Night Beat (46 page)
In the end, none of these events settled the debate over rock’s rights to free speech. Certainly, in the rough seasons ahead, there will be further calls for censorship. More arrests and more trials are also likely, and given the rightward drift of America’s federal courts, it is hard to say how these campaigns will play themselves out. Still, there is hope: The tide of cultural history suggests that, as troubling as the notion may be to some, freedom of expression is a right that ultimately will not be undone. At the same time, perhaps the most frightening lesson of the Reagan era is that sometimes the tide of cultural history can be reversed.
IF NOTHING ELSE, all the brouhaha over censorship served to remind many of us that rock still has the power to unsettle and to inflame. Of course, sometimes it chooses to provoke its critics by merely taunting them with surefire irritants like explicit sexual descriptions, or rants about violence or the devil—but then sometimes the most effective (and hilarious) response to haughty disapproval is simply to become more unconscionable. At its best, though, rock & roll is a good deal more than a mere affront or a subject for argument. It is, in fact, perhaps the sole art form that most regularly
forms
an argument. That is, rock & roll is itself a disagreement with established power—a refutation of authority’s unearned influence.
Not surprisingly, some of the music that did the best job of both taunting
and
arguing in 1990 came from the two camps that experienced the greatest heat—heavy metal and rap. On the surface, these two genres might seem to have little in common, in terms either of audience or style. And yet both are derived from the structures of blues music, and by keeping that form’s temper fresh, rap and metal have also done a tremendous amount to revivify rock’s essential incendiary spirit. In addition, both rap and hard rock speak for and to the concerns of young and often disenfranchised audiences—working class and black youth, who are frequently viewed with fear and suspicion by much of the American mainstream—and it is this power to articulate and stir the passions of youthful outsiders that today scares so many people about rock & roll.
But it was rap that enjoyed more attention than any other pop genre in 1990, and for fair reason. Despite all the swipes directed at it, rap remained committed to holding forth on some of the most disturbing concerns of the day. Records like Public Enemy’s
Fear of a Black Planet,
Above the Law’s
Livin’ Like Hustlers,
Kid Frost’s
Hispanic Causing Panic,
Ice Cube’s
AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted,
and the Geto Boys’ debut album were works that offered tough and unflinching appraisals of a broad range of unpleasant topics—including gang violence, misogyny, racism, and drug dealing—and despite the naysayers who warned that this music amounted to “ugly macho boasting” and “obscenity,” all of these albums enjoyed substantial sales. Is that cause for concern? Does it mean that the audience that buys rap records is an audience that likes this music because it espouses values of anger? Do people in that audience, in fact, take some of the songs on the Ice Cube, Geto Boys, Kid Frost, or Above the Law records as literal celebrations of misogyny or violence?
Obviously, few of the people who hear a musical account of a drive-by shooting lose their repulsion toward such acts in real life, much less feel any inclination to take part in such horror. Yet this isn’t to deny that one shouldn’t raise hard questions about the meaning and impact of some of this music. A record like
The Geto Boys
(which, remember, Geffen found so offensive, the label refused to release it) relates some truly unsettling tales about gang violence and homicidal rape, and does so from a first-person point of view that brings both the narrator and listener into the heart of modern urban horror. It may be among the most terrifying works that popular music has ever produced. Certainly, it is a record that one should take a good hard look at—indeed, any art that might seem to celebrate hatred and murder is art that should be scrutinized, and, when necessary, criticized. At the same time, that isn’t really what
The Geto Boys
is about. Like Martin Scorsese, whose
GoodFellas
is deeply felt drama about contemporary gangster life, the Geto Boys and other rappers are reporting on a social reality—in the Geto Boys’ case, one that they know firsthand—and at times such reportage can seem ugly and morally questionable. But whereas Scorsese’s work is singled out as an artistic achievement,
The Geto Boys
is roundly condemned as brutal trash. Why? Is it because the Geto Boys are talking about conditions of violence
so
modern,
so
threatening, that we can’t view any of it with distance? Or is it because, by telling their tales in the first person, rappers seem to commit themselves to the worst impulses of their scenarios?
There are no simple answers to these questions. All that is clear is that works like
The Geto Boys
are disturbing for good reason—they’re
meant
to be disturbing—and it is to our peril and discredit when we fail to examine the conditions that have made such music possible, or necessary.
One other artist had a rough time of it in 1990, and that was Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor. The year began wonderfully for her, with a number 1 hit single, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and an equally high-ranking album,
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
But during the summer, when O’Connor refused to allow the national anthem to be played at one of her performances in New Jersey, local and national media treated the event as major news. Overnight, there were calls for her to be deported back to the United Kingdom; radio stations announced they were boycotting her music; and she was vilified by other celebrities (including Frank Sinatra) and harassed in public. Over and over, irate Americans asked the same question: What did O’Connor have against the national anthem? (The answer is easy, and fairly innocent: O’Connor is opposed to nationalism of any sort, and in fact refused to pose with an Irish flag for a photo session for
Rolling Stone
earlier in the year.) But there was another question that wasn’t asked and perhaps should have been: Namely, in a year when rock was treated as subversion by so many American lawmakers and pundits, how could any principled rock & roller do anything but refuse any false tributes? Why should any performer be forced to pay tribute to a nation that is so reluctant to stand up for the rights of its own artists?
The incident was merely another reminder that these are dangerous times to advertise yourself as a malcontent in American pop culture. But it was also a reminder that rock’s best and bravest heroes aren’t about to back down when confronted by indignant authoritarians. Kicking against social repression and moral vapidity—that’s an activity which, for well over thirty years now, rock & roll has managed to do better than virtually any other art or entertainment form. But at this juncture, the forces that would not only condemn but curtail or silence that impulse are formidable. If 1990 taught us anything, it is that if we value rock as a spirit of insolent liberty, then the time has come to form a bulwark against those who would gladly muzzle that spirit.
clash of the titans: heavy metal enters the 1990s
“
I
t looks like hell,” says the security guard, gazing at the scene before him. “It’s like hell just came popping up all over the place.”
It is a hot spring night in 1991, in Dallas, Texas, at the open-air Starplex theater, where the Clash of the Titans—a bill featuring three of the leading exponents of speed-metal rock & roll, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer—is playing its opening date of a two-month trek across America. Onstage, Megadeth is playing a loud-hard-fast set of songs about rage and apocalypse, but at the rear of the theater, on a large grassy slope, it looks like apocalypse may be happening for real. Up on that knoll, hundreds of heavy metal fans have started to build bonfires and dance and stomp around them in an almost tribal fashion. From a distance it almost looks as if the fans are tossing themselves in and out of the pyres, like one of Bosch or Bruegel’s portrayals of the inferno brought to modern life.
“Man, I have
never
seen anything like that,” says the security guard, shaking his head, still transfixed. “This is what we get for letting this heavy metal shit into this place. I tell you, the stuff is fucking
evil.”
HEAVY METAL: Over the course of its history it has been accused of everything from musical low-mindedness and lousy politics to the spread of teenage suicide and suburban Satanism. It has also been blasted by federal legislators, local lawmakers, conservative (
and
liberal) moralists, concerned parents, and prominent religious figures, all of whom see the music as a corrupting influence on the young: a music that is capable of entering the souls of its listeners and delivering them to the darkest forces of evil.
But for all the scorn and dismissal that has been perpetually hurled its way, heavy metal is the only constant standard-bearer that rock & roll can claim. Whereas movements like rockabilly, psychedelia, disco, and even punk played out their active histories in a handful of years each, metal has proven consistently popular for over twenty years now. Plus, it has also served as a vital and reliable rite of passage for its audience—that is, it is music that articulates the frustrations, desires, and values of a youth population that has too often found itself without any other cultural advocate or voice. Indeed, metal often works as music for outcasts: kids who feel pressed or condemned by adult society, who feel despised or hopeless or angry, and who need to assert their own pride and bravado. Consequently, a music that many regard as a form without redemption is actually a music that can help powerless young people feel powerful—or at least feel like they’ve found a means to outrage or repel an increasingly coldhearted society.
In other words, metal persists. Though the music may remain a prime target for legislators and moralists—and though many critics are now claiming that guitar-driven rock & roll has lost its primacy in the world of popular music—heavy metal remains as audacious and defiant as ever. At present, in fact, it supports one of the most energetic and far-reaching alternative-culture scenes in all modern pop, a vast and complex international network of record labels, magazines, radio stations, nightclubs, newsletters, and leather-and-T-shirts shops. What’s more, metal (in the early 1990s) is enjoying the widest spectrum of musical stylists it has ever seen, including the progressive hip-hop and punk-inflected rock & roll of Living Colour; Faith No More; and 24-7 Spyz; the classic bad-boy posturing of Guns n’ Roses, the blues-derived majesty of the Black Crowes, the pretty-boy raunch of Poison and Warrant; the grungy grandeur of Pacific Northwest bands like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, and Tad; and the avant-garde extremism of British grindcore bands like Napalm Death, Carcass, and Godflesh.
Yet when it comes to sheer disrepute or bravado, nothing in all pop—except for some of the more notorious rap artists of the day—can compare with speed-metal or thrash-metal bands like Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax. Inspired as much by the brutal rhythms and bellicose stance of early 1980s hardcore punk as by heavy metal’s own styles and obsessions, these bands are making some of the boldest music of our time, and, some critics would claim, also some of the most frightening. “When victory’s a massacre,” sings Slayer in a song from the group’s latest album,
Seasons in the Abyss,
“When victory is survival/When this end is a slaughter/The final swing is not a drill/It’s how many people I can kill.” It’s a brutal decree, and though it’s possible to read it as an indictment of the bloodshed that it describes, it’s also possible to hear it as a celebration: a surrender to the exhilaration of the kill. Either way, it’s one of those moments that serves notice that something in rock & roll’s moral center is now shifting. An art form which has often striven to convince its audience that the world might yet be redeemed through action or opposition now seeks to tell us unflinchingly violent truths about the increasingly violent modern soul.
“Bands like us are writing a new book in rock & roll history,” says Dave Mustaine, the lead singer and guitarist for Megadeth. “If Elvis Presley liberated the body and Bob Dylan released the mind, we’re releasing whatever’s left: all the stuff that people would rather overlook in a world that’s gone mad. Actually, I prefer to think of us as modern troubadours who are spreading joy and harmony by saying ’shit, fuck, piss, kill,’ and all the rest of it.”
FOR THE BETTER PART of the last decade, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax have been working in rock’s margins, making extreme music for a fervid young audience that much of the pop world—including the heavy metal mainstream—would just as soon ignore. In fact, as far as much rock media is concerned, this whole scene may as well be invisible.
But the Clash of the Titans tour is an attempt to change all that, and to assert that these bands can attract a mass following that is a legitimate pop community in its own right. It’s an ambitious venture, but also a risky one. Though the three co-headlining bands share a roughly similar style, they don’t all share the same interests. Slayer, a Los Angeles-based band, plays rageful tunes about the horror of interminable warfare and unconscionable murder, while Megadeth—despite its smartly humored songs about drug abuse, ecological disaster, and impending apocalypse—is pretty much a band for guitar aficionados. Anthrax—a New York band—plays some of the most erudite and ambitious political rock of the day, with an eye toward helping the heavy metal audience understand the power and responsibility that lies within its own community. In short, there is as much separating these three bands (including profoundly different philosophies in politics and personal behavior) as there is uniting them (namely, a shared belief that metal is one of the most exciting, intelligent, and viable pop forms of the day).
Consequently, there is some concern about what might happen when the bands’ various audiences mingle. Megadeth tends to draw a crowd of headbangers—long-haired young males who stand around bobbing their heads as a way of keeping time with the music’s lickety-split rhythms—while Anthrax draws a crowd that likes to slam-dance and mosh: a style of dancing in which kids stomp around together, flailing and bouncing off each other at a furious pace. Slayer’s audience, however, can sometimes seem flat-out violent. At Slayer shows in Los Angeles in recent years, the LAPD (always good for an overreaction) sent in riot squads and helicopters to deal with some rowdy fans outside the concert halls, and at an ill-famed show at New York’s Felt Forum in 1988, the group’s fans went wild, tearing seats apart and hurling them around the floor and getting into fights with security guards. The band’s lead singer, Tom Araya, tried to calm the crowd down, but after a few songs the Forum’s management ejected Slayer from the stage. “Thanks a lot, assholes,” Araya told the crowd. “You fucked this up for yourselves.”
For this tour—which will easily draw some of the biggest thrash or mosh crowds ever assembled in the States—the three bands have hired a special security overseer, Jerry Mele, who previously worked with Madonna, among others. Shortly before each show, Mele convenes a meeting of the hall’s various security and management personnel. “Look,” Mele tells the guards assembled at the Starplex amphitheater in Dallas, “I want you to treat these kids with respect. It may look like they’re fighting or hurting each other out there, but it’s their way of having fun. If they come over the barricade down front—and some of them will—don’t hurt them and don’t throw them out. Bring them over to me at the side of the stage. I’ll have a talk with them and give them another chance. Believe me, if you do things this way, we won’t have any serious trouble here.” You can see the look of skepticism on the faces of these guards—big, muscular men, some who are accustomed to resolving rowdiness with force—but in the end they agree to Mele’s requests.
The first test comes an hour later, when Slayer opens the Dallas show (the three bands will rotate the headline slot). There is nothing in all modern pop like the moment Slayer takes a stage. The whole place rises to its feet as the band slams into “Hell Awaits” at a ludicrous breakneck pace, and hundreds of kids press their way to the front of the stage, where they proceed to throw themselves into each other, moshing and slamming with a furious intensity. At first the security force looks a bit edgy—it is not always an enviable position to be staked out between Slayer and its fans—but in a short time their patience and gentleness with the fans pays off. Nobody shoves or punches anybody, and the few times that any guards see a kid who looks like he’s trying to hurt other dancers in the mosh pit, Mele makes his way into the crowd and drags the offender out himself. Later, when Anthrax makes its appearance, the slamming is even more congenial—though in large part that’s because Anthrax’s music, in contrast to Slayer’s, is more concerned with questions of community than with the thrills of violence. When Anthrax plays, even young women find the mosh pit a fun place to hang out—which is rarely the case during a Slayer set.
But then, just before Megadeth is set to perform, the fires on the hill begin: eerie-looking eruptions of flame, surrounded by stomping circles of kids, all pushing and shoving to dance as close to the flares as possible.
When you venture up close, though, the fire-dancing doesn’t seem particularly threatening or licentious. In fact, there appears to be a rather strict social order at work in constructing the event. First, one or two kids strip off their T-shirts and set them ablaze, waving them over their heads like fiery flags until they attract the attention of other fans. It’s almost as if they are setting the fires as a way of drawing each other in closer, as a way of finding other sympathetic souls in a dark landscape. After a bit, the kids toss the burning rags into a heap and toss in paper cups and other inflammable scraps until they have something like a watchfire going. Meantime, a growing circle of dancers begins to tramp around the fire in a mosh rhythm, picking up speed and attracting new members as it spreads outward. The only time the scene ever gets scary is when security guards charge up the hill, pushing the kids aside and extinguishing the fires with chemical sprays. The resulting smoke is harsh and burns the eyes, causing the kids to turn and run, sometimes knocking each other down in the process. Invariably, though, the fires start up again, and the circle of wildly stomping dancers reconvenes.
It’s as if the conflagrations taking place on the hill were an enactment of the defiance and rage that the music onstage has been proclaiming all day long. At the end of Megadeth’s set, Dave Mustaine sings the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.”—the song that first announced that rock & roll could accommodate the vision of a world in ruin. By the time he gets to the song’s incendiary closing verse—”I want to be anarchy, you know what I mean?/’Cause I want to be an anarchist/Again I’m
pissed
/DESTROY!”—the hill has erupted in small bonfires from top to bottom, as if the fans are acting out the song’s incitements as fast as Mustaine can proclaim them.
In the end, not much real damage is done. In the morning there will be a few square feet of torched grass and some predictable local media outrage. But for some of the kids gathered here, a genuine power struggle took place tonight—the first one that many of them have ever won.