The Last Scion PART 2

On February 28, 2009, the Scion car company put on a free metal festival in Atlanta, GA. This is the story of my journey there and back.

Karen

I caught an unexpected glance at Karen’s pubic hair as she threw the quilt and sheets off of A.J.’s bed in a frenzy. She lept up and at the two sheet-ply doors, twisted a blue robe around her meager body, and tossed the would-be intruder away like a dead mouse. He went back inside the house without complaint. We waited for A.J. to return.

We had shared liquor and tales, and now shared a growing sense of the truly weird, as if detecting the first scent of a paper-mill that had mysteriously appeared in the front yard. The rain had not yet let up, but I began to feel the decided necessity of moving on, as, it seemed, did Karen. I had told her about a local youth hostel and made the offer to pay for a night there. But we waited for A.J. It took no more than seven agitated minutes for him to return. I told him that I was leaving; I actually wanted to sleep that night and the cold wouldn’t allow it. Karen angrily told him that the man in the house had nearly broken the door down, and A.J. dismissively tried to console her. I said my goodbyes. He offered to walk me a few blocks up the street. I told him I was fine but he insisted. I divided a bit of vodka into a bottle for myself, and Karen got up to hug me goodbye. She sent me off without giving any indication that she was leaving. She asked me to take care of myself. Then A.J. and I set off up the street, through the rain, towards the intersection where we had encountered each other earlier in the evening.

While we walked he told me stories about a trumpeter he may have been related to, his mother and the trials and tribulations of moving her home all over the country. He was a traveler, claimed to be a carpenter by trade; highly charismatic, an Atlanta resident of fifteen years; I didn’t know how long he had been homeless. He never talked about it and I didn’t either. I wonder now whether I had been taken in by A.J.’s pride in his porch, or if I had been the beneficiary of his bountiful generosity. Maybe he doesn’t identify as Homeless. Maybe he identified me as Homeless. Maybe he has proper pity for a wet idiot. I still said nothing. Double the coward, I thought, loosing the evening’s narrative in his loose talk about the musicians he knew. I was wondering how long until I would crave to be dry and slipping out of my reverie, but was all the same feeling grand at that moment about my adventure. I split off with him just past a small flood in a Pep Boys parking lot, taking his blessings and good tidings.

I had encountered A.J. in a similar fashion earlier that evening. I was breaking free of the empty Masquerade back lot, where I’d been hoping to grab a post-sound check interview with whomever. After mucking my way onto the back lot, I found I had missed Mastodon and High on Fire by an hour. That plan foiled and the rain getting harder, I began to walk back the mile towards downtown when I ran into him. He asked me if I had come from the Masque and wanted to talk music. I told him that I was in town for the big fest tomorrow. He said it was a great idea, that he loved music, and loved listening to bands behind the Masque from his porch. I don’t really remember what he talked about then, but I told him that I hadn’t lined up lodging, but knew I had passed a youth hostel on my way. He told me he knew of a cheaper place than the one to which I was heading. $11.50 a night, he said. That just can’t be beat. He showed me up the block to a stone building painted white, and walked inside like it was his job. Friend of his lived here. The interior looked like a tiny nursing home. There was a set of glass doors to the immediate left, darkened and locked, and a steep flight of stairs directly in front of us. A large woman who looked like a child’s doll was standing near a small office. Two grown men were putting a puzzle together on the floor. A shorter woman strode out of an open doorway next to the stairs, brushing someone’s bullshit off her arms. She looked like she had spent every night of her life in the tiny cubicle I called an office. She knew A.J. He asked if I could stay in his friend’s room. She obsequiously declined. They argued their respective points by blinking Morse code at each other while releasing a varied stream of grunts and sighs. Then she looked right through me and said, trying as hard as she could to be frank, that I did not want to spend the night in that nasty-ass room. One of the men on the floor looked up at me with morning due in his eyes and offered to stay with me. I was flattered, however I concurred with the woman from the office and told A.J. so. We left and he said, "then let me put you up at my house." I trusted the world for the hell of it. We went to a store, bought a bottle of cheap vodka, and marched the blocks back to where we had met.

We walked up a flight of stone steps in front of a nearby house, turned left, and entered the screened-in porch where A.J. lived, and Karen sometimes stayed. It completely contained almost all the contents of a small apartment and had no electricity. She woke up quickly with a faint trace of alarm. I poured out small cups of vodka, one straight and one with Coke, and gave A.J. $17. $11.50 was for his landlord, who lived in the porch’s house. He left to pay his landlord and to pick up some groceries with the rest of the money. Karen sat up in the bed and told me what a nuisance A.J. is. You can never hear him when he talks, she said. She delicately stubbed out half of a Kool and placed it on the headboard. She groaned and creaked while waking up. Then she looked at me and we met.

I asked her about herself and she told me about her recent jail time, her reawakened addiction to crack, and her continuing devotion to God. Karen had been addicted to crack for twenty-two years. She told me that it isnt’t an enjoyable drug. It’s jittery, itchy, and none too pleasurable. She traced her addiction to crack to an alcohol problem she noticed when she was 13 years old, after eight years of being raped by her father.

“I grew up in a very alcoholic, dysfunctional, paranoid-schizophrenic environment. I had two sisters and two brothers and an alcoholic mother and an alcoholic father. A lot of gunplay, a lot of violence, a lot of breaking of doors, windows, glass, furniture. Lot of beatings. A lot of emotional abuse. Lot of sexual abuse.” She began when she started drinking her father’s lemon kool-aid and vodka, which he would leave on the nightstand while he was having sex with her. “Nobody noticed,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you at the time that I was trying to disappear; I couldn’t put it in those words, but that is what I was trying to do.” She started smoking crack when she was twenty-one. When describing how her addiction feels, she used all of the English language’s negative adjectives. And she hates having sex for crack.

“Living on the street, I’ve been beaten, stabbed, raped, shot. I have one sister that I’m in contact with; she lives in Arizona. I don’t have family. I don’t have friends. I don’t have family…And I’ve got a bad haircut.” And her last hope is with God. She wants to have a house, a girlfriend, and a job with her craft of building cabinets. She doesn’t believe she values anything anymore, but thinks others should value the freedom to do what they want to do, when they want to.

I don’t know what to do with this story except admonish the metal community for being more fortunate than Karen. This is an irrational impulse. It’s my way of criticizing the genre for relying heavily on abstractions of pain and horror for inspiration without promoting justice, but also to undercut that criticism enough that I still want to participate. I’m a hypocrite and a piece of shit.

Metal heads, myself included, should feel like pieces of shit for engaging with a reality rendered irreversibly bleak and disgusting by our art if that vision of reality is a fantasy into which we escape from perceptions of violence and/or senses of powerlessness. Seeking to escape the reality of violence is a passively violent act. Being aware of violence and feeling powerless are conditions that demand action. Often there is nothing more to do than pay attention. Attending to that which is deplorable is neither simple nor easy, but if done properly, it is honest.

The same sounds that provide the avenue of the escape, have the power to lift us up and empower us to change. Imagine if Slayer opened every performance of “Angel of Death” by saying “We wrote this song because we are desensitized to genocide. Dance! Dance! Dance!” or “There is a genocide being perpetrated right now in Darfur! Until you stop it, you will feel immensely frustrated. Now DANCE DANCE DANCE!” Imagine if Pig Destroyer wrote a song about Karen, and when they performed it at Scion they said, “This is a song about Karen, who was raped for years by her father, found apathy with her family, has been imprisoned, stabbed, raped, beaten, is homeless, addicted to crack, and we all probably ignored her when we walked in here; she’s standing outside this place, trying to disappear. Don’t forget: everyday, women and young girls are raped by violent cowards. 1! 2! 3! 4!” So stated, the hyper-insistent music and violent dances of metal would make the atrocities of Karen’s life impossible to ignore. The audience, except the most cynical, cowardly, or evil members, would be forced to confront more than horror and misery. They would be forced to engage injustice with their minds and their bodies, shunning the physical placidity to which entertainment usually dooms unhappy thoughts. One cannot combat atrocity without using both the body and mind. Pig Destroyer is one of the few bands that has the musical power to make that interaction unbearable, and in so doing, to get beyond their audience’s ability to shut down its sensitivity. That’s a power that can change lives.

The moment I knew Karen is a marker: a moment that would seem decidedly different from any other if I didn’t have the vision to see through Weird Clouds to life on earth above. It was a beacon; it shaped the way I was at the show of the world thereafter. When Karen and I were talking, I didn't compartmentalize any of my feelings. I didn't feel crushed with pain any more than I felt lifted like a hot-air balloon. I thought that I was standing on an emotional Arch in which every feeling got it's own brick, and each was of the utmost importance. To remove one would make the whole collapse. In fact I wasn’t standing on the Arch. I was the Arch. I was the best person I’d been in six months, and as of this writing, I have not been as courageous since. I felt absolutely free. I felt a small and nearly overwhelming measure of empathy for pain beyond my reckoning, and I felt joy stirring in the candlelight; I felt radiating warmth while my body shivered from the cold. I wanted to take off into the universe by catching fire and simultaneously becoming an ocean. Karen got embarrassed when I pulled out my tape recorder. She was happy for a few seconds at a time.

Art is not separate from life. Not even life which it doesn't know or understand. Artists willing to express that level of integration and vulnerability - to take the risk of playing it all - are working for justice. Heavy music certainly has that power, and many bands seem to have the inclination. I walked and wondered if I’d meet anyone willing to answer the call. Skyscrapers loomed in shadows at the edges of my vision as I made my weary way to the hostel.


Tune in next week for The Last Scion part III: Metal Heads in the Mist

Avow/Disavow

Now here this: this text is about the extreme metal subgenre, grindcore. For those of you who are not yet metal-heads, the creatures forming extreme metal’s die hard audience, it is necessary that you read a little about its background. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindcore, and www.anus.com are decent resources. Additionally, use www.metal-archives.com and the google to research the bands Napalm Death, Repulsion (from Flint, MI), Disrupt, Discordance Axis, Nasum, and most importantly, Pig Destroyer. I recommend you listen to at least three grindcore songs prior to reading this edition of UltraMegaSound (try these: Napalm Death plays "You Suffer (But Why?)," Repulsion plays "The Lurking Fear," Pig Destroyer plays "Naked Trees,").


To listen grindcore is to hear the sound of senseless perdition. It’s fantasy Hell. Light up and burn up on vile and thick guitar distortion, like oil slick on a gull, like lung cancer, like the crust of desert death sweats. What kind of ludicrous animal seriously desires to attend to the world in such a way? Comedians, disgruntled government computer spies, and civil engineers sick of their civility. Sure, they like some beautiful things (Springsteen, Chomsky), but who cares? They are addicted in public; they are stomping on a mess; they are mad, gibbering apes with public educations planted solidly in overlarge brains, seeing a prison wall behind everything.

You can fully engage with grindcore in two ways: you can honestly hate your shitty life, detest the systematic oppression you see everywhere, find psychosis in everybody you love or hate, and then shut up and go to work until you explode; or you can bear the brunt of your shitty life, systematic oppression, and the psychosis of those you love by being at a grindcore show with all the energy you can summon from your mortal body. To engage with grindcore is to immerse oneself in worldly irrationality until it hurts. The music is secondary. The real difference is in the resignation of the former approach to bare the weight and horror of insignificance to the death.

Henry David Thoreau said most men lead lives of quiet desperation. A desperate man resigned to live out his plight is like a guard in his own prison. He keeps his gun loaded with non-lethals. The real stuff is in a locker, and another guy, not a supervisor or a manager per se, but some kind of superior keeps a key on the ring on his belt. If things get too hairy, if too many connections are made, the lights won’t go out, memories are beginning to organize themselves, if the violence over which he watches (keeping the guard distracted from his addictions to sleep, waking, bathing, coffee, meal 1, commute, chatter, forgotten misery, face time, market share, branding, meal 2, e-mail, shitting as entertainment, breaking, breeding, meal 3 at a sensible restaurant, preventative maintenance, laughing at TV, chums, pals, cohorts, drinking and watching sports, pool, girls and boys, old songs, weekend projects, and waiting to die) has disappeared except for a few idle threats, supplies in the office are missing, or no one talks in the showers, then the locker comes open. The guard spends months lying in wait for that locker to dart wide like a clam in heat or a chest of pirate treasure. And then…finally, some action! This man, in his desperation to fight off all of his lies as they come into view, fires at will with a state-issued Remington model 1100 shotgun from the locker. But all the cages are open, the mattresses are on fire, there shivs and shanks coming out of the air, and a brick in a bed sheet swinging into his face. Had he paroled his better demons, let them march out into the world to live with the rest of us, he might have found his guardianship at a monument of human spiritual unity. But because he hesitated, he is smashed to a pulp by ethereal climbers and mercenaries alike. This is the grind of the willing oppressed.

JR Hayes doesn’t strike me as necessarily happy with petty satisfactions, but he is not interested in grand ideas either. He is an American, perhaps the most fully American man I’ve ever met, who can see that the government’s agents are just prison guards, but can’t imagine any action other than to wait out his term. So he posts no guards on the prison of his mind.

The inmates were all born there, out of the ether of JR’s experience. It seems that the architect who built JR’s prison never saw a need to leave, and so failed install a door. The guys get by all right. Someone, a while back, had the bright idea to plant some seeds they found in the kitchen; they built a trellis in the shop and shived and shanked the ground into turned-over soil. It took a year to make a garden big enough to sustain any people, and it’s still not enough to keep the many that are left. Every Wednesday there’s a lottery to see which seven guys have to give up their meat for the lives of the others. So the whole population of better demons and bitter angels is slowly dying, and will go on that way until there are no more than the garden will feed.

There are no new guys in the JR’s prison, but you can still hear screaming in the night. Most of the terror comes on Monday, because on Tuesday they all celebrate the dying. They get together and build skyscrapers with Mesa/Boogie stacks. They beat on every can, stump, and wall. They crow violence to the stars. When they get tired, they lie down and sleep where they stood.

Wednesday nights are orderly, and even a little sweet. Everyone got a number when they arrived. Every number is duplicated on a square of paper cut out of one of the books some guy found in a drawer in the office, and each paper square is laminated with Scotch tape. These scraps are floating in the water runoff barrel out behind the main office. Everyone gathers out there, away from the lights and fires they leave burning in the yard. One guy volunteers to pick seven pieces of laminate out; another guy hands him matches or a lighter. He flicks a little fire into being and calls out seven numbers as casually as he can, and everyone slowly spins their heads around, looking with a mixture of sadness and delirious relief at the guys walking forward.

Everybody, no exceptions, steps forward when his number is called. If a guy were to refuse then there would be the guards all over again. One thing the guys sure can’t stomach is the idea of having guards again. So they sing the songs every Tuesday, chose and chop up their brothers every Wednesday, and tend the garden all the rest of the week. And on Monday they hate it all so much they can’t breath until they scream the suffocation out of their body.

* * *

Pig Destroyer doesn’t really play shows. It’s too hard to stand still and gape at the mere spectacle of their performance. Shows are for statues, and concerts are for hearts plus brains plus clapping hands equals entertainment. Pig Destroyer makes collapse, combs rubble, boils blood; they play rotations: organized, consensual exchanges of position between guards and prisoners. We don’t watch. We are inmates in the pit, admins on the console and working the door, and the guards ignore their world falling apart because of the implicit promises the music makes that they will not get involved. We climb the stage like a guard tower, seize the mic like an empty gun, we dive away without considering just who is doing the catching. For others it’s like a holiday or a new coat of paint. For me it’s like cliff diving off the outer wall and discovering that it goes straight down forever.

It is not ironic that the men behind Pig Destroyer are exceedingly nice. Blake Harrison worked everything short of magic to get me backstage at the Feb. 4 LA event. JR and Brian both sat for interviews and were genial and sweaty in the same way one should be after a particularly satisfying workout. I asked a variety of silly and devastating questions to which I received a variety of devastating and silly answers. I tried to lead JR into describing artistic and political intentions that he doesn’t have, and which I only imagined because I engaged with his band in exactly the way he intended: by seeing my own interests reflected in the band’s intensity. But he insists he doesn’t make art, because it’s just grindcore.

I believe that art is in its right place philosophically when it advocates an ideal or a vision, and I find an artist believable when they make their ethos evident. JR doesn’t consider himself either an artist or an intellectual, which is news that probably only surprised me. I believe in Pig Destroyer and for the last month I’ve been trying to figure out why. Since this blog is not yet widely read, and should this sentence make it into a periodical it will most likely be removed by a judicious editor (unless he is a good enough person to feel guilty simply for the reading of it), it is safe to assume that there are few to no avowed metal heads in my audience yet. It will be hard for those who are not addicted to guitar distortion to understand just how much righteous power it holds (for a taste refer to all prior entries). For avowed metal heads, it might be disconcerting to read what must seem like a senseless intellectualization of a musical form that almost defies basic characterization. The crossroads of these two positions is where my belief stood, waiting for me to bare my soul in the night for a pittance of vision.

In phonetics, the fundamental is the lowest pitch in a harmonic series, and forms the basis for the information and action, or the timbre if you will, of any musical note. The fundamental of Rock and Roll music is rebellion. It is a simple and brutal reaction against perceived class oppression, given voice by a set of tools derived from the existing empowered-class-approved set. The “hardest” and “heaviest” subgenres of rock are those that most embody this anarchistic fundamental: hardcore punk, grindcore, noise, rap-music, etc. Bands that fall into these subgenres are, in the context of a Musicsociety constructed as a function of social class, easily classified as a kind of anti-music, with some bands (Discharge, Skitsystem, Anti-Climax) going so far as to self-classify in this way. For a group like Pig Destroyer, the very timbres they work with constitute a political action.

However, such action may be problematic because it only utilizes tools granted to the oppressed by the oppressor; JR Hayes seems to me to be a true American because he possesses both a dangerous artistic intention and a striking need to rebel, and also because these two factors seem opposed to one another. There is a little nobility and poetry in JR’s art because it is so deeply restless. During our interview, JR only discussed art in abstracted, idealistic terms. Given that, it makes sense then that he doesn’t consider the music of Pig Destroyer to be art. The predominant effect is to translate profound restlessness into movement. This is politically and philosophically valuable because one cannot disengage with one’s environment while listening to grindcore. If you turn on the radio today, ninety-nine percent of the music you listen to will ask you to turn off everything else. It is quite impossible to tune out or relax while listening to Pig Destroyer. In fact, it is practically impossible not to seriously listen to Pig Destroyer if it is in any way audible.

Art created for pleasure out of dishonorable intentions creates the hidden nihilism at the heart of American philosophical and political apathy. Pig Destroyer’s anti-art is noble because it cares so hard despite its assumption that escape from one’s nightmare is impossible. Perhaps it is the use of oppressor-granted tools that creates this perception. How can one create a vision of being beyond oppression when the one’s essence is deeply rooted in it? When all you have to work with are oppressor-tools, then all visions look like reflections of oppressor-desires. Pig Destroyer’s poetry is that they craft the greatest, and therefore most anarchistic, extremity of rock and roll’s fundamental rebellion. And if you think their music sounds hopeless now, consider this: if what I say is true, and if rock ever succeeds in destroying its oppressors, then its necessity would no longer exist, and rock and roll itself would truly die.

Hesitation Is A Reverie: 0:11 on the left side

I am perched on the cupped hands of a man-child; six-foot-five and probably three hundred pounds large. He stoops low and gracefully. His motions are practiced and comfortingly precise. He must be the lifter at all the shows. He is wearing a tan shirt and glasses, making him the most approachable person in the place. He is only too glad to foist my body on the frenzied crowd. I lift off his shoulders as if I were climbing a fence. Gravity takes over and the people below me are working hard to keep from being crushed. I paw and the clamber over denizens of the pit, the sounds of guitars and drums and screaming are now deafening above the absorptive human layer. I knee someone in the head and in response they take a solid hold of my stomach flab and squeeze and shove. I take a breath and steady the lights in my eyes. I grab at the matt black around the middle stage monitor, trying to leave the cable runs steady and to pull myself out of the crowd’s weakening grip.

I am successful, emerge onto stage right, and then am standing stock still in front of guitarist Scott Hull. He doesn’t remember five years ago when an over-zealous power-violence fan at a NYC show pushed me onto the stage. That night the crowd filled in the gap, making escape impossible. He let me sit at his feet, watching his hands chop and peel the night’s riffs. Tonight, I’m going to take a flying leap. You can’t intellectualize a decision like this. You don’t even have the option of making a different decision. You are on stage, Max. Your choice is fish. Hesitation is a reverie, and in grindcore, reverie lasts less than a second.

It’s mostly like diving into a pool. You hit a layer of outstretched hands and breathing becomes impossible. You don’t register the shock until you are sinking, reptilian brain screaming “SWIM! SWIM FUCKER!” This is all wrong. No one wants you to claw at the chop or kick your feet. You roll onto your back, trying to give them an even surface to push against, or maybe just something broad to absorb the shock when they drop you. Because they ARE going to drop you. Coordinated and thoughtfully throngs will help you land on your feet as easily as they scoop the fallen from the bottom of the mosh. The terrified and unprepared drop you on your head. Their bodies buckle or they run, silently squealing to the sides. Six feet from the axis of your right ankle, your head sweeps to the floor like an overripe apple.

I hope I looked like a free and happy madman as my head hit the concrete. Crowd surfing is definitely for the faint of heart.