Halloween Countdown: October 4 – red dawn crazy crazy

It might seem odd to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch in a Halloween countdown, but, hey, if it's good enough for Stephen King...

In the opening chapter of Danse Macabre, King's ruminations on the history and mechanics of the horror genre, he recounts his childhood memories of the announcement that the Soviets had placed the first artificial satellite in orbit. From his perspective, it was an event as momentous and harrowing as the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Kennedy assassination, which may seem a hyperbolic reaction to a polished sphere containing a simple radio transmitter, but historical context is key here.


The terror wasn't about the crude device lofted into orbit as much as the delivery system that put it there. The Soviets had proven they had the means to successfully launch a ballistic missile, and so quite literally seized the tactical high ground in the Cold War arms race. Jet bombers had limited range and could theoretically be intercepted. (There was a Nike anti-aircraft missile site not too far from my grandmother's childhood home on the Woburn/Burlington line at the time.) An ICBM, on the other hand, could hit Muncie, Indiana just as easily as it could hit Seattle, with a next to zero chance of being knocked from the sky en route.

(This hasn't stopped the military-industrial complex from pissing away billions in trying to create a "missile shield", even though anything short of a 100% success rate would be fundamentally pointless. A successful interception would be poor consolation to the residents Hartford if both the Boston/Route 128 region and New York City had been transformed into fallout-belching radioactive craters.)

The Sputnik launch did mark the crossing into a new frontier, but intertwined with the visions of jet cars and lunar vacation excusions was the notion that Cold War geopolitics and the associated anxieties thereof had extended their reach across the entire planet -- an additional sense of dread in an era rife with panics, moral and otherwise.


Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Rockit Miss USA (from Flaunt It! 1986) - The launching of Sigue Sigue Sputnik caused much dread in those concerned about CFC's and the hole in the ozone layer.

Skip Stanley - Satellite Baby (from a 1956 single; collected on The Ultimate 50's Rockin' Sci-Fi Disc, 2003) - SHAKE YOUR ASTEROID!

...and just so no one accuses me of straying from the musical aspect of the Halloween theme month:

dok-u-ment - Live in Fear (from New Wave Complex, Vol. 9) - Nearly ten minutes worth of oppressive and dark synth. Googling turned up next to nothing on dok-u-ment, except that they were probably from Germany or thereabouts and that this track came from a cassette release, which would explain the why it sounds so muddy. (Personally, I think it just adds to its claustrophobic atmosphere.)

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?