i really don’t get it,
never have.
hard rock/metal in general, i mean.
too much sweaty hair thrashing around,
too many notes overcrowding each bar,
too many gratuitous tempo changes,
the voice (always male) too yowly or growly,
the lyrics, ridiculous.
i can dig the more spacey prog stuff from the ’70s, king crimson for example, or the o.t.t. weirdness of frank zappa, but the testosserterrain of deep purple/motorhead/budgie etc etc… i just don’t get it.

it reminds me of all the wankers i tried to sing or play guitar with at school.
i could never find anyone who wanted to do anything interesting.
all they did was spank away over and over for hours and hours at the same led zeppelin or sabbath or metallica riffs,
show off their paradiddle-diddle-diddle drumming,
their kakky renditions of les claypool slap bass,
drink black label quarts, smoke dagga, crow about forcing themselves on girls.

here’s a memory from when i was about 15 or 16… i’m at a house party in kloof, drunk and very bored, after one such disappointing “jam”. the drummer, julian (still remember his stinking name), with long fluffy hair and a straggly beard and juicy zits who’s maybe a bit older than the rest of us, starts kissing me and i’m kinda flattered but not feeling anything at all. so i crawl off a bit later when he’s getting another beer to go sleep in someone’s bedroom plastered with creepy iron maiden posters.

he comes to find me and i wake to his entire weight bearing down on me, smothered in salty, smoky hair and he’s forcing his hands into my panties and shoving his filthy callused stompie fingers in my virginity and his penis is grinding into my thigh and i can’t move or breathe. i’m choking. i bite at his furry beer tongue and he swears at me and slaps me, calls me a cocktease, and then he’s gone. mercifully. i need to vomit and wash myself but i daren’t go to the bathroom. i’m scared that he’ll come back. i’m lying there groggy and rigid with the reek of him on me, his plaque in my mouth, with that eddie creature leering down at me from the moonlit posters, with the drone of mosquitoes and the signature riffs of the morning birds over and over for hours and hours – bulbul, white-eye, hadeda, bulbul, white-eye, hadeda, bulbul, hadeda… somewhere a cock is crowing and finally i can get out of there.

coda: my younger sister got seduced by the whole scene and ended up pregnant at 16 by one of these fret-tapping frauds that she’d called her boyfriend for about 2 years. a few months after the baby came, he slunk off with the chick he’d been cheating on her with.

so yeah. i don’t enjoy hard rock/metal’s machismo-drenched doodling.
i find it the aural equivalent of being fucked badly.
there’s not a smidgen of feminine awareness in its puffed-up rooster strut.

september 15, 2008