THRASH AND GLAM 04/24/2011

                I really enjoyed this week’s readings because it was speaking to something that I actually have some experience with. I grew up with a father who listened to thrash metal religiously, while my mother was totally into glam rock. I have seen the debates that go on between the two, so this was quite interesting to read about.

                Metallica is quite the interesting band because they were both speed players but highly accurate and highly talented.  I still find them fun to listen to, even if I think that their original guitar player was a narcissistic ass.

                The idea of thrash metal is highly appealing to me because it clearly over exaggerates the reality of pain and masculinity. It was an experimentation of something that hadn’t been seen before with “Fast and Slow tempos routinely mixed, and often gained power through contrast,” (Steve Waksman, 274). It is clear that thrash metal was highly revolved around those severely fast tempos that brought a sense of chaos and uncertainty to the music.

                Even more interesting to me, is the imagery that became associated with thrash metal, especially because I am a Christian. It is very interesting to see that the idea of satin and mocking religious values became the role of much of thrash metal. This was certainly something I never knew before, and has given me some new stuff to think about when listening to the lyrics of bands like Megadeath. 

Week Four Blog

The reading this week was very interesting because I never really considered that there was any overlay between punk and heavy metal. While I listen to punk music, I never really listened to heavy metal, thus I never really considered any relation between the two. Yet, after this past week’s readings, the two are almost the same, aren’t they? I don’t think that I would agree.

While there remains the obvious similarities between the two: the style of playing loud, rough, and almost crappy sounding, it seems that the topics that each genre speaks to are very different.  Heavy metal stands as something that is strongly masculine and tough in my mind, while this is not necessarily true for punk. It is easier for me to see the femininity of punk rock singers than in metal bands. Also, it seems that both genres are for the rebellion against main stream society, metal seems to be more infatuated with the concept of death and such.

Yet, in the brilliance of Motorhead, we certainly get to see the crossover of the two genres in quite the interesting way. In their own unique way, they called out to both the punks and the metal heads in their style and music. For this very reason, they were one of the greatest bands of the 70’s. 

Week Three: The Brilliance of Mr. Kim Fowley

                By far the most interesting topic from this week was the image of women in heavy metal and rock and roll.  It is a safe assumption that metal is generally a masculine type of music, with men being the most prevalent image representing it.  It is a genre that is generally hard and aggressive in nature, something that we don’t usually associate with women, but with young males. Thus, bands like the Runaways are extremely interesting to study because they take that image upon themselves, yet they are all young females.

            In the 70’s, we can certainly credit Mr. Kim Fowley as the first person to gift the world with the idea of women in rock and roll. Not only do we see that Waksman credits Fowley with this idea that “Girls who can bring hysteria, magic, beauty, and teen authority to the stage,” (Waksman 31), but in the film “The Runaways” we certainly see the same idea.  Whilst it is a story that is totally blown up and skewed by Hollywood, it is quite promising in developing the relationship between Fowley and the band, as well as developing the ideas and values that The Runaways possessed. For instance, it is clear that Fowley felt that putting teenage girls up on stage in lingerie, as is quite true with the young Cherie Curry, would be a big publicity stunt as well as adding “beauty” as an element to rock and roll. This idea blows my mind as to how it worked because when I think rock and roll, I don’t typically think beauty and sexiness as standing as an overwhelming criterion.  Yet, the band still remains as one of my favorites to listen to today, however it is safe to say that I like them for their sound, and not so much their looks.

            Fowley was certainly on to something with the idea of giving power to teenagers on stage at that time though, because the music genre is certainly for the young and not the old. The older generations are people whom accept their fate and their disenchanted society by following the flow and the rules of every day. The youth is far more likely to rebel and look for their own individualism than the older, thus Fowley knew exactly what he was doing in helping create an all teenage band in that sense. It was a brilliant idea in my opinion. 

Week Two: Beginning of "This Ain't The Summer of Love" by Waksman

                This week’s reading in “This Ain’t The Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk” was particularly interesting to me because it not only speaks to the metal scene, but the punk music scene as well. While I haven’t listened to much metal music in my time, I have gone through a few punk-loving phases when I was younger.  The novel introduces a topic that I had never really thought much on: “asserting a degree of interconnectedness between them that has often been acknowledged, especially by nonacademic observers, but rarely analyzed,” (Waksman, 7).

            At a surface level, it is easy to say that there is, in fact, conflict between metal and punk music genres, as there stands conflict between any sorts of music genre; there is always a fight to justify liking on type of music more than another. Yet, Waksman takes a look at the conflict between metal and punk by looking even deeper and analyzing what he names as the four distinct differences between the two: aesthetic value, popularity, masculinity/gender, and history (4-5). I must admit that I am, in fact, one of those people who never “analyzed” the two genres together or separately, so these differences between punk and metal struck me as rather interesting and surprising.  The most shocking between the two genres was the certainly the strong environment of hate the two types of music listeners had created for one another, claiming that their own favorite music was of far more talent and value than the other. I had never considered people hating one another based on the music that they listened to versus another before.

            The following chapters were a bit less interesting to me because it began the reading on bands that I am not an expert on nor were they ones that I had listened to before. This is where the videos for the class became helpful, because it gave me a perspective of what the punk or rock bands were like as they started in the seventies.  Each group was interesting to me in their own ways, but the one that stood out to me more than others was Alice Cooper’s video in which he sang “I love the dead,” over and over again. His general seventies rock get up was strange with his big, long hair and his dark eye make-up. Everything about the song was made to shock and awe the audience, and it was quite effective.  In this song, I certainly thought about Waksman’s reference to reviving the rock and roll scene.