by Ian Christe
Shockingly and sadly, just as Exodus began work on a new album with original singer Paul Baloff, the Bay Area metal fixture suffered a stroke on February 2, 2002, and died during the night at the age of forty-one. Friends and former bandmates, including Kirk Hammett, lionized Baloff, a man whose mirth-filled but unrelenting war with the world embodied the heavy metal attitude. “He was my idol,” said S.O.D. singer and loudmouth Billy Milano. “Every time I was in a room with him, I was invisible.”
The healthy found themselves acting increasingly in a guidance capacity, an interesting role considering metal’s aversion to authority figures. “I’ve gone from being the voice of the youth of America to being an elder statesman,” says Dave Mustaine. “I’ve watched a lot of things come and go in my career, and I see a lot of people right now doing things that, if they asked me what I thought about what they were doing—if—I would say they’re going about it wrong. But people have to learn the hard way.”
In 2001 Forbes magazine ranked Metallica as a unit the eighteenth most powerful celebrity in the world, citing $28 million in profits in 2000 without the aid of a single major magazine cover story. (Among musicians in the ratings, the band was bested only by the long money earned by the Beatles and the short money of teen trilogy Britney Spears, N’Sync, and the Backstreet Boys.) Courting the final frontier of celebrity-face recognition, Lars Ulrich guested on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and appeared frequently on The Charlie Rose Show and VH1 specials, arguing his anti-Napster views and reveling in tales of dirty deeds Metallica had done.
Still reaping the rewards, Metallica’s 2000 tour was second in total ticket sales only to Barbra Streisand—famous for her $450 ticket prices. The band estimated the figure for worldwide sales of its albums at more than 60 million. Thus it came as a great shock after a nine-and-a-half-hour band meeting when Jason Newsted left Metallica in January 2001 after fourteen years with the band, citing “private and personal reasons and the damage I have done to myself over the years.” The last to come was the first to leave. Newsted soon surfaced in three new bands, including the revered Montreal thrash metal giant Voivod. Hetfield and Ulrich, meanwhile, were absorbed with parenthood, as their toddlers, born seven weeks apart in the summer of 1998, undoubtedly changed priorities for the fathers of thrash metal.
Among further surprises, James Hetfield—formerly a one-man marketing campaign for Smirnoff vodka—checked into a rehab clinic for treatment for alcoholism and a period of forced self-evaluation. With Metallica the longtime pacesetters for the music, there remained new standards to be set and hope for more surprises, worlds to be turned upside down in the forthcoming epoch. After all, Lars Ulrich’s tennis-star father, Torben Ulrich, set a record as the oldest player to ever play in the Davis Cup, competing just one month before his forty-ninth birthday,
Though it grips by the neck in adolescence, heavy metal certainly does not dry up and blow away as each generation reaches maturity. Says Rob Halford, who turned fifty in 2001, “I’ve been lucky that I’ve been around to experience so many different styles of metal, from the early traditional stuff that I was a part of to seeing how it’s changed into Slipknot and all over the place. It’s great. I’ve experimented, I’ve had my fun, but out of all that experimentation I’ve had the realization that what I love the most, and what I do best, is heavy metal music. I think that all the things I get out of it are still intact. Here I am in 2002, working on my twenty-sixth release, and I have to scream my lungs out and turn my vocal cords to shreds. I just can’t let that go.”
As the world now faces great uncertainty, heavy metal leads the way with huge ideas and unblinking eyes, coursing through new mediums with vigor as it attacks convention with songs too long for radio, visions too twisted for television, and unpopular topical critiques in advance of mainstream social sensibilities. The entire experience, gleefully absurd to observers, continues to lay down impossible standards, meet them, then tear all expectations apart and begin anew. “We need to stay rebellious now more than ever in a world that tries to make us conform to a base set of typical values,” urges Jeff Becerra of Possessed.
Of course, heavy metal will surface in forms that many metallers of today will barely recognize and may be loath to embrace. What approaches next is left to the loudly bawling infants of this minute. They will take what they wish from the long-raging legacy of heavy metal and leave the rest to the dust. Though metal is larger than life, it ultimately comes from life: inflaming the intellect, shaking the senses, and stroking the soul more completely than any sound before. More than ever, humanity needs these risks and contradictions.
As we stare into infinity, the void beckons, and heavy metal tempts its edges.
Epilogue
2001: Iron Man Lives Again
In the meantime, Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath enjoyed the limelight. A stupefying thirty years after the song’s original release, Black Sabbath won a Grammy for Best Metal Performance on February 28, 2000, for its rendition of “Iron Man” on the live Reunion CD. Bill Ward accepted on behalf of the band, although Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler and their families were also in attendance. Oddly enough, after being nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 and 1999, Sabbath asked to be taken off the list for consideration in 2000 and 2001. “As it stands now, what’s the point?” said Ozzy Osbourne in his official statement. “It’s a joke. It’s about glad-handing and grandstanding and I don’t want any part of it.”
Instead Ozzy opened his house and family to MTV for the documentary/improvised situation-comedy series The Osbournes. Consisting of little more than footage of the foible-ridden figure of Ozzy Osbourne haunting his California mansion, the program drew more than 6 million viewers a week in the summer of 2002, becoming the top-rated program on cable television—and the most popular show by a great magnitude ever to air on MTV. In the wake of this sudden discovery of the universal appeal of Ozzy, he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ozzy soon stole the spotlight at the 2002 White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C.— taking tremendous applause from the political elite as President George W. Bush sang the praises of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” oblivious to the fact that Ozzy was once arrested for urinating on the Alamo.
In June 2002, Ozzy and Tony Iommi performed “Paranoid” at Buckingham Palace for the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee celebration. Both the monarch herself and Prince Charles were present, earthly rulers playing host to otherworldly regents. “This means more to me than anything,” said Ozzy about being an invited guest of the crown. Only knighthood would be a greater honor for a poor son of Birmingham.
Oddly, a fierce unexplained blaze broke out in the upper floors during rehearsals as Ozzy was finishing his sound check, forcing the first evacuation of the palace since World War II.
AFTERWORD
As this paperback edition of Sound of the Beast goes to print, premonitions of a twenty-first-century heavy metal revival are proving correct. Without reaching the heights of long-haired dominion seen in the late 1980s, metal has found the traction to climb into a comfortable cultural position long denied. As of 2003 there has been a welcome return of black leather and spikes to mass culture, fueled early by Uranium, a daily heavy metal music program on the MuchMusic USA cable channel. In May 2003, MTV resurrected its hallowed Headbangers Ball—as sure a sign of metal health as the show’s 1995 cancellation had been a harbinger of decline. Better yet, the revamped Ball presents videos by happening bands like Haunted, Meshuggah, and Hatebreed—heyday hair metal pariahs Poison and Cinderella are shunted off to an oldies slot on VH1.
A recent survey of newsstands shows mainstream magazines of all demographics offering special heavy metal issues, while the long-running Metal Maniacs has sharp competitors in the market-savvy Revolver and the pumped-up Circus, Hit Parader, and Metal Edge. Lesser-known specialty titles like Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles and Unrestrained! nip at the corners of the racks alongside a sudden influx of shiny imports. This proliferation of print is
all the more remarkable considering the popularity of Internet sites like Blabber-mouth.net—a metalhead Drudge Report that feeds semihourly items on Cryptic Slaughter, Mudvayne, and the dating habits of Tommy Lee to an addicted user base of more than 350,000.
Yet the best news for heavy metal comes from the bottom line. While overall music sales during the first half of 2003 declined 8.3 percent, the heavy metal and aggressive rock segment of the market bounded from 10.9 million units one year earlier to 36.2 million—a whopping upswing in sales of 232 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. This news comes during a period of rampant file-sharing and CD duplication, while the RIAA subpoenas private citizens for copyright abuses. As music business trendspotters proclaim the death of the industry at the hands of immoral MP3 pirates, metal fans uncover lost and forgotten favorites, revel in more free and paid music than ever before, and breathe new life into old-timers like Bang and Thin Lizzy, sending them back on the road for the first time in decades.
In countless ways, the last lingering cultural traces of the 1990s, a period of long neglect of heavy metal, were crushed by the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in September 2001. Very suddenly, the nightly television news began to look like doomsday as depicted on a Nuclear Assault album cover, with crowds running away in terror from a tableau of collapsing buildings. It is too simplistic to say that hard times breed hard music, but in a culture under siege the conflict and torpor of heavy metal have found new credibility.
The changed landscape of an unfriendly world is also dotted with signs of heavy metal. The Internet has taken what was already an international music, smuggled across borders and stashed as contraband when necessary, and accelerated its pace across the globe. Venom records may have been cherished rarities when Hellhammer formed in Switzerland in 1982; twenty years later, headbangers in the Pacific subscribe to daily updates on the latest in Scandinavian black metal or Italian power metal. Years ago, Sepultura came from the poverty-stricken streets of Brazil to produce the award-winning video “Territory,” its tense appeal for peace in the Middle East. Now countless thousands of metal fans from East Timor to South Africa live on a volatile cusp, prone to harassment by powers that view them as symbolic of a breakdown in traditional values.
Heavy metal fans and musicians in Muslim countries already felt the squeeze of culture clash in their homelands before September 11. In Malaysia in July 2001, authorities began requiring all foreign acts to submit recordings of recent performances for government approval before playing. The Scorpions made the cut—Megadeth was banned. Reports in the tabloid paper Harian Metro told the nation that invocations to Satan and burning pages from the Koran were standard practice at the beginning of all heavy metal concerts. Soon state police were conducting raids on schools and shopping centers, stopping suspicious teens, administering impromptu drug tests, and conducting strip searches to look for tattoos to supposedly confirm cult or gang membership.
Such highly dubious claims of black magic were widely regarded as a pretext for policing the increasingly politically active youth of the ethnic Malay minority. Waging a full-scale war on so-called black metal cults, Malaysian officials claimed the corruption of their youth was the work of foreign forces seeking to unravel the Islamic fabric of their society. In the following year, Eric Cheah of the Kuala Lumpur-based heavy metal distributor Psychic Scream reported a business loss of 70 percent. “Pretty bad isn’t it?” he says. “Retailers are scared to sell metal albums, fans aren’t into wearing metal shirts anymore, and we don’t have any metal shows.”
After September 11, however, Malaysia’s interest in devil-worshipping teenagers waned fast. The country’s leaders instead declared terrorism the national scourge—after being deeply embarrassed by revelations of the infiltration of Muslim radicals on their soil. International investigators identified the country as the home of full-scale chemical factories for use in bombmaking, and cited a terrorist meeting in 2000 attended by three of the September 11 hijackers. Small wonder authorities sought to distract the populace with tales of witchcraft. Faced with real problems, it was much easier to blame the headbangers.
As wars in Afghanistan and later Iraq create immense political pressure across the globe, other weak national governments prefer attacking heavy metal to chasing terrorists. In early 2003, several Moroccan heavy metal fans were arrested in Casablanca on charges including “attempting to convert a Muslim to another faith.” Long beleaguered by religious forces in the West, heavy metal is now denounced in the far corners of the world as a symptom of American immorality. Even the most avowed foes of Christendom have no love for Deicide.
The enlightened French-language newspapers in Morocco ridiculed outdated court assertions that “normal people attend concerts in suit and tie, not black T-shirts.” Yet the fourteen accused—nine of them members of the bands Nekros, Infected Brain, and Reborn—were ultimately convicted and sentenced to prison terms of up to one year for such offenses as writing lyrics in English. The politically capricious nature of the charges was exposed when the judge quickly reduced the harshest sentences and dropped others entirely following the unexpected uproar from the local liberal community.
Wherever a country is torn between its past and its future, the heavy metal scene feels repercussions. In Cairo, Egypt, in 1997, authorities raided dozens of wealthy homes in the dark of night, arresting nearly 300 teens and confiscating Black Sabbath, Metallica, and Megadeth CDs. Faced with charges of apostasy, for which the penalty is death, the accused confessed to a variety of weird offenses including devil worship, listening to heavy metal, and wearing black cloaks. Police issued warnings to the general public to beware of women wearing black fingernail polish and men with ponytails.
For sure, these educated youth engaged in bizarre behavior— inviting trouble by congregating in World War II cemeteries each weekend to smoke hash, drink beer, and have sex—but their antics hardly warranted a death sentence. “We want to imitate foreigners and live life in our own way,” one student told the London Observer.
Indeed, in Egypt as in America headbangers make excellent scapegoats. In this case, they were simply a means to wound an affluent class sympathetic to Western values and out of touch with the religious fervor of the downtrodden. In the outcry against foreign culture that followed, Egyptian newspapers revealed their true targets, attacking American fast-food outlets like McDonald’s for apparently serving as meeting places for cult activity. Furthermore, the country’s highest Sunni leader identified the arrested heavy metal fans as Israeli spies— not mere servants of Satan, but headbanging agents of Zionism.
In nearby Lebanon, the Daily Star reported on “nonconventional teenagers” being arrested and questioned as a Satanic scare swept through the tiny country. No evidence was discovered, nor any crime. It seemed like a symptom of a familiar affliction: Fear of a black T-shirt. In fact, the Star scolded Christian leaders for exploiting and prolonging the situation in order to win new converts.
Regardless, officials from the Lebanese Office of Anti-Terrorism and Important Crimes recommended that young children carry mace for protection from Satanists; banned the music of Guns N’ Roses and Metallica; and required local bands to sign the following statement before performing: “We do not now, nor have we, nor will we ever play for the devil—even if someone asks us to.” This was either a meek legal solution to a metaphysical crisis or an easy fix for politicians living in oblivion.
This negative attention to heavy metal in Muslim countries puts Western rebellion in a new light. Unbelievably—as if it agreed that American culture was painful—U.S. Army Psychological Operations announced it was subjecting captured enemy combatants to repeated plays of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” during interrogation. In the Metallica camp, James Hetfield called this news “absurd and sad,” and Lars Ulrich quipped: “I feel horrible about this…. What about firing up some Venom?”
Even if effective in this setting, “Enter Sandman” is a lousy choice of torture implements. As the le
ad track from one of the most popular American rock albums ever recorded, the song is something the Iraqi people will have to get used to in their new free society. Just a few miles away, Kid Rock was using “Enter Sandman” as backing music on his USO tour to boost the morale of American troops.
Not for the first time, the irony was totally lost on the Army. As Army Sgt. Mark Hadsell told Newsweek: “Trust me, it works. These people haven’t heard heavy metal before. They can’t take it.”
In truth, once the iron ceiling of Saddam Hussein’s regime was pried off of Iraqi society, the headbangers among what Hadsell calls “these people” spilled forth. From the streets to the palaces, aggressive music fans were everywhere. The Boston Globe reported on the murder of an interpreter for aiding American soldiers, describing his bedroom as wallpapered with Megadeth, Motorhead, Slayer, and Vixen posters, a hand-drawn Ozzfest logo on the door. Television images depicted more fortunate young Iraqis clad in long-sleeved Iron Maiden concert shirts, defying clerics by struggling to launch free-press newspapers and radio in the chaotic postwar environment. In its profile of journalist Omar al-Issawi of Al Jazeera, The New Yorker described the star Arab television correspondent zooming across the sandy desert in a BMW to a blaring soundtrack of Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath.
Army intelligence to the contrary, heavy metal has already taken root in the Arab world. The larger-than-life heroes and sentiments of metal mesh neatly with the messy new historical realities. “Iraq after the war is just what our music is always about, except more so,” said Waleed Moudhafar of the Slayer-influenced Baghdad death metal band A. Crassicauda to the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s metal.” Now free to speak his mind in public, the singer actually lamented the loss of Saddam Hussein as a source of angry lyrical inspiration.