More on “Christ Illusion”

The NY Times weighs in with a good review.

Apocalypse, Coincidence, and Slayer’s new album

This is the first album in months (years?) that I have actually wanted to run right out to the store and buy. I have downloaded the music and sit here listening to it right now. (I would say ‘enjoying it,’ but that doesn’t sound quite apt when describing the experience of listening to a great Slayer album. I am ‘loving’ it, but not in any way having anything to do with romantic or sentimental love. I think the most accurate word might be ‘feeling’ the music – my leg is shaking, I’m nodding my head, I’m frequently shaking it too or blinking my eyes in disbelief – but again, I don’t want to imply that I’m getting any ‘touchy feeling’ from the music. For as I’ll conclude at the end of this essay, any pleasure I get from this music is how far it distances me from the ‘touchy feeling’ that I get out of so much of the other music that I listen to, like, and indeed the music that I compose myself.) Even though I have the music, I still want the commodity, the new Slayer disc, because I want the artwork and, most of all, I want the lyric sheet..

I was listening to NPR’s Talk of the Nation ‘Science Friday’ today and Joe Palko was talking to Deborah Blum, who’s just written a book about William James and scientific research into the paranormal and supernatural in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the interview, Blum recounted an incident where her father-in-law (sic) woke up in the middle of the night and heard his cousin calling his name somewhere outside the house. He wasn’t sure if it was a dream or what, but he went outside and looked for his cousin, to no avail. The next day, he learned that his cousin shot himself at just that time. Blum stated that this was a point in her life when the possibility of a supernatural world or an afterlife presented itself. Palko countered that, in a world containing billions of people, like ours, all with wily brains capable of great imaginings and, really, just millions of everyday thoughts, isn’t a coincidence of this nature fairly probable as thoughts seem to match up with events as the former inevitably proliferate? Blum, being a good scientist and logical person, agreed, and the conversation moved on. Palko hadn’t disproved the supernatural, or given us any good reason even to doubt its existence, but he had, rather elegantly, in my view, offered a kind of mathematic rationale behind the scientist’s skepticism towards the supernatural.

The existence of Slayer, the band, in this, our natural world, calls this skepticism into account. Recogntion of this fact is how their music inspires deep affect. As I considered writing this review, refreshed myself on Slayer’s history, their oeuvre, learned some new things too, I was reminded that their last album, God Hates Us All, was released on September 11. All throughout my listening to this new album, I thought to myself how, really, this is the only music relevant to this historical moment. Was God Hates Us All the perfect and only soundtrack to that day? Or was this release date nothing much more than another coincidence in the lattice of coincidences that we string together into something intelligible to make everyday life? I argue that the power in this new Slayer record, Christ Illusion, and in most of their proceeding work (although I won’t get into that here), is that it is some of the only American music being recorded these days that would actually get us to ask these questions, get us to question the boundary between the secular, the religious, the supernatural in music, make us wonder whether or not our cultural, social, moral, and religious choices in this life might hold consequences in another one. It is one of the only musics that asks us even to wonder at the existence of another life, and to wonder at the nature of that other life. And furthermore, Slayer’s music then asks us to reflect on this life with a simultaneous, parallel repulsion, attraction, alarm, disgust, dismay, embarassment, humiliation that I would compare indeed only to the reflection inspired by the fiction of Kafka. Even the great composers, Beethoven, Mozart, the great jazz players, even the most spiritual, Coltrane, the best pop musicians, Beach Boys, in their music never seem, to me, to show the bad faith in humanity, reality, the supernatural, perfection that Slayer show. In fact, they seem to betray just the opposite faith, or wonder, or fear of God, nature, man. Fear is not absent from Slayer’s music, the harrowing “Black Serenade” on this new album ends with just the words “Fear death” echoing on the track, but fear here is matched by what I find an enviable courage on the part of the band, a singular courage on Slayer’s part to take human death and human suffering either as a great joke or an inescapable reality and not to bemoan this fact as a tragedy, but to herald it as a great and universal truth, perhaps the only great and universal truth out there, the only one worth caring about certainly.

When I was out running earlier today, I was blown away by the less well-known second half of Johnny Cash’s performance later released as At San Quentin (I’m referring here to the complete recording released in 2000) in which he plays predominantly sacred material with strong backing by the Carter Family, Carl Perkins, and that Statler Brothers. I was amazed at the intelligence in Johnny’s writing (on the songs he wrote) and in his singing, his interpretations, and I was fairly swept up in the charismatic family feel of the proceedings. I glimpsed, at moments, what John Cash must have felt like in his deep and abiding faith in Jesus Christ’s miraculous grace and the redemption available through him. Take for instance, one of the weaker sacred cuts on that album, “Peace in the Valley,” where the very laws of nature, as we currently understand them, are turned on their head: the child leads the beast, and Johnny, as he tells it, at the rapture will be made into some thing, some being wholly new and other from the fleshly, humanly form he holds now. I thought of a lion or a bear or something of that sort, and the fact that I’m still imagining John’s transformation in these terms, into something earthly, I think adds to just how poignant, beautiful, spectacular, and in a word, sacred this performance is. If you believe Johnny, it puts you somewhere in between heaven and earth, or merely earth and whatever else, and seamlessly blends elements of both. I don’t have faith in this image. I think it is man’s imagining, but I appreciate its beauty, and I thank Johnny for the insight it gave me into the religious mindset, religious faith, to remind me that I don’t have it.

Slayer’s music, on the other hand, Slayer’s worldview I can at least begin to relate to. When, in Christ Illusion’s “Cult”, Kerry King reminds us that he has chosen 666, I can’t join him either, just as I can’t quite join Johnny in choosing Christ, but I have a much easier time understanding how King has gotten to that point, and it seems to accord much better with the vision of unromantic tragedy and eternal suffering that not only King and myself, but indeed Johnny Cash too, see in our fallen world, owned and operated by the rich and powerful at the expense of the wretched, the meak, the poor.

I love this new Slayer album for the way it makes me feel: as far from romance and sentimentality as seems appropriate for an American citizen after 9/11, during the Bush presidency, during the Iraq War, as Lebanon and Isreal fight, as more Muslim men are arrested in Britain for reasons that, even if they haven’t been fabricated, cannot, logically, have the stench of Orwellain fantasy ever removed from them. Whether or not there is such a thing as the end times and we’re in them, this is the soundtrack to our moment, the perfect music for contemplating man’s ability to contemplate and enact his own destruction on purely secular, logical, scientific terms, and simultaneously to witness the rich and powerful political leaders of the world contemplate this same destruction in apposite religious terms of their own. It is clear, even without understanding all of Christ Illusion’s lyrics or seeing its artwork, that it is taking the powerful to task on these very grounds, for their spectacular and spectacularly misguided, indeed downright wrong imagining of man’s exit from this world. Many will accuse Slayer of pornography, obscenity, shock tactics, but I believe that, in these terms, their artistic vision is the most sober, the most accurate, the most true in a sick and barbaric world; the vision of Bush, Ahmenijad, Al Qaeda, and the rest is the truly pornographic one, the one that, like Johnny Cash’s, though in a much different way and to different ends (forgive me Johnny), can make a human desirous of his end as the only end in sight.

Man Man @ The Satellite Ballroom, C-ville

I knew I shouldn’t have gone to this show. Everything I’d read about this band pointed to the fact that I wasn’t going to like them. I could have very easily downloaded their album when I found out about the show and decided whether I was in or out, but I live in a small town now, a town that doesn’t attract a lot of touring acts, especially those of the ‘out’ or ‘experimental’ variety, so I thought I should go, support the scene, maybe be pleasantly surprised.

Well, I was surprised, but not pleasantly. First of all, I was surprised by the venue. I expected it to be much more dingy and, dare I say it, authentic. Instead, the room was boxy, and yes, too clean for a rock club. It felt more like a roller rink or a banquet hall, which it is when there’s not a show. There were no great places to sit while you waited for the band, nothing on the walls to look at, and things were being run rather poorly. When I arrived, I ordered the usual $2 PBR. According to the bartender the PBR was warm, so I ended up getting a $2 Starr Hill, the local C-Ville brew, at a discount, which is fine. It tastes better than PBR. But how could the PBR have been warm on the night of a show, over an hour after the door?

What was most annoying about the venue though was how disorganized everything was. Apparently the opening band, the Ultra-Dolphins, had not shown up (!) and at 9:30, an hour and a half after the door, the management still hadn’t decided how to proceed. Cancel the opening act, go straight to the headliner, maybe inform the crowd politely, maybe not. Instead, we got the guitarist of the opener banging on some drums and playing guitar at the same time with gas mask vocals, a JV Lightning Bolt of sorts. This was not as weak as it might sound, though it was weak, but I’m not gonna pick on the guy for trying. At least the guys in Man Man seemed to like it. As this character finishes his set, the rest of his band shows up, plays four songs in about the time it took them to load in, sound check, and load out. I found this all just super unprofessional, boring, and lame, especially since, despite their obvious lack of having their shit together on-stage, the band did manage to have two friends working the merch table selling three different T-shirt designs and a record on white vinyl. They should learn how to get to gigs on time before they put so much work into how they market themselves (obviously).

Then came Man Man. I’m not going to rip these guys just because I don’t like them. I don’t like a lot of bands, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad. They’re just not to my taste. But what I think worthy of critique about Man Man is that their music is so similar to so many bands that I do like, and I still don’t like them. I started with the immediate and probably most obvious comparison to Tom Waits, which I think is the most telling. When Tom does/did the gruff vocals, weird instrumentation, cabaret, carnival thing on great albums like “Rain Dogs,” “Swordfishtrombones,” etc. at least part of his reason for doing so was to revive the kind of confrontational, politicized popular art associated with Brecht and the Weimar Republic, later with various ‘Third World’ and avant-garde American pop movements, and before that the more recently termed ‘Old Weird America’-type tradition of folk and blues. This gave Tom’s great albums a sort of political, existential edge, sounding wholly of the Reagan era as the sounded wholly other from it (if that makes any sense). He also situated his new, innovative, out there music, so different from his earlier singer-songwriter records, firmly within an evolving tradition stretching forward and backward from the Dylan/new Dylan nexus with which he was originally associated.

When Man Man, on the other hand, bang on pots and pans (literally), sing in a gruff voice, break out the melodicas and saxes, the toy instruments, the mallets, they do so with such wild abandon that it would seem no tradition could contain them. And this is the problem. It’s also the reason why so many reviews compare them to everything under the sun before throwing up their hands and saying none of the comparisons are apt and none of them really fit. Their wild drumming has little in common with good rock drumming, or jazz drumming, it wouldn’t make good hip-hop beats, good beats to dance to either. It could be that their drumming might fit into some African or Eastern tradition that I am unaware of or cannot fully appreciate, but I think I know enough international music to know that this is not the case, and I would wonder, without underestimating them, really, whether their audience could understand such a tradition either. Similarly, their use of brass, mallets, and other slightly out rock instrumentation was totally underwhelming for me since I detected no proficiency of any of the members on any of these instruments whatsoever.

And this last point in particular lead me to think: Hey, no talent, no chops, just a lot of noise and bang bang bang and oo-oo-oo, ah-ah-ah lyrics. This must be punk or at least some variant of punk or something in the punk ‘tradition,’ if there is such a thing. And this of course gets to a problem with the term punk, since, according to one definition, in can be applied to just about anything bad, lacking in quality or talent, since quality and talent are non-punk, antithetical to punk. But what was lacking tonight, at the Man Man show, and is thing really shared by all good punk music was creativity. This is where the derivativeness and the transparency of Man Man’s blustery spectacle starts to eat its own tail. When I stumbled upon this formula, it struck me how few critics actually talk about creativity anymore, probably because it’s a problematic term, and even I’m a little skeptical of it because I know its connotation in sociological circles (see Richard Florida’s creative class), but I also like the term because it seems to point towards so much of what I think is bad about indie or underground or post-punk or post-hardcore music these days. Hopefully I’ll keep on talking about creativity in future posts.

Thom Yorke, “The Eraser”

Put this one on while I was running this morning since someone had reminded me of it this weekend and I thought its smooth, bassy, clicky beats would make good music to listen to as I ran up and down Charlottesville’s foothills. I was right. And I was surprised to find that beyond the beats and the great treated pianos, I really liked the lyrics, too.

I have always felt one step behind the Radiohead thing, like there was a depth or energy or appeal to their music that escaped me. Having now caught up with nearly everything in their corpus besides B-sides, I would say that, no, to the contrary, I have pretty much been right with them, although perhaps not as fanatical, prone to exagerration at worst, passionate at best, as those with whom I have talked to about the band. I think that Radiohead has done a lot of innovative, fun, sublime things with music, and without ever seeming too trendy or pretentious about it, and I think they are a prime candidate for the most impressive post-Nirvana rock band, bar none. But I wonder whether any of that matters. I give Radiohead a lot of credit for at least attempting to stay political, avoiding boy-girl love lyrics (although they do have plenty of these), experimenting with cutting edge electronic sounds, veering away from verse-chorus-verse song structures. They do all of these things, but in what measure? What difference does it really make in such a stylistically radical, and radically diverse musical universe? Not much, I don’t think, which is why I respect Radiohead and listen to their music a lot, but could never herald them as innovators, trendsetters, tastemakers in the vein of Hendrix, Presley, the Bomb Squad, Beefheart, Metallica.

And since this is my major complaint against Radiohead, and a weak one admittedly: Not innovative enough! I was particularly surprised that what I like most about Yorke’s “Eraser” is that it is much closer to a typical ‘love album,’ as I hear it, than I think anything Radiohead has done since “The Bends.” Despite the clicky beats, and the frequently far out treated pianos, it sounds to me like Yorke is, in the main, singing about and addressing these lyrics to an ex-wife, ex-lover, maybe even a bandmate or a child or a friend. I’m figuring that if I scoured other reviews of the album or interviews with Yorke, I could dig up the biographical tidbit that eludes me here, but I don’t want to. I don’t want that immediate gratification. I’m much happier listening to an album about divorce or growing older that at times verges on something not really like spoken-word or vocalese gibberish, but downright rap music (not hip-hop, rap), and wondering what’s going on. Yorke has stumbled upon some musical formula – confessional lyrics over new electro beats – that I really like. Obviously, he’s been doing something like this for years with Radiohead, but here, solo, it is more naked and, whether good or bad, more warm, more human. Can we make pop music and ever really avoid this?