I receive much criticism, both tongue-in-cheek and serious, for the music I listen to. I seem to have reached a stage of notoriety in some circles of peers for the extremity of certain bands and artists I choose to enjoy. I decided to dedicate this post to defending and explaining why I listen to certain types of music and, more importantly, why music is wholly subjective.
I understand that is a contentious point, I have had a number of discussions surrounding the evils of heavy metal, the dangers of satanic black metal and (somewhat humourously I must admit) the occasional person claiming the ‘satanic influence’ of anything with the accent on the second and fourth beat of the bar (curiously nothing is ever said about odd time signatures… is 23/16 perhaps the time signature of chaos itself?!) but I will attempt to justify my claims in this post.
Personal Reasons
This is perhaps the simplest part of this post. I listen to ‘weird’ music because it gives variety, every single time it gives variety. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good burst of cheesy pop now and then (I do own both Justin Timberlake’s live DVDs) but other than that my brain seems to be wired against the manufactured pop industry’s apparent motto: ‘They like this, so let us give them this a million times over!’ (Or as it seems to be becoming, ‘We want them to like this, so let us give them this a million times over!’). I remember the days when the Spice Girls first showed up, everyone was fascinated. I owned their first album on cassette but it simply wasn’t enough, compilations were the way forward for me. I discovered many different forms of musical outlet but all of them eventually merged into one big ball of ear-mashing boredom. I wanted more.
It was a good thing my father’s music collection was there to catch me when I fell, I was 11 when he took me to my first concert: Gary Moore (R.I.P.) at Portsmouth Guildhall. From then on I was hooked on what you could rather arrogantly call real music. But I will call it real music. Because it is.
I kept going, through the realm of classic rock I headed into punk. In punk, not being satisfied with ‘normal’ punk (I completely skipped pop-punk, I don’t think I’ve ever listened to more than 3 Jimmy Eat World or Blink 182 songs…) I wanted musical madness so, in my genre, I discovered Rancid. With Matt Freeman’s rip-roaring bass solos and Flea’s funk fueled aggression I thought I had discovered music’s pinnacle of energy and musical dexterity. Oh how little I knew… Browsing Pure Volume one morning at college I found, praise God, death metal. How had this eluded me for so long?! Oh yes, I had rejected anything that wasn’t punk as false and commercial.
Thanks to my musical training I could hear in bands like Necrophagist and Cannibal Corpse a musical technicality which I had never, ever come across. All of a sudden it was all about fret w*****y for me, I wanted to find the most insane technical music on the planet and I wanted it to be surpassed. Through the next year I found such bands as: Dysrhythmia, Behold…The Arctopus, Brain Drill, Meshuggah, The Locust and The Dillinger Escape Plan among many others. There was still something missing though, I wanted atmosphere! As I scoured the internet I found a whole scene of ambient and noise artists who specialised in creating obscure atmospheres: Gustaf Hildebrand, Sunn O))), Om, Niarch, Machinist, BORIS and Merzbow again among many, many others. I had reached the end of my musical journey, there was nowhere else for me to go. Quite literally. Everything was there from free jazz to black metal, renaissance to drone, pop to prog. The question I am currently pondering is this, where does music go now? It seems to me that there is very little happening other than the merging of genres. Bands like Ghengis Tron show up (I love GT!) and demonstrate to us that electro-pop and grindcore are perfectly compatible and this is going to start happening more and more. This is where my justification becomes pure.
I like boundaries to be pushed, I see the only boundaries being pushed in those musical areas which are ‘noise’. I listen to five Merzbow albums in succession and do not get bored, how can I? I listen to two As I Lay Dying albums in succession and, despite how much I like AILD, I get bored and want to put something completely different on. So, it isn’t that I hate familiarity, it is that I love unfamiliarity so damn much! I don’t get frustrated anymore at people who cannot hear complexity and beauty in such artists, it is pure arrogance. What will continue to anger me is the arrogance of other people telling me categorically that what I listen to is not music.
I couldn’t care less if you don’t want to call it music, just don’t then go ahead and tell me that it is objectively bad. We may disagree subjectively, I have no problem with this but please don’t assume or claim that I shouldn’t like it (or even worse that I only like weird music so I can be different).
So there we have it, why I listen to noise. I don’t expect many people to read this or comment on it but if you feel so inclined, let me know your thoughts. The next post will hopefully be better structured than this one and is likely to be about the claim of many of the religious right that ‘heavy’ music is somehow objectively evil. I will also try to address claims of backmasking and refute claims that some make regarding the overarching influence of satanism on rock and metal.
For now, I leave you with love.
The Rambler
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