Kurt Cobain: The Legacy

I just saw the commercial for the portable version of Guitar Hero, where some kid is playing Guitar Hero on his DS while the background transforms into scenes out of the video for "Tonight, Tonight" (note that anything involving space backgrounds and music makes me think of the "Tonight, Tonight" video) and "On a Plain" plays in the background. Somehow, I feel like every time that ad comes on, Kurt Cobain goes into a high speed spin cycle in his grave. You know, because he hated the commercialism so much. I bet Courtney justifies it to herself, though. Preserving the legacy and all that.

Metal Mutability

My wife and I had a party at our apartment this past weeend, which isn't relevant to this blog except that it means lots of cleaning, which in turn means I spend time listening to music and pontificating while my hands get the manual labor done. On Saturday my wife was out for the day, so I had the place to myself while I cleaned up the kitchen. To keep me company, I loaded up the stereo with Black Sabbath's Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Nirvana's In Utero (in that order) and soon fell to thinking about Sabbath's influence on Nirvana and then - just to make things interesting - metal's mutability.

By mutability, I mean the music's incredible ability to successfully meld with almost any other style of Western music you throw at it, making metal like type O negative blood, the universal music donor. Think about it: how many different types of metal can you describe just by combining metal and some other type of music, like mixing chemicals in a vial? Here's a few I came up with off the top of my head:

• Thrash: metal and punk rock.
• Grunge: also metal and punk rock, but Sabbath-style 70s metal instead of 80s style NWOBHM metal.
• Hair Metal: take metal, glam and pop, mix together, shake vigorously. Serve with a cocaine chaser off the back of a stripper.
• Rap Metal: mix metal and rap. Spend years ripping off Rage Against the Machine. Be proud of it.
• Metalcore: metal and hard core. Metal and punk rock mixes tend to be very popular, because punk is almost as diverse as metal.
  
• Progressive Metal: metal and classical or jazz, depending on the artists. Not the same as jazz fusion.
• Industrial Metal: metal and the more hardcore aspects of electronica. Can't see the same thing happening with house music, though.
  

See, isn't this fun?

Head Banging: An Exploration

Are you familiar with the term "bangover"? I wasn't either, until Municipal Waste frontman Tony Foresta used it during an intro at Irving Plaza a few weeks ago. The Urban Dictionary has a nice definition, with the wonderful side-effect that depending on the audience, it sounds like I had rough sex last night instead of overindulging in the wonderful world of bang yer head.

In the midst of extreme physical activity, like head banging way too much during Pinebox's set up in Yonkers, NY last night, my mind ends up wandering a little bit. Is it because the conscious mind releases so much control to keep the body moving in time with whatever it's doing that the subconscious takes full control? Is it because my levels of ADD are so high that I need to multitask whatever I'm doing, even if it's not effective? Maybe I'm trying to stave off an embolism (aka "bleeding on the brain") by making sure I can still think straight? Who knows.

In any case, when I wasn't staggering around trying to regain/keep my balance, I got to thinking about head banging and why people do it. I'm not a sociologist by any stretch of the imagination, so I'll just put up my own thoughts on the matter and we'll have to be content without any science to back them up. I have two theories:

1. It looks cool, especially in photos that you see when you're young and impressionable. For me, that was in the mid-1990s, when I saw things like the cover of "Bleach" and the Black Album tour video, which features stills and video of people head banging. Then there was Wayne's World and the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sequence - four metalheads in a car completely rocking out to Queen.
   
   Speaking of that scene, for some reason, the fashion among the kids with the larger bar mitzvahs was to have not only DJ-ed after parties, but lip sync contests at those parties. Thanks to the time limits on the songs, my friends Jeff, Alan and I chose to enter one of those lip sync contests by playing "Bohemian Rhapsody" right from that "head banging" bridge to the end and won because nothing slays a crowd like a group of thirteen-year-olds doing their best whip imitations with their skulls.
   
   With a background like that, there was no way I wasn't growing my hair so I could whip it around whenever possible.
   
   
2. The music itself demands you do something ridiculous with your body. Like those old movies about rock and roll where the repressed parents would feel like they were possessed because the back beat in the music made them want to dance, a good metal beat makes you want to move something, hit something, do something in time to the music. Pinebox was the first set last night and I blew my neck's load watching them play. For the rest of the night, there was no head banging, but the rhythm to move was so intense that I had to do something - so I ended up bruising my hand a bit by pounding it against a pillar.
   

So, let's sum up. Desire to head bang: ingrained enjoyment stemming from exposure during an impressionable youth, combined with frequent exposure to extreme music whose rhythm demands extreme responses from the body. And there you have it.