Wayne Cristaudo, Senior Lecturer, Centre for European
Studies
University of Adelaide, South Australia
Abstract
The wrath and demonic despair of much of contemporary rock music
is indicative of a genuine religious need and search. In opposition
to the Platonist moral approach to music (exhibited recently by the
philosopher Roger Scruton’s attack upon rock music) that condemns
the monstrousness of much rock music, I take my direction from the
(all but forgotten) German thinker, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Rosenstock-Huessy
was a Christian thinker who saw that Nietzsche, by adopting the role
of the Anti-Christ, was expressing an important truth about the spiritual
poverty of moral idealism and the encroaching catastrophe that required
a much more drastic spiritual expression in order to deal with it.
I argue that much of contemporary rock is devoted to drawing attention
to the spiritual impoverishment of modern life; the harshness of its
music and message is a drastic means to wake us up spiritually.
[1] Michael Gambon, playing the part of Raymond in the television
show, Perfect Strangers, picks up the microphone at a very
large gathering of mostly anonymous family members. There is a place,
he says, for a karaoke of despair, a karaoke that is not all happy
sappy, but a karaoke of truth, a truth from hell. The audience observes
him with increasing unease and shock before he stumbles off. What
he says is something that has been known and expressed in the dark
and despairing zones of contemporary music for quite some-time. Both
lyrically and musically the cries and gnashings of damnation have
become ever more prevalent. Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch
Nails, Radiohead, Korn, Slipknot, as different as they are or, in
the case of those that have broken up, were musically from each other,
they have all contributed to making hell a part of mainstream musical
consciousness, even moving into radio-friendly zones which are mainly
reserved for sappy happy. In this zone, as Trent Reznor sings in “somewhat
damaged”:
lost my faith in everything/ lick around divine debris/ taste
the wealth of hate in me/ shedding skin succumb defeat/ this machine
is obsolete / made the choice to go away/ drink the fountain of
decay/ tear a hole exquisite red/ fuck the rest and stab it dead
/broken bruised forgotten sore/ too fucked up to care anymore/ poisoned
to my rotten core/ too fucked up to care anymore (Nine Inch Nails,
The Fragile, 1999).
Or to take one more from thousands of possible choices, Slipknot’s
“Surfacing:” “fuck it all! Fuck this world!/ fuck everything that
you stand for!/don’t belong/ don’t exist!/don’t give a shit!/don’t
ever judge me!” (Slipknot, Surfacing, 1999).
[2] Much of this music is as beautiful as it is tortured (OK Computer
and the ballads of Smashing Pumpkins in particular, obviously so,
but all the other bands mentioned have moments of sheer beauty); much
is a sonic aggressive attack reinforcing the rage and howling; much
is an outright embrace of evil. At times that embrace adopts the perspective
of the evildoer; the effect is shocking, but it highlights all too
well the evil of the world and the despair that animates it. At times
it is a soundtrack to evil deeds horrifically stark and providing
no moral comment in its musical evocations and lyrical descriptions:
it is merely an odyssey into evil (Slipknot’s “Iowa,” Slayer’s “Sex,
Murder, Art,” or from the much earlier Sex Pistols’ “Belsen was a
Gas”). At other times, as in the music of Slayer and a legion of metal
bands, it is an unequivocal embrace of the Satanic and apocalypse.
Sometimes, but by no means always, that defiance collapses into parody
and the whole thing becomes an uproarious ghoulish joke. There is
laughter in hell, along with the howls and tears of self-pity, the
screams of rage, the curses, the defiant posturing, and the endless
repetitions of violence which are as much self-inflicted as other
inflicted. There is also a crimson beauty ranging from the delicate
splinterings of a soul’s disintegration to the burning defiance of
its last great refusal and the bellowing hatred that through all its
discordances retains the shimmering reminder of ethereal choirs in
the harmonics that move across the poundings, crashings, roarings
and the metallic cacophony of falling walls and wails.
[3] Along with film and comic strips, though I venture even more
so, much contemporary rock music (crossing numerous genres)[2] is a vast amphitheatre of rage delivering
the performance of hell, exploring, as it does, its multifarious
chambers and soul-scapes. What are we to make of the huge success
of this performance? No doubt, it is shocking. It is meant to be shocking.
No doubt it destabilizes all moral certitudes. It is meant to do that.
On occasion it has been directly linked with murder. In the mid-’nineties
in Norway, a central figure of Black metal, the guitarist for Mayhem,
Euronymous, was murdered by two other “black metal” performers (Steinke
1996). More recently in Germany, a couple were tried for murder. They
had met through a Metal magazine and had sacrificed a friend of theirs
in a satanic ritual. Just a couple of instances of life imitating
art, a scandal the likes of which metal has periodically become embroiled
in, as bands who sing of the bliss of suicide and the relish of murder
are, not surprisingly for those on the outside, held responsible for
suicides and murders.
[4] Even when rock music was more about hip-swivelling than suicidal
tendencies and deeds, let alone the carving up and disposal of dead
bodies, it was seen as the devil’s music. Attacks upon the power of
music to corrupt the soul, don’t, of course, start with Christians
burning records of Elvis Presley. In an insightful piece written nearly
forty years ago, the jazz and rock critic Ralph J. Gleason, while
emphasizing the power of music to destabilize the social world, recalled
one of Plato’s many attacks on music from the Republic (Stephanus,
ed., para. 424);
Speaking of the importance of new styles of music, he (Plato)
said, “The new style quietly insinuates itself into manners and
customs and from there it issues a greater force . . . goes on to
attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost imprudence,
until it ends by overthrowing everything, both in public and in
private.” That seems to me to be a pretty good summation of the
answer to the British rock-singer Donovan’s question, “What goes
on? I really want to know” (Gleason 1969, 64-5).
[5] The moral attack upon music has not changed much since Plato,
certainly not as much as rock music has since Donovan. A relatively
recent reworking of Plato’s critique can be found in Roger Scruton’s
The Aesthetics of Music, where he attacks the music of monsters
(he singles out REM and Nirvana) thus:
Music soothes, cheers and pacifies; it threatens the power of the
monsters, who live by violence and lawlessness, Those lonely … beings
are astounded by music, which speaks of another order of being —
the order which ‘the footstep hears, as the dance begins.’ It is
this very order that is threatened by the monsters of popular culture.
But much of it is also a kind of negation of music, a dehumanizing
of the spirit of song (1997, 504).
For Scruton, as with Plato, music is not primarily about expressing
the hell within us, but creating harmony within ourselves so that
we become more integrated with each other, that is to say, more civilized.
Scruton sees contemporary popular music as responsible for creating
monsters and pushing society into anarchy. As with Plato, his argument
emphasizes the mimetic dimension of human being while attempting to
devise a stable and harmonious social and political order.
[6] To be sure, a host of bands would be flattered that they are
creating a more anarchic and terrifying social disorder. But while
the Platonic dogma that leads from discordant sound and song to discordant
society may have an intuitive appeal to it, it does not strike me
as being supported by any facts. The popular music before and during
the two world wars of the last century was hardly music of rage and
discordance; popular music in Nazi Germany was as light and breezy
as popular music in the rest of Europe.[3] And the concentration camp guard did not go home
and crank up Cradle of Filth or Human Piss Parade.
[7] Plato and Scruton, at best, have cause and effect the wrong way
round: that is, sensitivity to the discordances of the world and within
the self may well lead people to search for discordant modes of expression
(an insight at the basis of the mystery schools and philosophically
appropriated by Aristotle in his theory of the cathartic nature of
poetry). This hypothesis would, at least, fit with the fact that while
there may be a lot of order in the modern world, not a lot of people
feel harmony within it, as is evidenced by the huge number of people
suffering from various forms of depression, anxiety attacks, and stress
related diseases. Radiohead’s “Fitter, Happier,” which begins “fitter
happier/ more productive/ comfortable/ not drinking too much/ regular
exercise at the gym (3 days a week)/ getting on better with you associate
employee/ contemporaries/ at ease/ eating well (no more microwave
dinners and/ saturated fats)” and ends “fitter healthier and more
productive/ a pig/ in a cage/ on antibiotics” (Radiohead, OK Computer,
1997), beautifully captures the bi-polar character of the age: the
rule of comfort creates a spiritual desert. Or, as Smashing Pumpkins
put it in “there is no why”: “and in your sad machines/ you’ll forever
stay/ desperate and displeased-with who you are.” (Mellon Collie
and the Infinite Sadness, 1995.)
[8] The real problem, however, is not only that people don’t feel
harmony, it is that people don’t feel at all. It was precisely this
recognition that led to the creation of punk music. As Richard Hell
of Television put it: “People don’t have to try not to feel anything
anymore; they just can’t.” (Bangs 1987, 261); and Johnny Rotten put
it in just two words “Pretty Vacant.” Thus when Scruton makes the
claim about the social value of harmony, rhythm and melody that has
been lost on the youth (and not just the youth) of today, he fails
to really grasp the disease he wants to cure. That is, feeling monstrous
is the price being paid for being able to feel at all. His moral opprobrium
has blinded him to the inefficacy of his cure. He seems incapable
of conceiving that the kind of dancing he wants to transpose from
the ball-rooms of eighteenth century Vienna into today’s urban machines
easily take on a macabre and robotic quality suggesting a sense of
vacuity no less disturbing than the howlings and ragings of metal
bands where people are, at least, feeling their humanity. Scruton’s
argument is thoroughly idealist, which is to say, it ignores the particular
world and the problems at hand and substitutes a set of solutions
belonging to ideal human beings and an ideal (i.e., non-existent)
social environment.
[9] Contrast this way of thinking with the following suggestions
of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a Christian social philosopher who was
a major source of inspiration for the anti-Hitler circle operating
in Germany before and during the war known as the Kreisau Circle.
Rosenstock-Huessy was vehemently anti-Platonist, who, having fought
on the battlefield at Verdun, thought long and deeply about the meaning
of the experience of hell. Rosenstock-Huessy knew nothing about rock
music, but he knew a lot about the human heart, philosophy, and sociology.
Unlike Plato, he did not emphasize the need for reason to control
the passions, nor did he believe it desirable or possible to create
a harmonious society based upon rational principles. Rather than seeing
social harmony as based upon an eternal pattern requiring the suppression
and censure of destructive and disorderly forces, he saw that the
social balance we achieve is the result of their incorporation over
time. Thus in his study of the “total revolutions” of the last millennium,
Out of Revolution, he devoted his attention to the great social
benefits which were forged from the “hellfire” of the European revolutions
(Rosenstock-Huessy 1969, 23). Unless humanity had descended into the
depths of despair its greatest creations, observes Rosenstock, would
never have occurred. In contradiction to Plato, then, he, like Nietzsche
before him, emphasized that chaos and destruction have to be affirmed
as essential and desirable components of life. Whatever concordance
we have is the result of how we have actively responded to and acted
upon, not merely expurgated or repressed, our discordances. Such a
way of thinking, then, requires breaking with a fundamental tenet
of classical philosophy that like generated like, that a good man
generated good things, a well ordered city well ordered souls and
the like. On the contrary, says Rosenstock-Huessy: “Without desecration,
no consecration, without the fear of the unholy, no belief in Holiness”
(1942, 369).
[10] In his Lectures on Comparative Religion Rosenstock-Huessy
had discussed the role of music in dealing with our discordances saying,
“When you play music, you answer the god of discord, and noise, and
dissonance…and say, by our organ, we tone down the peacelessness,
the war-like world, and the strife of the world” (1992, 13: 223).
As is evident from his different examples of jazz (the most discordant
popular music around when he was writing which he saw as a response
to an expression of the speed of American life), square-dancing and
church music, the “toning down” occurs through the act of music making
more than in the specific chosen form of the music. More pertinent
for the point I wish to make about the role of rage rock in contemporary
society is Rosenstock-Huessy’s unusual reading of Nietzsche. The deeply
committed Christian Rosenstock-Huessy saw in the Anti-Christ, Friedrich
Nietzsche, a depth of love and spirituality of infinitely more value
than what he considered to be the arid moralizing and anemic faith
of most of Nietzsche’s Christian contemporaries. Moreover, unlike
some of the other Nietzsche-philes (mainly of the post-second world
war American and French variety), Rosenstock-Huessy does not shirk
the terrible side of Nietzsche that links up with National Socialism.
Nevertheless, Rosenstock-Huessy, who left Germany immediately on Hitler’s
coming to power, and whose Jewish mother committed suicide because
of National Socialism, saw that the truth of something couldn’t be
turned away from because of its explosive nature. For Rosenstock-Huessy,
the immortal contribution of Nietzsche lay in the fact that he looked
“into a new kind of hell which he opened and willingly entered, a
hell in which he was in many times of man at the same time. And in
opening this hell, he gave a truer picture of our nature” (1942, 369).
[11] Nietzsche had, of course, written of the god Dionysos, that
god who is torn to pieces and whose disciples tear themselves to pieces
in the mad and terrifying celebrations of existence and rebirth; but,
as Rosenstock perceptively sees it was not enough for Nietzsche to
write of this torn-to-pieces-hood, he had to do it; and in doing it,
he made of himself a sacrifice, in the knowing that “man” would be
sacrificed for the over-man, in anticipation of the wars which he
predicted would convulse the earth. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the fact
that Nietzsche took upon himself the name of the Anti-Christ was a
profound recognition of what the times most needed: a great act of
spirit, observes Rosenstock, was required to find a sign terrifying
enough to wake up the following generations to the meaning of the
great explosive concoctions which Nietzsche rightly saw as inevitable.
Men and women were shocked that a philosopher would be so shocking
as to call himself The Anti-Christ. After two world wars and
the death camps, it is perhaps easier to see why the taking on the
name of the Anti-Christ was appropriate for a soul who took upon itself
the role of interpreting the meaning of the times. Nietzsche, then,
for Rosenstock-Huessy had to kill the “G-O-D” of idealist philosophy
in order to be open to and to speak of the genuinely divine. The “G-O-D”
and “Christ” of most of Nietzsche’s contemporaries, said Rosenstock-Huessy,
were, in fact, vacant signs that deluded Europeans about the terrifying
world they were creating. Nietzsche had sensed that beneath the surface
of European civilization was a deep longing for meaning, that its
nihilism was a preparatory stage for the possibility of a more fruitful
futureand the future would entail massive sacrifice.
[12] What Rosenstock-Huessy saw in Nietzsche is, I think, true of
much of contemporary rock music. That is, it senses that beneath the
surface of prosperity, sterility and comfort there is something terrifying
happening, a hell that is there for those who can see and lies in
waiting for those who can’t. This music is both announcing the existence
of this hell and exploring it. Such an exploration requires a conscious
act of sacrifice by those who explore it. And frequently such exploration
is described in sacrificial terms. Thus Sid Wilson from Slipknot describes
what he is doing: “To me it’s like I’m killing myself” (Metal Hammer
1999, 3). Or better, Marilyn Manson, the self-proclaimed Antichrist
Superstar. His (semi-auto-) biography with Neil Strauss, The Long
Hard Road Out of Hell, has as its front-piece a passage from section
24 of the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals
(“‘Guilt’, ‘Bad Conscience’ and the Like”) which begins: “In a stronger
age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to
us, the redeeming man, of great love and contempt” and concludes:
“This anti-Christ and antinihilist; this victor over god and nothingness:
he must one day come.” And on the back cover of the video Dead
to the World (Manson 1998), he says: “Society has traditionally
always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well here I am.”
The conscious act of descent into hell is also accentuated by Manson
in his deployment of the schemata of Dante’s Inferno for the
chapter headings of The Long Hard Road Out of Hell.
[13] The legion of bands that enter into and express the hell states,
then, demonstrate a profound awareness of a deep and widespread spiritual
hunger that cannot be satisfied by moral pieties coming from churches
and school rooms. What is required is becoming society’s worst nightmare,
adopting the sounds and gestures and images of total defiance. But,
at least in those bands who are authentic about their music, the defiance
is intended as a blast of truth at a world they see to be drowning
in its own lies and delusions about who we are and what we want that
it expresses dismay at the isolated acts of rage (such as shootings
in schools), precisely because they are an unwelcome reminder that
something is deeply wrong.
[14] The karaoke of despair is at once a combination of play and
fury, of pantomime and terror. The fact that rage rock is part of
an enormous industry, that it too is “product” and that the musicians
are still just playing “songs” means that there is no completely escaping
the dimension of parody and inauthenticity that is part of this world
as such. And yet in the midst of such contradictions, there is a demand
to take truth seriously, in particular those truths that most people
don’t want to know, a point made by Shawn Grahan of Slipknot when
he says, “I believe I bring disgusting truth. I bring what most people
want to hide” (Metal Hammer, November 1999, 11). The point
is more graphically made and developed by Jonathon Davis of Korn in
an interview with Jaan Uhelszki in 1996 for the online music magazine
Addicted to Noise:
ATN: Was there anything you learned being a coroner that has helped
you now as the lead singer of Korn?
Davis: The only thing I learned is to appreciate life more. I cut
up a lot of my friends, and have seen everything that I could possible
imagine, every kind of heinous crime you could imagine.
ATN: I did read that you found a dildo inserted in a corpse .
. .
Davis: I’ve had even worse, I’ve had a ten month old baby who was
fucked by his dad. With its legs totally broken back, just totally
killed by fucking him. I’ve seen many things like that, so I’ve
learned you just have to appreciate life and I’ve learned how people
really are, and how this world is. But I don’t know, I didn’t really
incorporate it all in my lyrics.
Davis: We just try to bring out the hidden evils of innocence.
Innocence is very evil and that comes across in our music. (Uhelszki
1996)
[15] How does one persist in a world so full of such terrible truths?
This is at least one of the tasks that motivates bands like Korn.
First of all one must own up to this truth, to the monster in human
beings. It is this owning up to the monster in everybody, this playing
with the monster that seems so offensive, so monstrous to mainstream
moral thinking. Mainstream moral thinking takes the harmonious as
normal and the horrific as a departure from the normal. But those
who are in hell simply know the world is not that way. They see the
normal as a façade or mask that conceals the more brutal behaviours
and energies of the monstrous. For them, the monstrous is not a departure
from the normal, but a coeval, vital and creative presence. Not to
acknowledge and work with it is to be deluded. What is so hard for
the Platonist to grasp is that these bands of evil which wallow in
hate, sacrilege and the abyss are frequently fronted by articulate
spokesmen who not only, in spite of their lyrics, do not cheer when
young kids kill or suicide, but who see their task as opening up a
more truthful view of reality for their audience. Thus, for example,
while Marilyn Manson has managed to outrage the Bible belt of America
with his obscene and satanic defiance of the Bible, and has been held
responsible for the Columbine Massacre, his father says, beaming with
pride at his son’s achievement and character, that the central message
of his music is that “he wants parents to raise their children right,
and that’s probably what’s wrong with society today” (Strauss 1997).
And in the interview cited above Jonathon Davis responds to the question
“What are you going to do to make your son’s life better, and hopefully
untouched by the evils of childhood?” by saying: “Try to teach him
everything I know, early, and not repeat the mistakes my parents made.
Let him make his own mistakes but not overstep the boundaries” (Uhelszki
1996). It may seem perverse that the best preparation for youth’s
entrance into adulthood is a musical odyssey through the perversions
that make up hell. But this is exactly the path that contemporary
rage rock has taken.
[16] Closely related to this is the rage it directs at parents for
their failure to love their children. Billy Corgan, singer of the
former Smashing Pumpkins, puts it bluntly when he says of his family:
“I feel I was fucked over…Why the fuck did you have me if you weren’t
going to take care of me? Why the fuck did you raise me to be a fucking
squirrel? Why was I raised to lose? Why wasn’t I given the skills
necessary to lead a successful, happy, productive, loving life? Why
has it been impossible for me to maintain a relationship?”(Wise 1997).
These whys directed at his family are not isolated instances of child
abuse but the expression of damnable anger expressed by a significant
percentage of a generation at its parents.
[17] The energy of the music and the lyrical content of rage rock
simultaneously affirm the reality of one’s own rage, loss and despair
and the validity of feeling them. To be sure, for many of the audience,
the music might be seen as just a “rush,” a good night out, and its
meaning may be of no great existential consequence. Yet a substantial
number of the bands who express their rage at their parents’ selfishness
and the “fucked up world” around them take it far more seriously.
They realize that they are able to provide a line of direction for
those that need it. The music is a conductor for evil truth, a means
of drawing out the evil that one feels inside oneself initially into
a form that is sonically and lyrically visible and which then triggers
a range of visualizations from CD covers to stage sets to t-shirts,
etc. It all expresses the specific spirit conjured up by the band.
That spirit, in turn, is a force facilitating a kind of quasi-tribal
identification. Thus donning a t-shirt with a band name on it is often
as much a part of the life-way as actually listening, a way of informing
others of how one experiences and positions oneself within reality.
The bands from hell, then, are conductors of energy which externalize
and give shape to powers which otherwise threaten to engulf and drive
mad in large part due to the amorphous and depletive character of
the energy of despair and depression. Through its artistic transmutation
the feeling of evil, or the pain that is the sign of its presence,
has found a place to be, and another way to be. It is
no longer everywhere and all the time. Moreover, as an element of
a music and song its very nature is changed. One ceases to be in total
despair when one has sufficient energy to leave the despair and use
it as energy for creation. In much the same way as a dream or daydream
about killing someone enables the release of one’s desire to kill
without actually killing, music about wanting to kill everything provides
a safety valve leaving one with a vital creative experience rather
than a pile of dead bodies, even if the songs are about piles of dead
bodies. Of course it may not be enough, one can still be a killer
and enjoy the music from hell, turn it into part of a soundtrack for
the deed. But the soundtrack is not essential to a deed that has been
carried out from time immemorial without such sound tracks.
[18] In spite of the demonic imagery that overwhelmingly attaches
itself to this music it generates its own form of transcendence in
the moment of its expression, and thus reveals itself to have a genuine
spiritual, even religious quality. In opposition to Scruton who condemns
such music (he thinks REM are monsters!) as irreligious because of
what he sees as its endless repetitions and its obsession with “the
thin time-slice of the now” (Scruton, 506), I see it as tapping into
one of the most religious of all processesthe ecstatic transmutation
of suffering. Even the most Satanic bands that sing of the liberation
of death vindicate the opposite through their staying alive to sing
and play, through the ecstatic shape that they conjure up and participate
in. The music is the vital sign of the triumph of life over death.
Such an approach to spirit may well be called negative, for it does
surround itself with symbols of darkness, despair, destruction and
death which are inescapable components of life. These four Ds put
a mighty brake on the “progressivist” world-view shared by modern
conservatives and radicals alike who focus their attention upon material
accumulation, administrative systems, and social manipulation, and
have the idolatrous belief that political action can solve spiritual
problems. It does not matter what kind of society we live in, the
truth of darkness, despair, destruction and death must find expression.
Indeed, to deploy a more archaic, but, in my view, a way of speaking,
one more in tune with our experiences, we may say that these four
great powers have created a form of music in order to make themselves
visible in a world which rationalizes, compartmentalizes, and hides
their presence, as if they were mere contingencies of existence, mere
intruders who interrupt the mechanical repetitions and routines of
a peaceable life of plenty. These four Ds have entered through music
through the machines and rhythmic motions that are appropriate for
the age.
[19] One essential human experience that best finds expression in
religious form is the recognition of and participation in the continuity
between death and life. That is why the occupation of the zone of
their interface is so emotionally charged, so potent with religious
feeling, bringing together as it does the great forces of agony and
ecstasy, those two extreme feelings from which all genuine religion
(as opposed to the merely moral) stems. In this important respect,
there is no fundamental difference between Christian or pagan religions.
This religious or spiritual strain of experience is expressed in symbols
or motifs, visually, lyrically, or sonically, beginning from the pole
of suffering or of joy, from that of damnation or of salvation. That
some bands are self-consciously pagan and/or anti-Christian in their
symbolisms and lyrics, while others can still draw upon the Christian
stock should not blind us to the common experiences that form and
are mediated through different traditions. That so much of rage rock,
in particular, and heavy metal, generally, expresses and depicts itself
through symbols of the Satanic owes, as we have suggested above, no
small amount to the perceived sterility, phoniness and failure of
dominant Christian culture to be open to the ecstatic experience generated
by the music.[4] What Deena Weinstein rightly says of much heavy
metal is true of how the signs of evil often function in rage rock:
“that if society chooses to place the power of ecstatic experience
in the realm of evil, then I will call myself evil” (Weinstein, 262).
[20] The music of hell states, then, is absolutely misunderstood
if its negativity is dismissed as lacking in spirituality. The issue
is what the time and the age require for spirit to make itself manifest,
or rather, what spirits are required in a particular time and place.
And only the condition of living souls give us a clue to what that
is. This is why an approach to music which reproduces the Platonic
fallacy of the timeless nature of truth and that holds that music
should always be peaceful, harmonious, uplifting, etc., is so un-spiritual,
so irreligious, so dead, and hence so incapable of squeezing the life
out of death.
[21] What I have designated as a negative religiosity could more
accurately be called preparatory. Far from dehumanizing, it re-humanizes
the living dead by taking people through the process of what being
living dead means, and in that process, drops of life are squeezed
from death, ecstasy from agony, and beauty from ugliness.
[22] In many bands, there is a very clear conception of the spiritual
nature of the stages of the process involved. One of the most musically
and lyrically intelligent bands is the enormously popular Tool. Their
drummer has described their music thus: “Chaos is the undercurrent
of everything that happens in life. You can equate our music to childbirth.
It’s brutal and harsh, but there’s a beautiful thing occurring”
(Widerhorn 1996). Tool’s album of 2001, Lateralus, powerfully
captures the process leading from wrath to ecstasy and the spiritual
dimension of the process. The song “Ticks and Leeches” typically expresses
the anger that is so widespread:
Suck and suck. Suckin up all you can suckin up all you can suck.
Workin up under my patience like a little tick.
Fat little parasite. Suck me dry.
My blood is bruised and borrowed.
You thieving bastards.
beat my compassion black and blue.
Hope this is what you wanted.
Hope this is what you had in mind.
Cuz this is what you’re getting.
I hope you’re choking. I hope you choke on this.
The song “Grudge” speaks of the process of transmutation:
Saturn comes back around. Lifts you up like a child or Drags you
down like a stone To consume you till you choose to let this go.
Give away the stone. Let the waters kiss and
Transmutate this cold and fated anchor.
Give away the stone. Let the oceans take and
Transmutate these leaden grudges into gold.
Let go.
While, finally, the title track of the album directly addresses the
ecstatic and experience of the divinity of the self and the music
which summons us to this realization:
I embrace my desire to
feel the rhythm, to feel connected
enough to step aside and weep like a widow
to feel inspired, to fathom the power,
to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral
of our divinity and still be a human.
[23] In other words, Tool know exactly what they are doing and why
they are doing it. Like the alchemists who saw the transformation
of lead into gold as both a chemical and spiritual process, Tool are
engaging in an alchemical transformation of human energies born out
of pain and despair. To be sure, many who merely play with the forces
of death and darkness are opening themselves and others to powers
they cannot control, and may suffer the terrible consequences. But
we must ask ourselves the question: why this genre now and why are
so many young people attracted to the music of hell? A social theorist
schooled in Marxism or any of its tributaries would focus upon the
profits to be made from such music or the social or cultural identity
of its makers and listeners. But such a response largely misses the
point. There is no question that this kind of music sells, and that
it (like everything else) is easily exploited in the search for profits;
likewise certain musical styles find strongest support among some
sociological, gender, ethnic or racial groupings. But why this now?
Why doesn’t the equivalent of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” musically
and lyrically suffice for so many young (and not only young) people
today and why do so many need to hear songs of rage and hate? At the
risk of glibness, the short answer is that the world as it is now
(and for whatever reasons) does not provide sufficient spiritual nourishment.
Many of the bands that fill the air with their hatred do so because
they see that the hardness of their words and sounds is the only way
to touch a world full of increasingly hard hearted and empty headed
people: softer words and tones simply do not suffice for them anymore.
Some bands, as we have said, embrace Satanism, but even there, when
pressed, almost always preserve a clear line of demarcation between
the symbolic energistics of dreaming of serving the demonic and the
literal demonic acts of actually murdering and raping. While the outsider
may be terrified by the potential to blur such boundaries, the overwhelming
majority of fans who frequently read the mild mannered and good natured
banter of their heroes know exactly what is going: the construction
of “safe zones” of psychic release. And to repeat, there can be no
guarantees that such zones will always be safe. But as we have just
seen, in a band like Tool that release is itself viewed as a step
on the way to spiritual rebirth and the awakening of a consciousness
that looks into the spiritual depths of our existence.
Notes
[1] I would like to thank Professor
Hartmut Moeller, director of the Musikhochschule in Rostock, for giving
me the opportunity in a lecture and seminar series to discuss and
formulate the ideas in this paper, Greg Hainge for helpful comments
on the penultimate draft, and Michelle Phillipov and Lucille Bruyand
for helpful material.
[2] What I call rage rock
is spread across, and not limited to, metal, hard rock, punk, and
neo-classic.
[3] Peter Wicke points
out that in 1938, 60 percent of radio programmes in Nazi Germany were
devoted to dance and light music (1985, 154-5).
[4] I have seen little
if any evidence of much historical understanding of the roots and
historical formation of the Christian churches in rock music circles,
which is not surprising given we are looking at artists not scholars.
That the intellectual eclecticism of a Satanist like Anton La Vey
looks deep to Marilyn Manson only serves to show the absolute shallowness
of the style of Christianity he is reacting to. The adoption of pagan
and Satanic symbols for expressing states of death and rebirth in
rock is, in large part, a reaction to the slick and sleazy US evangelism
of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century with its tub-thumping
fire and brim-stone sermons, simplistic spiritual cure-alls, tacky
commercialism and opulence, bullying self-righteousness, and small
minded bigotry, with periodic sex and financial scandals thrown in
for good measure.
Works Cited
Bangs, Lester. 1987. Psychotic Reaction and Carburetor
Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage.
Gleason, Ralph. 1969. “Like a Rolling Stone.” The Age of Rock:
Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution. Ed. Jonathan Eisen.
New York: Random House.
Manson, Marilyn. 1998. Video. Dead to the World. Nothing/
Interscope.
Manson, Marilyn with Neil Strauss. 1998. The Long Hard Road Out
of Hell. London: Plexus.
Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen. 1992. Lectures on Comparative Religion-1954,
Jericho, VT: Argo.
______. 1969. Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man.
Norwich, VT: Argo.
______. 1942. Nietzscheeana, reel 7, item 369 of The Writings
of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy [microform]. Ann Arbor, MI: University
Microfilms, 1995-1996.
Scruton, Roger. 1997. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon.
“Slipknot 16 Page Special Pull Out.” 1999. Metal Hammer, November.
Strauss. Neil. 1997. “Marilyn Manson: Stage Fright.” Rolling Stone,
June.
Steinke, Darcey. 1996. “Satan’s Cheerleaders.” Spin Magazine,
February.
Uhelszki, Jan. 1996. “The Kreepy Side of Korn: Interview with Jonathan
Davies,” Addicted to Noise Magazine, February. <http://ndoz2.tripod.com/interviews/atn.html>
Wicke, Peter. 1985 “Sentimentality and High Pathos: Popular Music
in Fascist Germany” in Popular Music <http://www.theblackbook.net/acad/tagg/others/pw3reich.html>,
originally in Popular Music. Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Weinstein. Deena. 2000. Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture.
Cambridge, MA: Da Capo.
Wiederhorn. Jon. 1996. “TOOL: Get Spiritual and Scatological with
Aenima,” Rolling Stone, November.
Wise. Nick. 1997. “The Smashing Pumpkins: The Story of.” The Rolling
Stone/ Omnibus Press Reader. Netley, South Australia: Griffin.
