* * *
The finest of the first generation of rock critics—Marcus, Christgau, Robert Palmer, Ellen Willis—ignored metal almost entirely. (Willis raved about Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4, but only after claiming that the first three albums “are mostly awful,” which is blasphemous.30) Their hostility makes a rough sense. These were people who grew up on Elvis and Chuck Berry, had their brains rewired by Beatles-Stones-Dylan, were on the scene for punk, and were young and smart enough to write terrific things about it. They had to make the case that rock and roll was worth writing intelligently—even intellectually—about. William Shawn had to be persuaded that popular music was something the New Yorker needed to cover, and that a young woman who had written for Cheetah magazine was the one to cover it. These critics weren’t about to squander their hard-earned cultural capital on an avowedly anti-intellectual genre known primarily for its cartoon demonology. I mean, the Ramones were too dumb for Marcus.
This critical negligence means that metal has had the freedom to develop from its bluesy origins in England’s working class into one of the most vibrantly imaginative and complex genres of popular art without a lot of outside interference or notice. (This has changed relatively recently—Ben Ratliff, for instance, writes about death metal and black metal for the New York Times; the metal faithful predictably cry hipster incursion.) I invite anyone who has dismissed metal from afar to check out Gorguts’ Colored Sands and Deafheaven’s Sunbather, two recently celebrated releases. I doubt they’re what you’re expecting.
I don’t promise you’ll like them, though. Kant claims that aesthetic judgments contain an implicit ought—I feel that a person ought to agree with my judgment of the beautiful, even though I recognize he may, foolishly, dissent from it. This is not how I feel about metal. I can understand why a person would not care to devote much time to music that involves a lunatic growling “Colon, cry for me!” over an unremitting tornado of guitars and drums (not that you can really make out what Lord Worm is growling about in Cryptopsy’s “Slit Your Guts”).
But I do think it’s a shame to spend your middle years listening to the same old Game Theory records. The summer I was twenty-two, stumbling around Europe, I listened to the Stones’ Exile on Main St on my Walkman at least once a day. Those songs slide right off me now. They gave me everything they had in them, and I’m grateful.
I didn’t get into metal until I was in my thirties, and then only because—this is really embarrassing to admit, but as they say in AA, we’re only as sick as our secrets—I was flipping through one of Robert Christgau’s old Consumer Guide collections and saw that he’d given Slayer’s Reign in Blood a B+. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on it, I turn up some unsuspected star chart that leads me off in search of ever more distant constellations. It’s like being seventeen again, perusing the testimony of Christgau and Marcus, scouring every record store in town for some out-of-print Adverts’ album I just had to hear.
Except, of course, it’s not like being seventeen at all. That out-of-print record is a Google search away, and music can’t ever again be as important to me as it was when I was young. Emerson wrote that “After thirty a man wakes up sad every morning excepting perhaps five or six until the day of his death.” This is—how shall I put it—true. Listening to most rock and roll now involves remembering what it used to do for me that it can’t anymore.
Recently I took my writing students to see Converge at the Metro in Chicago. It wasn’t like seeing Sonic Youth in Denver in 1990. For one thing, I was in the balcony rather than pressed up against the stage like a pilgrim on the hajj. For another, I had to keep my eye on a bunch of college kids to make sure they weren’t drinking alcohol on school time. But Converge (who aren’t much younger than I) took over that space like a bellowing woolly rhino crashing into a Pleistocene clearing. The enormousness of that sound, its rooms and crevices. The nearest objective correlative I know is in Christopher Logue’s All Day Permanent Red, which takes as its subject battle scenes from the Iliad:
Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.
Add the receding traction of its slats
Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.
Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.
It’s war music.
At one point the band lurched into a slow, martial burner I recognized from the new record, which I was still getting to know. I listened to it again when I got home—“Empty on the Inside” (as opposed to being empty on, like, the outside?). The studio version is good, but the song had been something else onstage—feral and free, the reverberation of decreation. I googled the lyrics. And was reminded that the frequent indecipherability of Jacob Bannon’s vocals is a blessing. One line struck me, though. You can barely hear it—Bannon’s not singing, just kind of muttering to himself, a pervert on a park bench watching girls walk home from school.
“I can’t shake these beasts from my bones.”
* * *
I. A note on terminology: the tag “heavy metal” was applied to various psychedelic and/or blues-based rock bands throughout the ’60s and early ’70s, but it seems to have stuck when Lester Bangs used it to describe Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, by broad consensus the first (and perhaps the best) heavy metal bands. As rock and roll became rock, heavy metal yielded to metal—splintering into a kajillion subgenres ranging from cough-syrup slow to so fast that drummers use electronic triggers to produce uniform beats at tempos faster than is normally possible with human arms and legs. Genre classification doesn’t interest me. Listen to Poison Idea’s Feel the Darkness followed by Repulsion’s Horrified, and tell me the main difference between hardcore punk and metal isn’t that one has a bullshit positive message and the other has a bullshit negative message. Hell, I think Steely Dan is metal half the time. But for the record, here’s a breakdown of some of the most popular metal subgenres. Thrash metal is fast and angry; practitioners often appear to have spent too much time lifting weights. Death metal comes from Florida, is superfast, and sometimes employs meters more often associated with jazz, or at least with Weather Report; lyrics tend to be about death and dying and killing. Black metal is from Norway, sounds like Joy Division on Benzedrine, and won’t shut up about Satan; these are the idiots who burned dozens of churches, some centuries old. Doom metal is low and slow, sometimes to the point of sounding like Pauline Oliveros, and mainly concerns the relationship between despair and marijuana.
II. Of course, Blake urges “mental fight” in the name of an idiosyncratically militant Christianity, whereas metal tends to be Christ-centric in, um, a slightly different way. But the marshaling of spiritual resources against Reason’s temples of destruction finds surprising resonance in the visions of technocratic nightmare common to certain strains of metal (e.g., the Québécois band Voivod’s entire oeuvre).
III. “To whom no anthems rise” is Richard Howard’s version of Baudelaire’s more straightforward “privé de louanges.” “Rise” is a nice touch.
IV. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk paraphrases Rilke’s directive as “Give up your attachment to comfortable ways of living” in You Must Change Your Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 28.
V. The scene also demonstrates an important difference between a popular art and an elite one like poetry: the possibilities each offers for communal or collective experience differ in kind and degree. Neither the bartender nor I need to identify “Ramble On” as a Led Zeppelin song—part of the point is everybody knows this. At least in America, there is no recent poem everyone in a bar would recognize.
VI. Another of Sloterdijk’s paraphrases of this imperative: “Seize the chance to train with a god!” He also offers an intriguing defense of the popular tendency, which I follow in this essay, to divorce the closing lines of Rilke’s sonnet from their context.
VII. When I interviewed Jonah Falco, drummer for the Toronto hardcore band Fucked Up (currently the planet’s best band), he told me that “punk and metal have been these parall
el yet constant diverging paths.” They seem to me even closer, in spirit and sound, than that paradoxical metaphor implies. As guitarist Mike Haliechuk said during the same interview: “I think I just like loud music.”
RHYME IS A DRUG
Mongol hordes carried rhyme from China to Persia, whence mystery cults infected Rome. Or else rhyme, being a natural linguistic structure, has no particular origin, but develops spontaneously in languages with the right features. On the one hand, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics informs us that “it is a thundering fact that most of the world’s 4,000 languages lack or avoid rhyme in their poetries altogether.” On the other, “rhyme-like structures apparently exist even in nonhuman languages, such as that of whales.”31
Since Chaucer consolidated end rhyme in English, there have been grumblers. The locus classicus of opposition, quoted by everyone who writes on the subject, is the prefatory note to Paradise Lost. Upon being asked by the printer of the second edition to supply “a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem Rimes not,” Milton wrote:
The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac’t indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian, and Spanish Poets of prime note have rejected Rhime both in longer and shorter Works, as have also long since our best English Tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, triveal, and of no true musical delight; which consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory. This neglect then of Rhime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, that it rather is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.
No one is likely today to suggest that poets should not rhyme because Homer and Virgil didn’t (in fact both do, on rare occasion). And Hugh Kenner inserted a sly footnote at “grac’t indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets”: “E.g., the author of Lycidas.”32
Milton echoes the Renaissance fit against rhyme. In the late sixteenth century, Roger Ascham deplored “our rude beggarly rhyming, brought first into Italy by Goths and Huns, when all good verse and good learning too were destroyed by them, and after carried into France and Germany, and at last received into England by men of excellent wit indeed, but of small learning and less judgment in that behalf.”
Various literary movements in Europe had argued that their vernacular poetries of like endings would be better off imitating the quantitative verse of the Greeks and Romans, since rhyme was a Hunnish vestige of the Dark Ages. Spenser, Campion, and Jonson inveighed against the practice, somewhat ridiculously—unlike Milton, they would scarcely be remembered if they hadn’t been so good at rhyming. By the early nineteenth century, the classics envy had mostly dropped away—Blake approvingly lifts Milton’s “modern bondage of Rhyming” for the preface to Jerusalem but fails to mention Homer or Virgil. For Whitman, “the truest and greatest Poetry . . . can never again, in the English language, be expressed in arbitrary and rhyming meter.” Emerson said of Poe, “O, you mean the jingle man!” To which Ernest Fenollosa, thanks to Pound, retorted: “It is absurd to belittle this sound beauty in poetry, as to undervalue color beauty in painting” (little did he know).33
According to the potted histories of modernism, rhyme disappears from poetry sometime in early winter 1910, when of course it just becomes less common, along with human character. Gillian White, for instance, advises us that “for early modernism, ‘rhyme’ is a moribund nineteenth-century, paternalistic attachment inhibiting more authentic artistic (and truly American, modern) urges and expressions.”34 The conceptual prankster Kenneth Goldsmith has actually said that “there are no rhymes in modernism.” Right. Except for those of Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Moore, Stevens, Pound, Rilke, Stein, Valéry, Williams, Zukofsky, Bunting, Mayakovsky, and a dozen others. The next two generations include such rhymers in English as Auden, Berryman, Thomas, Bishop, Lowell, Larkin, Plath, Roethke . . .
Rhyme punctuates rhythm and pleases the ear. Yet I have met several poets who have internalized the received view and seem bewildered that such a reactionary formal element should persist in our enlightened age. And yet nearly everyone who holds the modern prejudice against rhyming poetry loves the art of rhyming—who objects to Lil Wayne or the Beatles on the grounds that they rhyme too much? Assorted misconceptions about rhyme lead many readers to disdain its use in verse, while their love of music that rhymes is rooted in organic experience. As the poet Anthony Madrid, whose unpublished dissertation is the best thing written on the subject of rhyme in decades, put it in a hyperbolic text message to me:
They know damn well they like rhyme, but it’s illegal to like it, according to their stupid fucking theory about it. They blame rhyme for what they perceive as the dryness/unpalatability/offputtingness of old poetry. When they don’t like something that rhymes, they think it’s because it rhymes that they don’t like it.
Not, of course, that any old rhymes will do. No one mourns, for instance, the eminently mortal Thomas Holley Chivers:
As the churches, with their whiteness,
Clothe the earth, with her uprightness
Clothed she now his soul with brightness,
Breathing out her heart’s love-lore;
For her lily-limbs so tender,
Like the moon in her own splendor
Seemed all earthly things to render
Bright as Eden was of yore.
Note, though, that what’s inept in such lines aren’t the rhymes themselves. A common misapprehension is that rhyme pairs like whiteness | brightness must be opposed on the grounds that they have been used too often before, or that they’re just too simple. Pope’s censure in An Essay on Criticism gets trotted out:
While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees.
The facile reading has it that Pope finds the pairing of breeze and trees objectionable in itself—a strange position for a poet who elsewhere, more than once, rhymes breeze with trees. I was delighted to learn that Madrid had not read Kenner’s “Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph,” as that means the two critics arrived independently at (almost) the same interpretation of Pope’s lines. In Madrid’s words, Pope is “not explicitly stating that clichéd rhymes exist and should be shunned”:
Pope does not say that wherever the poet ends his line with breeze, you can be sure the next will end with trees. Instead, he mimics a poet being trapped (as it were) into generating poetic tinsel on account of the poet’s not resisting the magnetism of the conventional and obvious relationship between trees and breezes. Yet there are, after all, many possible relations between those two physical realities (including no relation at all).
“I would suggest,” he concludes, “that it is more likely the rhymes are ‘expected’ because of the phrases leading up to them, rather than because of the nature of the rhyme pair” itself.35
Kenner concurs, noting that Pope rhymed breeze with trees in his “Winter” pastoral (also, Madrid remarks, in An Essay on Man and “Eloisa to Abelard”): “Her fate is whisper’d by the gentle Breeze, / And told in sighs to all the trembling Trees.” “Anyone whom the Essay on Criticism prompts to look back at the lines in Winter,” Kenner continues,
may admire Pope’s skill i
n forfending (for fit readers) any supposition that writing breeze was what prompted the thought of trees. Pope’s trees have better reasons for being there. They are sponsored by the fact that the young lady whose name they bear is named Daphne, after Ovid’s nymph who became a laurel, and they tremble less at the breeze’s agitation than at the news it bears, of a relative’s namesake’s fate. The poets Pope castigates in the Essay have not this ingenious energy, this mastery of superintending coherence. They write trees because a moment ago they wrote breeze, and their minds are suggestible, not capacious.
Pope’s mind is not suggestible. “He means us,” Kenner says, “when we are reading lines of his, to be visited by no suspicion that the first rhyme of a pair has suggested the second, or even vice versa; to judge rather that the rhyme validates a structure of meaning which other orders of cogency have produced.”36
Chivers’s lines fail because of how they rhyme, not what they rhyme, brightness validating only the need for a rhyme with whiteness. Compare the natural, robust coherence of Frost’s early poem “Going for Water”:
We ran as if to meet the moon
That slowly dawned behind the trees,
The barren boughs without the leaves,
Without the birds, without the breeze.
The conventional, expected relation of trees to breezes is adroitly sidestepped. Something has been understood about rhyme here, about the stillness of the evening, about how the two orders—sound and stillness, harmony and absence—might be related.
So much for the opposition to what Kenner calls “normal” rhymes, those rhyme words whose pairing we have encountered before. There exists an equally obtuse and not unrelated disdain for “simple” rhymes, rhymes that lack the ingenuity and flair of, say, Byron’s intellectual | henpecked you all, Paul Muldoon’s zarf | scairbh, or Clipse’s confusin’ ’em | Peruvian. Rhymes such as change | strange, might | sight, old | told. I hesitate even to address this “objection that only a fool would raise,” as a fellow poet put it to me, but poetry is rife with fools. One of the legion of anonymous online ankle-biters scoffed at this rhyme in my poem “Country Music” when it first appeared in the New Yorker:
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