Too Old for Heavy Metal

 Heavy Metal is angry, young people's music. As my 40th birthday looms overhead just a few short months away, I find myself neither young nor angry anymore. Heavy Metal used to define me as a person. It was more than just music. It was a culture and a lifestyle. But these days I just find it increasingly loud and annoying, and today I want to talk about why that is.

WHAT IS HEAVY METAL?

 Now I know a lot of you out there will say that there are many rockers in their 60's still performing and making music, and you would be right in saying that. Alice Cooper, Steven Tyler, Ozzy, and Robert Plant all turn 65 this year, but that's hard rock not heavy metal. And there is a difference.

 Hard Rock in general is good time, party music

Heavy Metal is anger, death and war in clown makeup

Hard Rock is getting laid music with fast, driving rhythms and soft introspective power ballads

 Heavy Metal is mosh pits, acne, angst and black t-shirts

 Growing up I was angry. Angry for being born, angry at my parents, angry at school, angry at the law, angry because it I didn't fit in, angry because I didn't have a girlfriend, you name it and I was probably angry about it. Metal gave me an outlet for my aggressions. It gave me a voice and gave me a chance to meet other people who were just as angry as I was.

 Growing up in Catholic schools, it was the perfect way to stand out, get attention and make a name for myself. I never fit in or had many friends and was forced to be an outsider looking in, but metal let stand proud and say, "Yes, I'm on the outside looking in because I want to be not because you forced me here" 

I didn't really say that, mind you. It was more symbolic. 

GETTING OLD

 I don't hate heavy metal these days, and I don't REALLY think it sucks, I simply no longer find that Heavy Metal has any meaning for me now. I'm not the same person I was as a teenager. I'm not as angry and reactionary as I used to be. I'm still awkward, and an outsider who still doesn't fit in, but I'm old enough to accept that now and it just doesn't bother me.

 I'm middle aged, married w/kids and a job. With half my life behind me and a clear sense of my own mortality, my life finally has meaning for me now. So likewise I look for more meaning in my music.

 Even though there are many kinds of metal these days, (too many to go into here) I ultimately find it very one dimensional. War, anger, death, aggression, all the negative and dark corners of the human experience

I'm not as one dimensional as I was when I was younger. 

So what do I listen to? lots of stuff.

Classic Rock, like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. Punk Music like Iggy Pop, The Misfits and The Clash. All the Top 40 hits from the 80's, 90's Grunge and one or two modern artists like The Black Keys, Radiohead and The Mars Volta,

Even the metal artists themselves seem to outgrow metal.

The once mighty Metallica cut their hair as their music grew more and more commercially oriented and "MTV Friendly"

About the only thing resembling metal you will find on my I-Tunes is System of a Down. They have such a unique sound and I just find it fascinating. It's metal, its art, its progressive it's alternative...

Complex and diverse music for complex and diverse times. 

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The Five Stages of Rock N Roll: Stage 1

Stage 1: 'F*CK YEAH MOTHERF*CKER!!'

   I was an angry, hateful teenager. I hated school, teachers, the students, their parents, my parents, organized religion...messy religion (haha) the good looking girls that shunned me, the ugly girls that thought they were good looking and who also shunned me as well as the jocks, preppies, math nerds, science nerds. art fags, drama fags, cowboys, rappers, goths, punk rockers, skin heads, cholos, and those guys that all they ever talked about were muscle cars, or guns. I was a stoner, metalhead, rocker, hessian (I never understood hessian, how are headbangers and german mercenaries from the 18th century alike?) and I even hated most of the other stoner-metalheads. 

   So I listened to angry music. Metallica (until they put out the Black Album) Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer, among many others. Grew my hair long and wore black, experimented with drugs, got into some trouble with the law, never got laid, never had a girlfriend, never had a date, never went to a dance, didn't go to prom, never showed up at school for picture day. 

Highlights of Stage 1

• Age 13: I had drank before but at 13 was the first time I got really drunk
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• Age 14: started smoking cigarettes
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• Age 14: Smoked weed
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• Age 14: First time I was allowed to go with my cousins to the bars in Mexico. 
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• Age 15: First concert, Metallica w/Queensryche
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• Age 15: Tried LSD, which became somewhat of a semi-regular habit.
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• Age 16: Was hanging out with a group of 20-something homeless drug addicts. I would often disappear for days at a time, sleeping under bridges or on church rooftops.
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•  Ran away from home at age 16/17 (can't remember now) to Santa Barbara , CA where I lived in a car with three people I didn't know.  While we were there we broke into a car, stole some dudes weed stash, went shopping while I watched the people I was with bounce an $800 check for groceries, and went to one of the dudes girlfriends house where, while he was talking to her in the house, I was "drafted" to sneak into the guest house to take the "money machine" - one of those big crystal water jugs full of change and bills. This financed our trip back to Phoenix.
•  

My first DUI at age 17


    I was a rotten kid. I hated myself, and everyone around me. I was impossible to keep control of. There was nothing you could do or say to me. You couldn't take away my shit, because I didn't have anything. You couldn't ground me, I would sneak out. 

   You could try knocking me around, but I would knock you right back. I never minded getting hurt or beat up a little, bruises and wounds heal. So the threat of physical punishment meant nothing to me. 
 
   The Way I saw it, everybody takes a beating sometime. - Henry Hill, from Goodfellas.


  Besides a certain amount of pain is good. It lets you know you're still alive. Sometimes you can be so helplessly depressed, that you'll believe that THE ONLY way to feel anything else is to experience pain. At least thats how I used to see it. I spent my fair share of time carving anarchy symbols and pentagrams on my forearms.
 _____________________________________________________


   By the time I was 21, I had long been using alcohol and drugs to self medicate myself. When I was in hyperactive mode, alcohol or weed helped calm me down. When I was depressed or having the usual racing thoughts then alcohol killed all thought in my brain, like 'liquid meditation,' if you know what I mean. And if you know what I mean, then congrats because that means you are f*cking cool as hell. You're the Kitties Titties!

   But the thing with weed was that I never had any money because I could never hold down a job. Besides, I hate always having to 'score' all the time, and in the days before cell phones scoring weed could be a major pain in the ass. I tried growing it on a few occassions but that never worked. So if it was around I would smoke it, if I had money and the opportunity came along, I would buy. If a friend had some and was busting out with everyone else, count me in, but I never went out of my way for it, and alcohol is so much easier to take.  


   And of course there is the music....

  Back in the 80's my world revolved around Metallica. 'I celebrated their entire catalog.' For my money there was just no other band that was as hard, and fast, while still managing to remain melodic. "Master of Puppets" is a masterpiece. I loved the progressive tone of the album, 8 minute+ songs with three main riffs and at least two guitar solos. This was all lost with the Black Album, but we'll get to that in stage 2. Metal, and headbanging, moshing, thrashing on my guitar was the only way I could let out all the anger I was feeling.

   But why the hell are you so angry in Stage 1, When the Music is so F*kkin Cool?

   I was angry for a lot of reasons but besides the fact that your hormones are in overdrive, most of my anger had to do with being ostracized, left out, hunted, despised...

Home, I have no home, hunted, despised, living like an Animal!

   Years before I entered high school and my teenage years, my social fate was sealed as the oddball, the weird dude, the one who doesn't say much. The, "yeah he's alright but he's just a little..off, you know" 

   Stage 1 is where you really begin to realize this, but you are in denial of it. You still haven't accepted your fate by removing yourself of all labels and "types"... and by types, I mean that you no longer feel the need to have to be either a rocker or a jock, or a preppy, or a theater geek, whatever... 

   All you know is that your situation sucks and you don't how to fix it. The anger is a byproduct of this resistance to the way things are. And since it seems that the harder you try to fit in, the more you just stand out, there is only one thing to do...Smoke cigarettes, get drunk on cheap beer, get stoned on bad weed, and turn the music up louder than you secretly admit is reasonable, just so you can get a kick out of telling whoever asks you to turn it down, to f*ck off.

   I got kicked out of many public buses for not turning my walkman down. And I'm talking about the old ass walkmans, the ones that used 4 AA batteries instead of two. Now those f*kkers were noisy.

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Ok I've Covered A lot, So Let me Explain...

 

  The Five Stages of Rock

Stage 1: F*ck Yeah Motherf*cker!

• Raging Hormones
• Misplaced Aggression
• Realization that the teenage social status boundaries have already been drawn
• Accompanied by the realization that, that means you're pretty much screwed.
• Cheap beer, bad sex (if you're lucky) good drugs. (if you're real lucky)

• Kick ass tunes. 

Next Time: The Five Stages of Rock, Stage 2

 

 

 

 

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