visual synergy: heavy concepts

I remember riding my bike down Forest Park Road in the spring of 1985, and finding a massive bundle of issues of Circus and Hit Parader put out with someone’s trash. It seemed like a fantastic score, until I had lugged the stack home and began to actually read the magazines. The band profiles, reviews, and whatnot seemed so utterly calculated, even to my thirteen year old self, to exploit the frustrations and yearnings of blue collar teenage boys. Dee’s dad wanted him to attend the voc-tech to earn a plumbing apprenticeship – but Dee wanted TO ROCK!

Confronted with the Tiger Beat-dressed-in-studded-wristband reality, my rockitude went into dormancy for almost half a decade, until it was briefly resuscitated by thrash metal’s promise of being the real, dangerous deal. Alas, it was a promise better fulfilled by punk rock, which, despite its own set of intrinsic paradoxes, placed a greater emphasis on outrage and sentiment than on the hollow artistic wizardry of the power ballad or the eight minute guitar solo. Metal’s confusion between technical proficiency and musical greatness is not far removed from the pop music notion that a great singer is someone who can hold a note through an entire Minnesota winter. The American Idol concept of greatness holds no place for Tom Waits.

My rocky relationship with the genre aside, I have a certain fascination with heavy metal culture, in so far as it clearly articulates a particular and common enough strain of adolescent maleness. The key word here is “adolescent.” In recent years, there has been a trend among critics, comedians, and other evangelists of the popcult zeitgeist towards redeeming and ennobling the concept of RAWK and metal, either as a facile camp touchstone or in a celebratory, unironic sense.

The former are easily enough understood, as there is no retro artifact so unassuming that it cannot be dusted off, polished, and sold at a premium to the self-consciously hip. The latter, however, apart from a handful of old fans who didn’t stop believing (Whoa-oh-oh!), seem to be of the arrested development school of contemporary masculinity where “manhood” is a chimera formed from equal parts teenager, frat boy, and film/game/music geek. Is that hypocritical, coming from a man creeping towards age forty who dwells in a state of retrological limbo? Maybe, but as I’ve said whenever friends bring up the notion of “wanting to go back,” if the passing of years has done nothing else for me, it has given me a sense of perspective and cleared any illusions that personal tastes equal inherent quality. There is a world of difference between deciding what to hold on to, and refusing to let go.

Wow, that was a long introduction to a lazy music video post, but sometimes one must follow where one’s muse leads them. Continuing the last week’s Apocalypse Rock theme, here are some pinnacles of the music video art form, heavy metal concept video subcategory, post-apocalypse silliness subset:


Krokus - Screaming in the Night - "Krokus," because Iris, Delphinium, and Portulaca were already taken.


Queensryche - Queen of the Reich - I think this sums up my assertions about the genre and its target demographic pretty well. Listen close you can hear the rolling of polyhedral dice and the crack of the Rifts manual's spine in the background.


Grim Reaper - Fear No Evil - While the song lacks the magnificent bombast and oh-so-quotable title line of the band's earlier "See You in Hell," the video more than makes up for it.

Honestly, though, if I want to watch art-directed, fyoo-cha-riss-tik music video excess, I'd go with this simultaneously ahead of its time and hoplessly dated gem:


Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 - A testament to the power of one good gimmick, mesh fabric, and super-hold hairspray.

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 (from Flaunt It!, 1986) - Maura hates it. I love it. What more do you need to know?