LOW CULTURE, HIGH CUISINE, WE TALK 'TIL WE FALL OUT AND WHERE ARE ALL THE FUCKING CABS?

Hanging out exclusively with anthropologists this past Winter - folks who are experts in the meaning of the Virgin Mary in 1920s Portugal, for instance, or the psychopolitics of tourism in India, or what it feels like to have white people show up and compromise a people's identity in a timespan equivalent to one of our "Domino's pizza commercials," it feels to me like the equivalent of sinking plastic ducks at the carnival with a water cannon to try and talk about something as trivial as Heavy Metal. But that's what we've been thinking about for the next issue of BRIDGE, and here's a wild stab at some kind of introduction:

The Heavy Metal Project---

It’s a project borne from the gradual acknowledgement of one sensibly schizoid fact. That this particular musical form, heavy metal - blunt, clownish, and crass – tends to enact an aesthetic experience, oddly enough, that is incredibly fucking rich and nuanced. If this were 1956, and you were as hip back then as you presume yourself to be right now, and you were holding a gentleman’s magazine in your hands instead of a gentleperson’s, we might be talking about jazz. (You can save the appreciation part for the next person who refrains from coughing on you.)

Now, we certainly don’t want to invoke 1956 culturally, inasmuch as it’s already being reenacted politically right now in this country. We want to approach Metal as a phenomenon that warrants some critical unpacking - to put it stupidly - and we couldn’t stomach taking the low road, or the high one, for that matter; didn’t want to boil it down to pathology, as in an observation a friend of mine once had about how everyone he had ever met who liked metal had divorced parents. Beyond the fluorescent domain of hillside stranglers, air virtuosos and gas jockeys, true metal fandom can also include college professors, postmodern novelists, and scholars of Shakespeare. And, in fact, does; and, in fact, they’re here right now to offer their testimony. Not as amateur ethnographers, but as fellow travelers and wild-eyed aesthetes.

This is not to flog the old dead pony that low art becomes high art in the petting zoo of critical attention. Heavy metal was real art long before stoner chic, long before our parents’ “drug humor” became our generation’s de facto sensibility in TV programs and pop music and in Hollywood. And this is also not to say that historians can’t also be pothead fuck-ups. There is no line between high and low to blur here. The cognoscenti and the coprophiles have overlapping tastes, but when they meet, they dig it for the same reasons, and to the same degree. If ironic binoculars, chest-pounding, beer-swilling, and obscure lexica are invoked, it’s done only out of a need to re-erect class or cultural boundaries that might have otherwise been undermined by the naked presence of shared experience. It’s the difference between the Marquis de Sade and Richard Kern.

There are many other cultural tripwires here upon which we ought to tread lightly. Hip-hop authenticity, by arbitrary example, has clearer parameters: the ghetto is a geographical function, as well as a state of mind searchable on MapQuest. But what does it mean to be a real metal fan? A poseur? Where is metal’s ghetto? Rather than being lost in the ‘hood, rolling our windows up, are we lost in the suburbs, rolling our windows down?

[Now the fake moonlight dims. Fluorescent light pours through window. The audience ‘shows its horns.’]


posted at 2:09 AM