Growling in peace
A tragic thing happened to me the other night.
No, not tragic. I hate the use of tragic when referring to the tragic death of someone’s family member. No matter how tragic it was to you personally, it is not a tragedy unless several people died. Preferably with flames or other horrible accidental means. No snakes, though. I think that is called cheesy and improbable.
Anyway, this is not one of my many morose posts. And making fun of someone else’s tragedies is not funny.
What a dumb way to start a blog entry. Can she get to the point, please?
OK. Back on track.
I didn’t keep an eye on the charge of my iPod the other night, and my non-tragedy happened when I got to the workout room at work, hooked my tunes to my arm like an IV, and nothing.
The little symbol on the darkened screen told me no more tunes for you.
My iPod is about the only thing that makes working out worthwhile. If I try really hard, I can ignore all my heavy breathing, sweat pouring down my face and bouncing flabbiness in the mirror. Just focus on some of my favorite songs. I really need to work on a playlist just for working out, full of upbeat songs or hard songs that push me to move faster, harder.
So I pondered the thought of working out silently as I had in the past. My only focus then was the readout of numbers and the wishing it would be over soon.
I immediately dismissed the idea of turning on the TV. That takes time away from the workout and the reception is very bad on the third floor. At that time of night, the viewing options are terrible anyway.
So I turn to the ridiculously old stereo. Fish around desperately and quickly for a radio station. The problem is, I rarely listen to the radio and I don’t remember the call numbers for the acceptable stations in this area. They’re all preset into my car stereo, so why would I remember? I spin the dial (yes, dial) and get a station I know will at least play rock.
But it’s that time of night where the hard rock station airs its attempt to play seldom-heard bands.
That part’s OK. I like listening to non-popular music. I like being able to hear new musicians.
Unless it’s death metal.
I can’t describe death metal if you don’t already know what it sounds like. Sort of like demonic growling and shouting and lots of heavy guitar and bass. Can’t hear the words, doesn’t matter if you can. You know the song involves death, destruction and probably juvenile references to evil.
I wondered, as I grew increasingly irritated by the growls, if I’d just gotten too old for this kind of music. Had I finally reached that grand age where I could denounce the music of those damned kids?
After a few quick, panicked breaths (unless that was the workout), I realized that it wasn’t me getting old. I never liked death metal, not even when I was younger.
Death metal has always sucked.
I was increasingly irritated through several songs. It sounded like sandpaper would feel rubbed against my sweating back. I was actually relieved when the DJ succumbed to a sidekick’s request to play a Johnny Cash song in the middle of the set. I do not like Johnny Cash. I hate country perhaps slightly more than death metal. I could’ve easily taken Cash’s version of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails, but no, it was Folsom Prison Blues. Which still involves death.
And then I found myself enjoying that song far more than a song called Bind, Torture, Kill, presumably a tribute to BTK, but I couldn’t understand any other words except Bind, Torture, Kill.
I sighed with relief (or with having finished the workout without stabbing my eardrums out with a pencil) at the thought that I wasn’t really old. Music can and still does suck, no matter what my age.
And thankfully, my iPod was fully charged the next time I went to work out. No nasty old stereo. No being held captive by obscure death metal and incessant commercials. I sweated and grunted to David Bowie in peace.
Was slogging through this rambling entry worth it? Probably not. Might’ve had more fun working out for Mel B.
I have to admit, when I was in High School, I went through a fortunately brief period of listening to metal. Not Death Metal, just plain ol’ metal: Guns N’ Roses, Poison, Skid Row, Alice Cooper, Whitesnake…Oh God, please stop me before this gets even more embarassing.
I watched the Headbangers Ball on MTV. Lord forgive me.
You’re right. Death Metal does suck. It’s always sucked. I watched a VH1 documentary not long ago about that whole era, and it just left me wodnering, “What was the appeal?” The music is truly dreadful. And I’m glad you could appreciate Johnny Cash, at least in comparison with Death Metal.
Why do you dislike country music so much? There’s a very fine line between good rock and good country, as you seem to acknowledge with your statement about Cash’s cover of NIN’s “Hurt.”
Blech, death metal. You’re so cool, so hard if you sing a tribute to BTK.
Radio that late at night’s a game of Russian Roulette. If you’re ever in that situation again, try the college station. Even if they play metal, which they might, it would actually be intelligent stuff.
Hair bands, on the other hand, the Guns N Roses, the Poisons, have their place sometimes. I don’t mind an occasional hair band song to get the spiderwebs out. Yeah, I’ll admit it. Whatcha gonna do now?
Matt, I did like hard rock and heavy metal when I was younger. If you want to talk embarrassing, we can talk about my fixation on Def Leppard.
I grew out of that, fortunately.
But I still like rock, I guess. I probably don’t listen to enough of the newer stuff, either.
Headbangers Ball, Alternative Nation, 120 Minutes … those were the days when you could watch MTV fof the videos and see videos you’d never see during the day. Where my great love for Tool came from. Way late at night.
Tool. Still love Tool. Can’t even classify Tool. Don’t want to, because then it would lump brilliance in with shit. But they were never a hair band, never a glam band, never crotch rock, as I like to call stuff like Poison, Whitesnake, Skid Row.
But I never could take death metal. I just thought it was stupid.
As for country, I don’t know that I have good reasons you could argue me out. I don’t like whiny voices. I don’t like the twang. I don’t like the general country sound. I know there are some artists that are kinda cross-genre, where they sound almost pop. I’m still not interested, as I don’t like pop particularly either.
It’s hard to classify what I like these days, because if I do, it reduces those artists to a single term, and I think they’re more than that.
My favorite artists: David Bowie, Ani DiFranco, Tool, A Perfect Circle, Nine Inch Nails, Tori Amos. All of those groups/people mostly make a point of evolving their music, are hard to define.
I know folk shares a thin wall with country, and a handful of Ani’s songs sound too country to me. A reason I don’t like those songs as much.
And Heather, yeah, I guess I should’ve gone for the college station, except I don’t know what they play at night. Probably jazz or something I don’t care for.
But that college station kicks ass during the day. The alternative station is fairly tolerable, too.
Speaking of Def Leppard, when I was in Ithaca in July, I met a woman about my age (32) or slightly older who still listened to Def Leppard. She had went to a concert a few weeks prior, and she was going to another concert a few weeks after our week in Ithaca. I could barely restrain myself from asking, “You’re how old? And you still go to Def Leppard concerts?”
I didn’t even know DL was still together, and I certainly never expected to meet someone my age who still followed them avidly. I’m thirty, and I’m looking for tickets to a Bob Dylan concert–that shows you how my tastes have changed since the days when I was listening to Guns N Roses. Apparently, this woman’s tastes have never changed at all over the years.
I’m not going to argue you out of your antipathy to country. I don’t listen to country radio stations, myself, and I know what you mean about the twang and the fakeness of it. Most country singers grew up plain, middle to lower-middle class kids like the rest of us, whose idea of honky tonkin’ involved hitting the bars on a Friday night in college.
Like you, I tend to like singer/songwriters, people who take their art seriously and generally sing only songs they themselves have written. There aren’t any current country singers like that, so when I listen to country it tends to be stuff from the seventies and before. I admit if I’d grown up anywhere but West Virginia, I probably wouldn’t listen to country at all because I would not have been exposed to it. But because my parents and grandparents were listening to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and others when I was small, in the seventies and eighties, that style of country music has become a favorite of mine.
I think some people never move on in life, just like they always keep the same haircut. She didn’t have an 80s haircut, did she?
I will further embarrass myself when I admit I still have my old Def Leppard albums. I don’t have any other crotch rock left, I think. But their earlier stuff is kinda good. I just wouldn’t demean myself by listening to anything they’ve put out in a long time, nor go to more concerts, repeatedly. Nor admit it to anybody if I did have a sneaking notion to go.
I guess part of my antipathy to country might be the fact that my parents didn’t like it either. I grew up listening to their rock. I didn’t like some of what they liked at the time, but it was definitely an influence on me.
I spent a long time not liking the Who or Led Zeppelin because my parents liked them. There’s something to be said about classic rock. Some of it’s fabulous, and some of it, like Def Leppard, needs to go away.
Btw, I had to listen to the radio again last night. But following Heather’s advice, I actually remembered a different station to listen to. No more death metal for me.
She had a short, contemporary haircut, nothing particularly eighties about it. After she told me of her Def Leppard obsession, however, I could never look at her again without imagining her at a concert, jumping up and down in front of the stage and pulling up her shirt. Or waving a cigarette lighter during one of those awful “power ballads.” She was a secret smoker, by the way. You know the type: they smoke, but they’re embarassed for anyone to see them. But you can smell it on them, so you know they’re a puffer.