, while the European Championships in football were being played and the Dutch were running roughshod over every opponent they came across, and the whole of Europe was enthralled by the skills of Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten in particular, I sat in a car with a stereo with my friend, James. A young man whom I, at the time, idolized as the very pinnacle of "cool".
I mean, he was a diver. He was an aspiring artist. He was multilingual. He knew computer coding, he played this amazing game called Dungeons & Dragons, he knew the most awesome things ... to my then-13-year-old-self, quite frankly, things did not get a whole lot cooler than that.
So we were sitting in a baking hot car with a decent car-stereo in it, and he pulled out a casette-tape. You know the thing if you're old enough to have owned a walkman.
A real, genuine tape, and he had this wicked grin on his face, when he said "Du må høre dette. Dette er absolutt dritt. Dette er rytmisk bråk! Det værste du noengang kommer at høre!"
"You gotta hear this. This is absolute garbage. This is rhythmic noise. The worst thing you'll ever hear!"
I never, ever forgot that expression. "Rytmisk bråk". It's a wonderfully Norwegian expression in and of itself ... like, quintessentially Norwegian, in fact ... but when he turned on the stereo and out spilled my first ever experience with heavy metal, I was about ready to dig a hole in the car-seat to escape out the bottom of the vehicle.
He was right. It was rhythmic noise. It was dreadful. It was complete and utter nonsense. It made no sense. It was AWFUL!
ARRRGH!!
RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY
*insert picture of Monty Python's Knights of the Round Table, escaping from the castle walls manned by Frenchmen here*
Mercifully, James turned it off again pretty quickly, but the grin on his face had grown almost impossibly wide at this point, and I had, for the time being, COMPLETELY forgotten how to blink.
How could anyone treat musical instruments that way?!
We talked about music for some time after that. Quite a good conversation, too. I still remember significant bits of it.
But I was a curious kid. I never knew when to let something lie and just ... leave it there.
A year or so later, a slow, slow guitar riff played on my tape-recorder, while I had a tape in it, recording something else.
I did not know what it was, but it lasted thirty seven seconds. Then ... suddenly ... it picked up and became EPIC ... and it lasted until one minute and six seconds into the piece, and then it changed again into something very fast and confusing and I quickly stopped recording. But I had the riff.
I listened to it again and again and again.
Later, I realized it was the lead-in to Metallica's "Battery", from their iconic "Master of Puppets"-album from 1986.
This didn't make sense. Metallica was heavy metal and I did not like heavy metal, right? But why was this riff so good, then?
I had other, similar experiences over the years that followed. Slowly, slowly I began to understand that like it had been the case with jazz, metal was innovative, different, experimental, sometimes very harsh, and sometimes incredibly gentle. But most of all, over the years, I learned that it had a message, and that it was neither hateful or angry in almost all cases. It was ... grabbing life by the collar, shaking it hard and furiously, and insisting on squeezing as much out of it as you possibly could in a veritable explosion of sound.
I began understanding how some bands from the 1960's and 1970's had pioneered sound. Some were in no way heavy metal-aligned ... bands like Dr. Hook, which my father absolutely loved. It wasn't polished. It wasn't pure. It was great music but delivered through the voice of a one-eyed lead singer, Ray Sawyer, who genuinely sounded like he was one shot of whiskey and two cigarettes away from keeling over sideways and dying of acute system overload, right there on stage, but when he begs "Carry me, Carrie", it squeezes your heart and makes your bowels ache because it's honest and it's genuine and it's deep felt and its real.
Another example was a Danish band called "the Savage Rose" whose lead singer, Anisette, has a voice so unique that she was asked to sing Janis Joplin's portfolio in Central Park in New York some years ago, at a memorial concert ... because literally NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD had the voice to do so.
Bands like those tried something that was different. They never settled for "Oh, this is the sound that sells". They pushed the envelope.
There were a lot of other bands who did similar things, and which did NOT fit neatly into "pop"-pockets or "Funk"-classifications during those years.
And then ... arose the darkest of dragons, the most misunderstood of bands ...
From the ashes of Earth, like some decrepit phoenix, in 1969 the world witnessed the creation of Black Sabbath.
Music would never ... ever ... ever ... be the same again.
While ABBA popped their way through Waterloo and Dancing Queens, and honestly, they deserve all the praise in the world for their success, throughout the 1970's, and while Disco blemished the world for ten years along with rayon shirts with collars you could go hangliding on and trousers so flared an America's Cup-yacht captain complained he couldn't get enough cloth for his sails one year, and with a young ... a very, very young ... John Travolta in perhaps the most unfortunate white suit in human history discoed his way into the hearts of every girl in the western world and made himself the envy of practically every boy for much the same reason, Ozzy Osbourne and his band were making gold ...
And platinum.
In record time and record form.
Classics like "Iron Man" ... "Into the Void" and of course the seminal anti-war masterpiece "War Pigs" flowed out of their studios, and people were enthralled in greater and greater numbers all over the world.
I began understanding this part of the story too, as I looked into it, and even talked to a few metal-fans I knew.
Not that I immediately went over to "the dark side" (I should have, though ... we have cookies). It took years, and it happened one song at a time, listening to something and realizing "Whoa, this is ... really good. But I don't like that stuff over there. That's too rough for me. That's too hard!"
But I began to understand just how phenomenally good some of these musicians and vocalists were.
I came across AC/DC ... which isn't usually seen as a heavy metal band, but more a hard rock one ... and I was stunned by their sound and I loved it. I eeeeeeven listened to a few songs by Iron Maiden, and realized that "Run to the hills" and "Fear of the Dark" were incredible pieces, amongst others.
But nope.
Nononono. Couldn't admit I actually liked heavy metal.
Don't ask me why. I have no idea but I thought it would be bad if I admitted that I liked it.
It's complete nonsense, of course ... it's music. We all like different things. I mean, I legitimately find beauty so deep and profound in classical music, particularly from the baroque, that it can effortlessly bring me to tears. I grew up with the synth-pop of the 1980s and thought Annie Lennox was, quite probably, the most amazing female vocalist in the world (I'm still at least willing to entertain that idea, to this day). I had even found a genuine appreciation of some jazz, even though I never did get the "fusion"-stuff.
Look, I'm not a musical person. I'm really not. My mum always says that I'm one of two out of her three kids who will stand up every time music comes on the TV on the off-chance that it's the national anthem. Well, I wouldn't say it's quite that bad, but I really do not have a musical bone in my body. I have no talent for playing instruments, and my singing voice is listed in a little-known addendum to the Geneva Convention as a forbidden weapon of war, alongside bacteriological and chemical agents.
And I'm the FIRST person to admit to it, believe me.
But I love ... love ... love ... the sound of it.
Years passed with me being unwilling to just come clean and admit I was actually rather fond of metal. It was, for gods know what stupid reason, a true "guilty pleasure" for me. I HONESTLY wish I knew what my internal rationale for it was ... except I don't think there really -was- one.
Then I came across a Finnish band, one day. It was on the telly. They're called "Nightwish".
They play something called "Symphonic metal" ... their first lead singer was a classically trained opera soprano. The mixture of that kind of voice and faaaaairly mild metal sounds made me stop and stare in complete awe at the TV-screen and I just kicked my reservations to the curb.
I haven't really listened to anything they've made for close to twelve years now. I moved on to other bands. A now-defunct German band called Ensiferum, which had a truly unique vocalist caught my attention for a short while.
Then I ran into a genre I hadn't heard about before, called "folk metal". Most particularly a Swiss band called "Eluveitie" ... pronounced "Elveti", in reference to what the Romans called people from Switzerland.
They sing a portion of their songs in Swiss gallic. They used traditional instruments ... like a violin and a bleedin' hurdy gurdy. An ELECTRIC HURDY GURDY! Sorry, that's so unspeakable geeky, I had no chance to resist whatsoever. I loved that band for years and years. I still do, really. I was meant to go see them live while I lived in Dublin, only for me to fall down a flight of stairs and shatter a kneecap that very same day.
No concert for me.
A few years later, after I moved to Denmark again, they were in Copenhagen, and I was all set to go ... only for me to slip on an icy patch, fall down a flight of stairs in central Copenhagen, and smashing up my leg again.
I hate stairs. Did I mention that I really hate stairs?
I hate stairs!!!!
I even wrote to the band on their facebook page to grouch about my rotten luck with stairs and their concerts. They sent me the kindest message back. That salvaged things a bit, at least.
While I still lived in Dublin, I was introduced by a German colleague ... big, beardy, lovely bloke with a big, BIG personality ... to a band called Amon Amarth.
I went to a concert with him and a couple of other colleagues where they played.
My one and only live band experience. Two thousand people packed into a venue that was meant for 1400 ...
You'd need a crowbar to get more people in or out of that place, and me ... who panics and feels terrified of strangers ... have never felt so safe in my whole life. There was so much joy and so much happiness all around me. People were wonderful!
I couldn't hear anything for five days afterwards, sure ... and I felt like I had been gutpunched repeatedly from the power of the bass when I finally exited ... but holy smokes it was an eye-opening experience.
Nowadays, I wouldn't call myself a metal-head, per se. Because music is so many things and there are so many genres that I enjoy.
But metal ...?
I learned, through years and years of slowly trying to learn what it was saying, what it meant, what it intended for me to experience and -get out of it-, that it wasn't and that it isn't "rytmisk bråk".
Sorry James.
It's just not.
It's an omnibus of life in music form, distilled into something powerful and feral and sometimes frantic. There is something truly primal about it, and at the same time, there's a message and joy in it. Real, actual appreciation of this strange life we're given to live.
And the man who, perhaps more than any other single human being, created this genre, nurtured it and helped it grow from something obscure and unspeakable, to a world phenomenon ... a man who blazed every single trail and lived life so hard that no one could've expected him to live to the ripe age of 76 without being called a hopeless optimist ... Ozzy Osbourne ... has finally shed his mortal coil.
He's run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible ... or at the very least Lemmy Kilminster for the most awesome jam-session ever.
He's pushing up the daisies, he's ceased to be, he's kicked the bucket ...
He has, in fact, died.
The world will never see his likes again, and while I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who will say "and thank goodness for that", I choose to feel a considerable sadness for the passing of a true original, an oddball par excellence, an utterly irrepressible wanker and, in my humble opinion, a musical genius who gave rise to an entire new genre of sound.
I hope he'll rest easy.
Though I am imagining a duet between him and Lemmy, singing "1916" and "War Pigs", just for the hell of it.
Literally.
"Omnia mors poscit; lex est, non poena, perire."
Seneca the Younger