Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 3

The time has come again to lay off my blog and focus on other projects. As usual, however, I’ve been turning over some posts and won’t be able to rest until I get them out there at least in rough form. So here is Part 3 in my “Oh, The Blog Posts I’ll Never Write!” series.

 

Good Muslims / Bad Muslims

I’ve been wanting to post an account of a trip I once took from Belfast to the Sahara Desert via Casablanca and back again via Madrid--all in two weeks. It was a fairly hard-core trip, with no tour guide, no itinerary, and little money. During that time, strangers scammed my travel companion and me for money (with tales of U2 tickets that never appeared) and others helped us out of jams (when we got stranded on the edge of the desert).

I did not see this live in Marrakesh:

 

Although I have had other experiences in Northern Africa and the Middle East, and more intimate experiences with Muslims, that trip comes to mind whenever I run across the debate about Islam, because I would assume that most of the people I encountered on that trip were Muslim. Some treated us poorly indeed, but there is no doubt in my mind that those who helped us did so out of a sense of hospitality at least partially derived from their religion. A student named Aziz stuck with us through some tight scrapes and eventually let us crash at his place. The most common forms of Islam, like many other religions, generally encourage treating others with kindness.

I suppose the point of this post would have been that Muslims are just like anybody else, which is to say they are complicated. It should be impossible to have the debate about good Muslims versus bad Muslims without feeling dumber for it--although the times do call for that debate. Personally, I'm even uncomfortable analyzing the issue as I am now because talking about Muslims as them compared to us is othering and hard to pull off without sounding condescending.

 

Who Sticks In the Knife?

Another post I had planned springs from a personal ordeal I’ve been going through. I suddenly found myself in a big international mess due to my tax preparer doing everything wrong for a couple years. One of the ways I alleviate stress is by viewing matters through the framework of ideas, and in this case I felt like Friedrich Nietzsche (as always) and Franz Kafka were relevant.

One of the many soul-crushing aspects of international tax problems is that they take forever to sort out and the sorting is labyrinthine. Imagine if your survival depended not on running through a giant maze as in The Maze Runner, but on filling out endless forms, negotiating tax laws, paying endless bills, making frantic phone calls, and biting your fingernails. The System is coming down on you hard, according to its own secret principles, and will do so again whenever it feels like it.

You are utterly powerless.

Along the way, it occurred to me that despite the injustice of it all, no one was concerned with the morality of it: the gears of interlocking apparatuses were simply grinding away. A great deal of the modern world is like this. The totally administered society, to borrow a phrase from Herbert Marcuse, dispenses with morality in favor of impersonal systems in which no one is accountable for what is right. Each person is a functionary who need only do their job according to the rules, much like--to take a dramatic example--Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt’s face for the banality of evil.

I thought Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals might shed some light on this, but I’ll never find the time to review that right now. But I also thought of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (free here), about a man named Josef K. who wakes up one morning to find that he is on trial. He never learns his crime or how he can defend himself, but as he spends more and more time trying to satisfy the Law (previous post), his life falls apart. Eventually, he gets the death sentence and the courts send a couple goons to drag him out to a quarry and execute him with a butcher knife. Curiously, however, neither of the goons wants to do the deed, for that would be taking too much personal responsibility, and that is exactly what the systems governing us--and we when we work for them--want to avoid. They would prefer the illusion that we somehow did it to ourselves:

The repulsive courtesies began once again, one of them passed the knife over K. to the other, who then passed it back over K. to the first. K. now knew it would be his duty to take the knife as it passed from hand to hand above him and thrust it into himself. But he did not do it…

Hopefully, I will escape the knife, but other projects demand my attention. Projects within projects within projects. . .  So for now this blog is on a slowdown.

 

 

Related posts:

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 1

Oh, The Blog Posts I'll Never Write! Part 2

The Times They Are A-Problematizin'

When I visit the record store, I tend to flip through all the records in several genres, from rock to metal and punk to soul, and then browse other bins (J-pop, hip-hop, alternative) as the mood strikes. This turns each hunt for vinyl into a curious inventory of pop culture imagery across the decades, and the results are often disturbing when seen through a politically sensitive 21st-Century lens.

Rockabilly provides a perfect example. I recently went into Shinjuku to see what I could drum up at Disk Union’s new location. I was hoping for some Stray Cats neo-rockabilly from the Eighties, as well as some old rockabilly from the Fifties. If you’re unfamiliar with the term rockabilly (until recently I associated it solely with the dancers in Yoyogi Park), think old rock-n-roll like Elvis’s “Blue Suede Shoes” and Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue.” I found records by these artists and many more, but I was surprised to see that many album covers showed the Confederate flag.

 

So it was time to learn something. Apparently, the “billy” in “rockabilly” comes from “hillbilly,” as in old country music, which has deep roots in the South. Thus, instead of slick suits and greased back hair, many rockabilly musicians sported Western blazers and cowboy hats, and played for record labels based in Tennessee. The sound caught on, moved around the country--and across the Pond--and evolved through blending with other styles of music. In America, however, the ties to Dixie were strong, and thus all the white guys holding guitars and grinning in front of Confederate flags.

I'm sure much of that music is unobjectionable, but I would be willing to bet that some of it reflects nostalgia for the antebellum South, slavery and all. Some listeners might be able to overlook the Confederate flag and troublesome lyrics in favor of the music, but I for one cannot, so as a record shopper, I steer clear of Confederate flags.

One artist whose sound I took an immediate liking to was Wanda Jackson, known as the Queen of Rockabilly. I love her spunky attitude and edgy voice, but she also displays, not Confederate flags, but a propensity to use lyrics of questionable taste for laughs. For example, in “Fujiyama Mama,” she talks about a woman so feisty she levels cities like the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No doubt many would consider such lyrics to be mere harmless fun, but can events of such extreme horror ever be funny?

Luckily, much of Jackson's music really is just harmless fun:

 

Every genre has its own visual language. Hard rock and heavy metal bands insist on images that sexualize women, show them subordinated, and make them targets of violence. Our reactions to such images do not have to be narrow ideological indignation--depending on the exact nature of the image, we may even see something to celebrate in what others find deplorable--but at the very least, the times have problematized much that often went unquestioned before, and I see that as a good thing because it furthers the discussion that leads toward a better society.

As I’ve written before, we each make our own decisions as to how much we’re willing to overlook disagreeable signals in pop culture, and the choice isn’t always clear. Personally, I won’t waste my time, money or attention on anything with a Confederate flag, but when it comes to Wanda Jackson, I’ll just remove “Fujiyama Mama” from my playlist and enjoy the other songs. Nonetheless, overlook we must--at least sometimes--because in our sensitive times, almost everything is problematic from some angle or another.

 

Kvelertak's Nattesferd: Review

The first two tracks on Kvelertak’s Nattesferd indicate the dynamics of the entire album. “Dendroful for Yggdrasil” is black-n-roll with touches of Seventies Rush, while “1985” immediately calls to mind Eighties Van Halen. The rest of the album navigates the territory around these soundscapes, with results that are never less than metal.

 

Kvelertak is a Norwegian band and Nattesferd, their third release, shows a band that has found a distinct sound. As frontman Erlend Hjelvik screams lyrics in Norwegian about Norse mythology, ancient ones from the stars, berserkers, witches and necromancers, no less than three guitars continually chug and wail, while the drums pound, sometimes reaching blazing speeds. There are no clean lead vocals, there are no ballads. The cover art, in the style of old fantasy paperbacks, features a bearded and armed warrior hunching amid craggy heights beside the band’s mascot, an owl.

How metal is that?

But while Kvelertak may black like Khold and roll like Vreid ca. V, Nattesferd has more polish. The songwriting is pop-tight, with touches everywhere alluding to past decades. Like many metal bands, Kvelertak clearly have roots in Seventies classic rock, but the Eighties influences stand out most, with “1985” hearkening back to Van Halen’s 1984, and “Svartmesses” featuring guitar practically lifted from the opening of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” I would also swear there are Nineties alternative influences, among them female backing vocals on “Nattesferd” and “Heksebrann” reminiscent of The Pixies and Smashing Pumpkins.

 

But for all that, Nattesferd never sounds retro like Wolfmother, The Sword or recent Opeth. It’s as if Kvelertak have adopted as a musical philosophy the statement on the band's website that introduces the lyrics for “1985”:  In the future, the only way forward will be to go back. Kvelertak’s sound has taken a leap forward into new territory for the group, and for metal, by mining sounds from the past for blending with the group's black-metal heritage.

I liked Nattesferd the first time I listened to it, and it only got better upon further listens. There’s nothing wrong with doom and death in metal, but this album, while heavy, only rises. You feel at times like the warrior on the cover--or even better, his owl, gifted with flight--surveying the world as it spreads beneath the blue vault of Heaven.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

 

Other music reviews:
Queensryche’s Debut with La Torre
Queensryche’s Condition Human
David Bowie’s Blackstar