20120627

crucialmovement

I don't get why so many people (most of the crowd) go to rock or metal shows and just stand so still. Like drinking Pabst in a dive bar makes them too cool for this shit. If you wanted to just stare at something while loud music played in the background, you could have watched the band on Youtube. It's not a requirement to mosh or bang your head as fast and hard as possible, but still..

Metal is ecstatic music. It creates a sustained unusual emotional state and holds it for the length of a riff, a song, an album, a show. You let the music tell you how to move and what to feel.

I left my usual atheistic coffee and beer friends (alas, not many metalheads) last Thursday (Jun20) to hear Subrosa perform as part of Crucial Fest, a mostly-locals many-genre many-venue music showcase put together by Exigent records. I've forgotten how Subrosa first got my attention, around the time "No Help For the Mighty Ones" came out, but I'd been waiting for a chance to see them perform live. It's cool seeing a Salt Lake band get acclaim from metal reviewers across the world, even if they don't become a huge act.

Unfortunately Subrosa had at least three mics fail on them, but they let the violins and bass do most of the talking. Also performing were Reality, Salt Lakers whose set I just missed; Lord Dying, Portlanders with Salt Lake ties; and Witch Mountain, also Portlanders. It was a night of thunderous doomy music. I managed --in my usual social ineptness-- not to have any real talky-speech with the singer of Witch Mountain when I bought her CDs, but I really liked her bluesy rock singing style.

I think there's something to be said for coming from a subculture that happily takes symbols of darkness, fear, and evil and makes them into symbols of personal empowerment. It can prepare you to let go of other easy "good guy" and "bad guy" labels fed through the system. Of course not every metalhead becomes a free-questioning political independent, but if half your favorite bands have inverted pentagrams and bloody knives on their album covers, you're less likely to take society's presumed Moral Guardians seriously when they label an idea or a person "evil," and it might prepare you not to take them seriously when they label an idea or a person "foreign," "dangerous," "socialist," or "terrorist." At least I like to think music of rebellion helps one be more free-roving in the ideological landscape, better able to share the same ideas with different symbols and metaphors.








1 comment:

Sra said...

Interesting thought about making evil symbols mundane. I have noticed that the further you get away from a band's origin, the less evil and scary they sound. In the 90's, I always thought Rage Against the Machine was pretty heavy and dark and hard to listen to, but I found them rather quaint on the radio the other day. Of course, I'm not sure if I would experience the same effect from your actual heavy music. I don't know if time has the same effect there.

 
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