Year In National Pop: New Attitudes (Boston Phoenix, 12/22/08

Are we fated to pretend?

Music is a drug, as they say, distorting perception and shaping reality into æsthetically appropriate patterns and themes. In heady times like these, it can be a real trip to look back through the past year and see what our musical idols were telling us about ourselves all along — whether showing us our most craven inner id, or echoing the cynicism that grows in our hearts as we react to the madness around us. As MGMT said in one of the most beguilingly mind-bending pop moments on record this year, "We're fated to pretend."

The interface between reality and fantasy is almost always a war zone in contemporary rap, but this year it felt as if the fantasy were ready to snap. Rap's sonic frontier shifted radically, as the legal hazards of sampling meant that most rappers had to get by with synths and beatboxes. Whereas KANYE WEST's new digital sobfest 808s and Heartbreak faltered, other rappers were able to make spare production work. "It ain't frontin' if you got it" is a line uttered in two Top 10 rap tunes this year: LIL WAYNE's "A Milli" and T.I.'s "Whatever You Like," both straightforward odes to being rich and getting laid, in that order. T.I.'s song is particularly epic and seductive, if only because its brazen fantasy is so tawdry and false: when he offers to "gas up the jet tonight and you can go wherever you like," he seems to forget not only the then-$4-a-gallon gas tariff but also his own ankle-cuffed house arrest.

"Whatever You Like" was eventually dethroned from the #1 spot on the Billboard "Hot 100" by another T.I. smash, his duet with RIHANNA, "Live Your Life," a song equally obsessed with the twin goals of reaching for the stars and making that paper, with, at the beginning, T.I.'s somewhat contradictory spoken exhortation to "stop lookin' at what you ain't got and start bein' thankful for what you do got." T.I.'s success here hinges on his understanding that the goal of a pop song is to put the zeitgeist in a blender and hit "puree." "Live Your Life" does that with gusto — did I mention that it's dedicated to "all my soldiers over there in Iraq"? Of course, it doesn't really matter what you're singing or rapping about if you have Rihanna. Which may explain why "Live Your Life" was one of three #1 hits Rihanna had in a year where she didn't even put an album out. The 20-year-old Barbadian is the bellwether of a trend in superdivas where the ability to get a tell-tale sing-along hook on the radio is more crucial than the ability to display a multi-octave voice or manufacture lyrical introspect.

If there was one constant in 2008's pop sweepstakes, it was the rapid ascent of female solo artists willing to toe the line between pop diva and electroclash queen. The ubiquity in 2007 of Daft Punk and Justice seems to have emboldened a new generation of producers to harshen up the beats of dance pop and add some grit to tween pop. How else explain the jolting dance rock of, say, MILEY CYRUS's "Fly on the Wall" (on the otherwise turgid Breakout), or BRITNEY SPEARS's über-catchy "Womanizer"? The thing about diva pop is that as pop music (somehow) becomes more flagrantly sexual, the hand tips toward female artists who know how to channel that sexual energy into a dance vibe. Which means that even an ode to being cheated on (like "Womanizer") or a diatribe against an ex who couldn't commit (like BEYONCÉ's tribal detonator "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)") can be a banger if there's enough sass and 'tude thrown in.

This new attitude also opened the door to newcomers (with the right producers). I was particularly impressed with a number of production jobs by French electro-shocker SPACE COWBOY, who worked magic for ennui-laden British tartNADIA OH (with her offhandedly slut-tastic "My Egyptian Lover" off her Hot Like Wow album) and especially rising starLADY GAGA(whose album title The Fame could be prophetic if enough people hear glam-slam-thank-you-ma'am smashes-in-waiting like "Starstruck," "Just Dance," and "Poker Face"). Of course, the story of the year in terms of sassy chicks being provocative isKATY PERRY, who turned her back on her strict religious background just long enough to pen her ode to making out with another girl as long as her boyfriend doesn't mind, "I Kissed a Girl."

Meanwhile, the more accessible acts of the underground seemed intent on reanimating the corpse of the '80s. M83's lauded Saturdays = Youth whooshed listeners back to their respective proms with its John-Hughes-soundtrack-that-never-was. New Zealand oddball Pip Brown a/k/a LADYHAWKE put together a stunning pastiche of invented '80s-isms, creating anthemic dance pop that rocks hard and mopes harder — like Bananarama fronting Depeche Mode. And São Paulo players CSS continued to party all over the world on Donkey, with their increasingly sophisticated synth/guitar rock/pop carried aloft by lead singer Lovefoxxx's mix of innocent ineptitude and charming viciousness. Brooklyn'sGANG GANG DANCE departed from their formless morass of wordless space jams to merge sparkling washes, weightless euphoria, worldbeat-inflected gaiety, and sex-starved dance-floor whump on Saint Dymphna.

When pop music is at its giddiest, heavy metal can be depended on to bum everyone back down to earth, and the newMETALLICA record would do just that if it weren't so thrilling to hear these dudes defiantly back in the saddle again. Sounding like the by-product of a series of stern talkings-to, Death Magnetic sees Hetfield, Ulrich, and company return to the Black Forest guitar romanticism so painfully missing from the ugly-sounding records they've pumped out over the past two decades. If they're still coming at you with songs about suicide, war, depression, and anger, at least they do so within the confines of tightly arranged jams and unbelievably gratifying waves of rockitude. But whereas Metallica got real, the rest of the metal world continued to get more unreal.AMON AMARTH and the SWORD continued in the vein of 2007's top metallers, High on Fire and Mastodon, constructing elaborate mythologies to deepen their prog-metal labyrinths. The result is accomplished stoner thrash with song titles you can barely pronounce (e.g., the Sword's axis-shifting single from '08's Gods of the Earth, "Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzepherians").

And whereas metal has become more knotted and complex, so much of what used to be called "indie rock" has become contemplative. The patience required of metal fans in recent years to make it through tedious works by Sunn O))) and Earth has now beset the not-quite-rock world. Plodding gorgeousness permeated new works by indie luminariesBEACH HOUSE,PORTISHEAD, and the BUG, to name a few. Meanwhile, the runaway success this year of newcomers FLEET FOXES — with their winsomely anachronistic CSNY-meets-Appalachia — was a resounding victory for the twin indie virtues of preciousness and perceived authenticity. But I was most impressed with the back-to-nature lushness ofMERCURY REV's Snowflake Midnight, wherein the band used programmed beats and a myopic obsession with the natural world to shed their previously annoying Flaming Lips–isms and discover an X'd-out bliss. It's like catharsis on tape.

Katy Perry: "Excuse Me, But What Was Going Through Your Mind When You Bought That Ringtone?" (Boston Phoenix, 7/16/08

Last week I interviewed a woman named Katy Perry. In late June her single "I Kissed A Girl" was the #1 song in the country, I think: I mean, there are now so many different charts and whatnot, who knows what the real #1 is. Plus, I never saw the cassingle for the song anywhere, so I couldn't tell you what physical presence the song has. I do know that in prepping for my interview and doing some research, I realized that a lot of people on the internet think that she is satan incarnate, which I can almost understand (although she was super nice and I think her new record rules).

A review I found of her new album on allmusic.com ended with the following kiss-off: "She sinks to crass, craven depths that turn One of the Boys into a grotesque emblem of all the wretched excesses of this decade." Whoa! Personally, if I was managing an early-20's female pop singer, I would encourage her to do things to further represent the "wretched excesses of this decade", if only because doing so usually means that you've hit a cultural zeitgeist vein and that would, I assume, mean $$$$, right?

A day after interviewing Ms. Perry I was at a drive-in theater in Central New York's Leatherstocking Region, in line for popcorn behind a gaggle of 12-15 year old girls, when one of their cell phones rang: and guess what the ringtone was?



I suppose a grumpier dude than myself would probably at this point go on a tirade lamenting the inevitability of the ringtone as the ultimate format of musical product in the future-- but really, is there anything more tiresome than endless discussion of musical formats? What I find funnier is that I almost stepped in to say "Hey, I talked to that woman that sings your ringtone yesterday, imagine that!"-- but it occurred to me that besides the obvious letch factor that would be involved in such a move, I would imagine that the girls would probably be pretty non-plussed anyway: who cares? Does anyone really want to know who sings that song, or what she's like, or what her musical ambitions are, etc? Do people really care about that sort of thing any more? I'm generalizing here, but still.

In talking to Ms. Perry, I asked her about her cover of The Outfield's "Your Love" (which appears as "Use Your Love" on her UR So Gay EP which preceded the actual album). My asking about this song was kind of a trap, in that I had seen a few interviews where she discussed why she covered the song: sure enough, I got a pretty canned answer that was almost word-for-word the same as this one here:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dmzmspt4_CM

I like the part where her label told her that she had to do a cover, and I really like that she is blunt and honest enough to just tell us that her label told her that she had to do a cover. *And* that she just wanted to do a song with some kind of mass appeal. Her cover of "Your Love" is pretty awesome, she definitely makes it her own, and I can see why she left it off the album: since she considers herself a songwriter first, putting this song on the album proper would pretty much torpedo the record, since its awesomeness smokes the rest of the rekkid.



I'm sure an essay could be written about how her 80's recidivism here is in line with that decade's echoing of the "wretched excesses of this decade", but a decade ain't nothin' but a number, right.

Achieving "Satori" (At 192 kbps): Flower Travellin' Band and the slow overturning of the classic rock lexicon (Boston Phoenix, 7/09/08)

Is it just me, or has the classic rock color guard been going into over-drive with the Top 100All-time 500 Greatest Guitar Songs Riffs Lists of Awesome Bob Dylan Awesomeness moves lately? Don't get me wrong, I loved I'm Not There as much as the next guy who came of cultural age in the post-1984 classic-rock-is-everything rockist landscape,but I mean, come on. I can't be the only one who senses a certain desperation at work here: The Man can roll out all the Scorcese-directed Stones/Dylan bullshit they want in order to mythify the 60's, but good luck getting people to continue buying the re-re-re-re-remastered catalog of these old vets, esp. in the internet age. And *especially* when Web 2.0 means that blog after blog after blog rolls out, pulling the blindfold off the classic-rock-addled newb.

I mean, seriously: do you have any idea how much awesome shit came out in the 60's and 70's alone? And on major labels? And in, say, Japan? Somehow while we were forced to watch the 40 bazillionth media genuflection towards The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin (all awesome, don't get me wrong), due was never given to a whole world of insanely incredible music that was, say, made on major labels during the 60's and 70's but has never made it onto classic rock's15-song-a-day playlist. Or to put it another way: why is it that I've never heard Dark of Sir Lord Baltimore on ZLX, but I heard *this* 10 times a day?

Aaanyway, the point here is that if you go to google, type in a genre of music you are interested in, and follow it with "blog" and "download", or something like that, and surrender a few hours of your life, you will soon realize a) that there are more incredible albums made in decades past than you ever had any clue, and that b) you can very easily *shhh* listen to them for free, if you want to and you are open-minded enough. For myself, that meant not only finding out a shitload about so-called "world music" (which prior to the web I only knew as "Peter Gabriel music"), but also continually mining for 60's and 70's prog/psych/proto-stoner records.

And what I found was that, in a perfect world, my childhood obsession with Led Zeppelin should have led me to unearthing Flower Travellin' Band's Satori, or Elias Hulk's Unchained, or Buffalo's Volcanic Rock. I dunno: it seemed in the 80's and early 90's that, Velvet Undergound aside (for some reason they were the one "obscure" act that one was allowed to know about), a typical music geek was supposed to burrow downward into the Dylan discography instead of sideways to find more and more awesomeness. And that inevitably led to side projects of famous classic rock bands (see: Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, that sort of shit), or bands that were composed of associates of famous classic rock artists (see: you know, Gram Parsons, that sort of thing). Again, all well and good, except that it would have been nice to know that if I liked Black Sabbath, I might have liked Lucifer's Friend and Necromandus.

Well, luckily for the budding music dorks of tomorrow's today, none of this is true anymore. So my misspent youth caring about the Traveling Wilburys won't be repeated by today's more intelligent children, who can so easily get into the real deal stuff. Why wasn't there someone there when I was younger to tell me "Look, I know that 'The Loco-motion' gets old really quickly, but trust us when we tell you that 'Sin's A Good Man's Brother' from Closer To Home proves that Grand Fund Railroad were one of the most righteous rock bands of all time"?

Anyway, to put this in terms that fit with the Rolling Stone hegemony, here's what I would consider the Top Eleven Albums Of Righteous 70's Rock I Discovered Within The Last Couple Of Years On The Internet That Proved To Me That I Knew/Know Absolutely Nothing About Music:

1. Flower Travellin' Band: Satori (1971)

I've said about all I have to say about this album here, but seriously: maybe the greatest rock album of all time.

2. Buffalo: Volcanic Rock (1973)

In college I had a cd promo single by the Screaming Trees that contained a hidden track (typical 90's alterna-CD-move in retrospect) that a 12-minute long jam that sounded like it was probably called "Freedom". What I didn't know until recently was that it was a cover by 70's Australian rock gods Buffalo. What I further didn't know was that the album that it comes from rules hard front to back, and that instead of wasting my youth listening to, I dunno, whatever CSN album "Southern Cross" is on, you know, the one with the incongruous space aliens on the cover, I should have been rocking out hard to this. Also, "I'm a Skirt Lifter, Not a Shirt Raiser" from their next album, 1974's Only Want You For Your Body, is as awesome a song as it is a song title.

3. X: Aspirations (1978)

The rest of the stuff on this list is somewhat, how shall I say this, "hippie music". Not this record. And no, this isn't the band fronted by Exene Cervenka featuring Howdy Doody on guitar; this is a band from Australia, and they released this masterpiece whilst that other (arguably inferior) X was getting all the headlines in the Northern Hemisphere. Two things that rule here: 1) the first ten seconds of the first song, "Suck Suck", wherein you have a rhythm section that makes the Jesus Lizard sound like slackers led by a guitarist who makes Andy Gill sound like a well-mannered session dude, and 2) penultimate tune "Waiting", a dirge time-bomb with a mid-tune scream that, IMHO, beats "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" for best rock scream ever. Seriously, where was this album all my life. Proof that punk hegemony is just as crusty and lame as classic rock hegemony: how many times do we need to hear a rundown of how great the Ramones and Blondie were, while records like this and The Wipers' Youth Of America are left out of print and unloved?

4. Groundhogs: Thank Christ For The Bomb (1970)

One of the most truly anarchic rock albums I've ever heard: although rooted in some kind of blues/folk idiom, when this thing runs off the rails it makes "out" bands like Hawkwind sound tame by comparison. The title track is one of the most frizzling anti-war anthems ever.

5. Left End: Spoiled Rotten (1974)

Mid-70's Cleveland yobs who awkwardly straddle a line between hard rock theatricality and what-would-become-punk ferocity. If you like this you'd probably like Sir Lord Baltimore, and that sort of thing. They are absolutely ridiculous but so nasty and awesome. Album opener "Bad Talking Lady" is just retarded, in the best possible way.

6. Cargo: Cargo (1972)

This record is all instrumental, sort of prog-meets-jazz-y, and made by Dutch people. Oof, sounds awesome, right? But it is! Seriously, this is an amazingly smoking album, just some incredible guitar workouts that never veer into cheese. It's closer to Curtis Mayfield than it is to, say, Weather Report, if that makes any sense.

7. Elias Hulk: Unchained (1970)

So many of these bands/albums I find myself describing as "retarded", is that a musical turn-off? I dunno, I don't find any of this stuff any more lunkheaded than "The Lemon Song", you know? Right? Anyway, this record is fucking retarded, in the best way. Drum solos. Riffs on top of riffs. Ugly British dudes back then must have felt like they were on top of the world or something. This sounds like if the dancer from Happy Mondays went back in time and cloned himself and formed a metal band in 1970, or something like that.

9. Dark: Around The Edges (1972)


Okay, I'm fudging a little here, since this one I didn't discover through a blog recently, but through a friend that found this on cd years ago. It blew my mind then, because it was so incredibly great, and so weird, with such incredible guitar work, and I had never ever ever heard of it. And all I could think was "There must be ten hundred zillion records out there like this, but they just aren't on cd or anything". And I was right. But seriously, "Maypole" on this is the fucking jam. Who names their band "Dark"? So fucking genius.

9. Luv Machine: Luv Machine (1971)

Imagine if a band today could play something even a zillionth as insane as "Witches Wand", from this album? The rest of this record has its dated moments, but holy shit when this band hits it. The guitar playing is so weird and rumbling and inept-yet-slaughtering.

10. The Nazgûl: The Nazgûl (1976)

In the days of my youth I thought that Robert Plant knew how to make an effective LOTR allusion; of course, it hadn't occured to me then that 15-minute doom/gloom/dread ambient epics by a band called The Nazgûl was about a zillion times scarier and more awesomer. Listen to this record on headphones in the dark, if you dare...

11. Elektriktus: Electronic Mind Waves (1976)

One spends so much of one's 20's looking for music as mind-frying as possible (well, "one" does if "one" is "me")-- if only "one" had been able to find this record earlier on. Track 3, "Power Hallucination", is pretty much the pinnacle of music-as-nightmarish-entrances-to-hell. No drugs necessary. The mystery of this band is somewhat diminished when you find out it's just some Italian guy from the 70's, I had an image of ten or twenty dudes in cloaks recording this in a chapel whilt wearing wire-rim glasses and slowly stroking their fu manchu beards. Oh wait that's Tangerine Dream except they are only three dudes.

P.S.:

I intended this piece as a post-script of my sidebar on this Boris article, where I listed some indispensible Japanese rock albums of the past 40 years or so. I had to leave a lot of awesomeness off, of course--especially from the 70's, where there is a literally limitless batch of awesome records: the most painful cuts I had to make were definitely:

1. Flied Egg: Dr. Siegel's Fried Egg Shooting Machine (1972)

2. High Rise: Live (1994)

3. JA Caesar: Kokkyou Jyunreika (1973)



4. Blues Creation: Demon & Eleven Children


Also, you should definitely check out Julian Cope's Japrocksampler site, where I cribbed so much science from.

The Concept Band: A Boston Tradition (Boston Phoenix, 7/02/08)

Ah, it's summer, the time when school is out and Boston's rocker-aged population puts down their books and starts dreaming up hypothetical bands with crazy gimmicks that will take Boston (or at least PA's Lounge) by storm. Having trouble coming up with a High Concept project that will, maybe, perhaps, join the vaunted ranks of The Bentmen, The Upper Crust, Kaiju Big Battel, and a million other Boston Idearock pioneers? Here's a few to get started:

EASTER ISLAND
- band members all wear 3-foot styrofoam Easter Island heads on their heads, and ever song is a heavy metal testament to the power of Easter Island
- hand out those hawaiian flower necklace thingys
- acquire opening slot on Slipknot tour

MNML
- 10-member band all play songs that consist of single notes repeated forever with no build or anything
- all posters, album covers, websites, etc are all black with any text in courier font as small as possible

BOOK CLUB
- every song is an Iron Maiden-esque Cliff Notes adaptation of a book into power metal
- new song every week, play song live, discuss themes afterwards in musical rounds
- first song: "A Separate Peace"
- first gig: Newton Mobile Book Fair

THEME PARK LAND
- put together 4 or 5 bands, and instead of them playing, say, the Mid East Up one after another like a bunch of trad rock dudes, they all set up in different corners of the club, with sound partitions, and play at once
- each band's repetoire is themed around, say, ADVENTURE, or PIRATING, or FOREIGN LANDS. admission to the show gets you a map
- oh, audience has to wait in long lines
- "You must be x inches tall to enter"

TRDNGSPCZ
- skinny dudez press play on their laptops and then in fast-motion remodel the stages of boston's most famous local bar band dives
- first gig: TT's

THE BOSTON OIRISHES
- band comprised of paper-mache replicas of america's favorite irish stereotypes, fronted by the lucky charms guy
- at mid-set audience gets to spray band and everyone else with beer**
- set-closing singalong to the song they do in the middle of "Titanic", you know the scene

**not real beer

On second thought, don't steal my ideas, kid!

"Can't Be Bought, Can't Be Sought": Maiden, Priest, Sabbath, and Walt Disney: Metal In Middle Age (Boston Phoenix, 2/27/08)

Watching Iron Maiden last week, I was struck by something that might seem like an odd thought: “Wow, people seem to *really* love Iron Maiden!” This might seem like kind of a duh, but when you consider how thoroughly this audience knew every word and every lick of these songs, and when you consider that Iron Maiden shirt-wearing had saturated a good 80% of the audience market, you begin to get a grip on the sheer adulation this band gets from its audience.



A lot was made of how no one liked their last tour, where they played their new album in its entirety. Although there was groaning from metal hipsters and ironists, though, at the show last year from my seats all I could sense was that everyone else around me had really done their homework: everyone there seemed to know every word and air-guitar riff from the new album. As an aside, at an Iron Maiden show a few years ago, I witnessed a sight that I will definitely take to my grave: in front of me for most of the show were two teenage boys air-guitaring along to every moment; and in the middle of one song, I swear I witnessed one of the boys correct the other one’s air-guitaring, as in “No, it doesn’t go like this, it goes like this.” Genius.

Anyway, my theory on Maiden is that they took the molten confusion of 60’s and 70’s rock culture and made a Disneyland attraction/ride out of it, with a degree of opera-derived camp that wasn’t far off from the then-ongoing Ice Capades craze and presaged the 90’s and 00’s Broadway musical trend. They also aren’t far off from the intents of the original Disneyland: pillage folklore and myth and create a technically masterful piece out of each one. The same way that a kid in the 70’s probably knew of Snow White and Pinocchio through the Disney animated films, a metal fan in the 80’s probably was more aware of “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”, “The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner”, and Winston Churchill’s infamous “We shall go on to the end” speech from Iron Maiden’s records than from their sources.

Maiden of course come from a pre-Internet world where knowledge of arcane tales was cool, and it was ultimately the same world where Dungeons & Dragons could flourish unironically. It's hard to remember a time where Area 51 and Roswell was not common knowledge, and instead of wikipedia'ing "Alexander The Great" you might have to go to a library and look something up in an encyclopedia, which is pretty much what it sounds like they did when writing said tune.



Metal and indeed rock in general has always plundered history and culture for source material, but in some ways the brazen way in which Maiden appropriated/pillaged was just in line with the burgeoning culture of “metal” from its origins on. We all know about Zep’s swipes from Lord of the Rings (not to mention Rush’s subsequent swipes from the same) and the way that Sabbath’s very name is from the 1963 Boris Karloff/Mario Bava horror flick (imagine how pretentious metal would have become if the Sabs had named themselves after the film’s original Italian title, I tre volti della paura) – but it’s arguable that neither of these bands had their sights set on the cohesive branding that a band like Maiden would later put together. Although the Sabs did pull the hat trick of same-song-name/band-name/album-name on their debut (which Maiden would of course pull themselves), Satanism and black masses was surprisingly not necessarily an ongoing lyrical preoccupation for the band, and in the end they are essential celebrated for being a great rock/metal band.



If the genesis theory of metal begins with the holy trinity of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and (always in third) Deep Purple, then it’s pretty understood that the second coming involves the Beatles/Stones dialectic of Maiden and Priest. And while Judas Priest were arguably campier, more flamboyant, and more aggressively “metal”, Iron Maiden have always stood for ideals that will forever define what metal is for generations of kids: large themes, grand scales, and straight-up fantasy.

You see, the rock crit line has always been that metal is part of a long line of androgynous sashayers drawing from such disparate sources as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Mick Jagger, etc: and indeed, you could pick a few points on the graph and show a straight line from, say, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Freddie Mercury to Ian Anderson’s cod-piece to Rob Halford to pretty much any emo-metaller nowadays—however, this emphasis on androgyny only works if you think that metallers are all about creating confusion and exploring society’s grey areas and dark themes, which works fine until you attempt to fit Iron Maiden in the equation, and then it all falls to shit. Why? Because Maiden are the wholesome and unconfused literalists in a sea of metal fatigue and ephemeral metaphor-peddlers.

Black Sabbath’s most enduring hit is a song called “Paranoid”. It was famously written quickly, lyrics and music, and as such it doesn’t entirely make a whole lot of sense. The word “paranoid” is never used in the song, and indeed it could have probably been called any number of other names and worked just as well. It isn’t a meditation on the concept of paranoia or anything, it’s a confused and emotional tune of heartbreak and emotional numbness; it’s lead guitar break is so fuzzed-out and jarring that it has always sounded, to me, like when you are trying to talk in a dream and can’t quite make the words out. Ultimately, the underlying theme of the majority of Black Sabbath tunes is “frustration”.



This is no longer true by the time you get to Maiden and Priest. Priest worked hard at being self-consciously “metal”, with lyrics and imagery that attempt to unite its teen fanbase in a leather-clad army of teen rebels. Priest’s mascot is a creature called The Metallion: never mentioned in song but adorning the cover of “Defenders of the Faith” as an art deco demon, he is part of the overall attempt by Priest to create metal myths with intimidating creatures meant to represent the power of their teen following. Songs like “United” especially lay bare the band’s naked thirst for fomenting teen rebellion.



Priest’s main weapon of coercion is sexual predation: if you didn’t know Halford was gay during Priest’s heyday, you would at least have known, by a cursory perusal of their tuneage, that the guy was as sexually aggressive as Freddie Mercury before him. It’s just a fine line between the aggressive camp of Queen’s “Tie Your Mother Down” and Priest’s PMRC-targeted tune “Eat Me Alive”. “I’m going to force you at gunpoint!”



It’s clear that Halford, closeted at the time, was trying to test the bounds of what he could get away with without giving the game away, and his hypersexuality in the band lent them their individuality and force. The opposite is true of Maiden: their tunes are completely devoid of any sexual content at all (unless you count a song about Jack The Ripper as sexual). Instead, Iron Maiden systematically work through coherent themes, and attempt to turn those themes into exciting showpieces. This approach worked to limited means with first singer Paul Di’Anno on their first two albums; although Di’Anno had a powerful presence that worked within the milieu of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that Maiden ostensibly came out of, his limited range meant that he could never take the songs to the stratospheric heights of Maiden’s 70’s heroes, bands with banshee shriekers like Zep, Deep Purple, UFO, Uriah Heep, etc.



(As an aside, I’d like to offer a quick defense of the rock band Uriah Heep. Sometimes people don’t realize that in order for the rock behemoths of today to exist, many others had to fall by the wayside to make the current ascendancy possible. This is especially true for a band like Heep, whose supernatural lyrical preoccupations, impossibly tight arrangements, blazing fretwork, extended themes, and glass-shattering approach to vocal histrionics not only laid a straight-up blueprint for Iron Maiden, but for metal itself. Laugh all you want, but the Heep delivered.)



Anyway, once Maiden had Dickinson, they finally had everything in place to take "satanic" metal mainstream: compare “Number of the Beast”, from Dickinson’s first LP with the band, to, say, the self-titled Sabbath tune, and you can see Maiden’s genius: whilst Sab’s tune is a dirgey testament to self-flagellation and eternal damnation, with a lone tri-note theme encapsulating seven centuries of banned music into a singular ode to one man’s shame and torment, Maiden’s tune is pure voyeurism: the protagonist witnesses the sights and sounds of a black mass. “6! 6! 6! / The number of the beast! / Sacrifice is going on tonight!”

In song after song, Maiden created self-contained worlds that act as adaptations of themes. "Flight of Icarus", "The Prisoner" (after the 60's British TV show), "Transylvania", "Quest For Fire", "To Tame A Land" (a ditty about Frank Herbert's Dune), "The Phantom Of The Opera", etc are straight-forward stories being told, with no real metaphor or hidden meaning at all. "Number Of The Beast" isn't an investigation of evil, or a metaphor for the modern day's banality of cruelty, or any of those things: it is a straightforward account of a black mass.

This is unusual for the world of the pop song, where everything is buried within symbolism and hidden meanings; but it is not unusual for the world of musicals and opera, which is really aesthetically where Maiden are coming from. From where I was sitting last week, Maiden's pageantry of themes and settings is like nothing so much as when one enters the hallowed halls of Disneyland, and sees this:

Rock, and metal in particular, is about harnessing the power of rock, and presenting that power in as big a way as possible. In a post-Disney world, where spectacle, imagery, symbolism stripped of context, and the history of the world and its mythology can be reshaped and represented at will, is there really anyone better at harnessing this power than Iron Maiden? It doesn't seem like it. Bands before Maiden attempted to harness this kind of power of imagery, but they all tended to get lost amidst their own personalities and emotions: whether it was Jim Morrission attempting confusing crowd manipulation, or Led Zeppelin sending conflicting messages of power, authority and fey sensuality, rock titans pre-Maiden tended to miss the untapped market of straight-forward arena-filling adaptation-rock. Think of "Run To The Hills" as similar to Disney's "Pocahantas": it presents the European/Native American interface from both sides equally (only the Maiden song has a lot more bloodshed and a lot fewer cute animals).

If you go outside of the US/UK rock market, you will start noticing that the only visible indication that rock culture exists at all are the constant flurry of Maiden t-shirts. Like the ending of Spinal Tap, smart money for post-baby boomer rockers is on exporting to the world at large, something that Maiden has always done exceedingly well. Last week's show was introduced with a video of Maiden piloting a jet to what appeared to be Rio for a series of mammoth concerts that made the Mansfield gig look like a weeknight at the Abbey by comparison.

The set proper, pre-encores, closed with "Iron Maiden", a kind-of clunky punkish number from their debut that still, to me, sounds like their baby steps in attempting to write the kind of epic historical pieces that they would later become famous for. "Oh well, whatever" is a pretty half-assed line to begin the chorus of a signature song of a band, and the final line of "Iron maiden can't be bought/Iron maiden can't be sought" doesn't make much sense whether you are talking about the band or its eponymous "medieval" torture device*. But perhaps it only sounds out of place when played at the end of a set by a band of Maiden's calibre 30-some-odd years into their career.

* Kind of like the band Anthrax, most metal fans probably didn't know what an "iron maiden" was when they first placed Maiden at the forefront of the N.W.O.B.H.M.-- but by the first Bill and Ted's movie, the saturation of the meaning of the name was pretty much complete in metal culture. Oddly enough, some research into the history of the "iron maiden" as a medieval torture device reveals that it is actually the result of a bizarre hoax. From wikipedia here:

Historians have ascertained that Johann Philipp Siebenkees created the history of [the iron maiden] as a hoax in 1793. According to Siebenkees' colportage, it was first used on August 14, 1515, to execute a coin forger.^[2] The Nuremberg iron maiden was actually built in the late 18th century as a probable misinterpretation of a medievalSchandmantel" ("cloak of shame"), which was made of wood and tin but without spikes. Accounts of the iron maiden cannot be found from any period older than 1793, although most other medieval torture devices were extensively catalogued. "

Meaning, I suppose, that the power of the imagery was enough that the thing didn't need to actually be used in order to represent the horrors of the Dark Ages to those in the 19th century and beyond. Bogus!