by Ian Christe
Nowhere do such tensions run higher than in the volatile landscape of Israel. Ringed by contentious Arab nations seething with heavy metal fans, Israel is also rife with bands, venues, and a Hebrew-language metal press. Though the struggles from outside and within wreak plenty of controversy ripe for heavy metal subject matter, Israel is a difficult and confusing place for heavy metal. Though modernized enough to support a strong scene, heavy metal musicians who sing about life under siege are still damned on all sides by lawmakers and religious leaders accusing them of ideological crimes.
The slings and arrows across the sky are confusing, even by the sometimes cryptic standards of the metal underworld. On the one extreme is Arallu, with its “War on the Wailing Wall” attacking Christianity and Judaism from a Muslim perspective. On the other stands Golgolot, which reviles Christians and Muslims with its “Hebrew war metal,” and expresses a desire to play shows in the war-torn settlements around Israel’s perimeter. In the less frenetic interior cities, foreign bands like Vader and Napalm Death perform before large crowds of hundreds of fans, while local acts mix Mesopotamian influences with good old-fashioned black metal, death metal, and thrash. A Hebrew-language version of the long-running European glossy metal mag Metal Hammer launched in Israel in 1999.
One pioneer Israeli metal band, Salem, which formed in 1985, came under fire in the mid-1990s for recording harsh remakes of sacred Hebrew hymns. The band’s Kreator-inflected version of “Ha’ayara Boe’eret"—a post-World War II tribute to victims of Hitler’s Kristallnacht massacre—was discussed in the Israeli parliament, as politicians quibbled over whether it was appropriate to give the song such an aggressive treatment. Scornful, the band members declared themselves patriots and derided religious intolerance as the cause of world suffering.
Such trials are not for everyone. One of the most ferocious and accomplished bands in Israel, Melechesh, was formed in 1993 by nonIsraelis living in Jerusalem. The band fled for the more hospitable pastures of northern Europe in 1999. The thrill of being wanted by the police for supposedly harboring Satanic beliefs (the band bases its lyrics on ancient Assyrian myths) had lost its charm, along with the hardship of surviving in chaotic Israel without the benefit of citizenship status.
Tracing a long finger across the globe, the battles rage. South African newspapers recently warned of a cult of 15,000 devil-obsessed heavy metal fans plotting to take over the country, recalling television rabble-rouser Geraldo Rivera’s ludicrous late-1980s claim that a secretive network of one million Satanists was active in America.
More seriously, heavy metal acts are also caught in the battle between Russia and Chechnya. Despite a history of touring the Eastern Bloc that dates to Iron Maiden in the early 1980s, bands including Soulfly have been asked by Russian authorities to cancel scheduled appearances after a suicide attack in July 2003 killed twelve concertgoers at the front gates of the Krylyla rock festival outside Moscow. Considering the importance of live performance to heavy metal bands, even a temporary ban on touring is a mortal economic blow.
Ultimately, authorities would do better to listen to the anxiety and frustration expressed by heavy metal bands. In the poorer countries of Eastern Europe, where xenophobia has become a superficial salve after decades of political instability, the dead-end promises of racist politics have begun to intersect with the black metal scene at the end of the 1990s. These so-called National Socialist black metal, or NSBM, bands upgrade the old black metal anti-Christian taunts into unfocused anti-Semitism and prowar sentiment. When Satan is no longer shocking, Hitler and his band of deputies will do.
The neo-Nazi metallers are largely bedroom warriors, whose exploits range from the cartoon menace of seig-heil salutes at sparsely attended gigs to the downright creepy, as with a group that resurrected a Third Reich mystic belief in using yoga to levitate above the inferior races. Releasing formulized music in small editions, the calls for ethnic purity can easily be dismissed as nothing more than the experiments of musicians crying out to the isolated and the immature. The music can even be charming, as bands in search of national heritage have begun introducing banjos and other obtuse folk elements into strange, minimal black metal.
Nonetheless, heavy metal’s record as a cultural crystal ball makes any kind of hate group presence in the scene an unwelcome omen. Since its beginnings, wherever heavy metal has pointed, society eventually arrives. For some reason probably related to inquisitiveness and short attention spans, metalheads have been early adopters of computers, vegetarianism, file-sharing, and many other examples ranging from the revolutionary to the mundane. As metal appeals so strongly to the young and the intellectually curious, the onset of Nazi sympathies, however isolated, bodes ill for how bored suburban kids will deal with their political identities in the increasingly divisive world of the future.
While struggles abroad put heavy metal through the wringer, 2003 also brought the ill-boding unhappy events in the supposedly developed world: the burning of Harry Potter books and at least one death resulting from an attempted exorcism; Sen. John McCain and Sen. Joseph Lieberman plotting the revival of the failed Media Decency Act of 2000, which would include penalties of up to $10,000 for selling music labeled with violent lyrics to minors; and—most shamefully—the tenth anniversary of the incarceration of the West Memphis 3 defendants in Arkansas, jailed and sentenced to death with rumors of devil worship in place of physical evidence.
Despite these pressures, heavy metal flourishes in the live arena. Pantera called it quits after flying the metal pennant through many tough years, but its one-size approach was no longer required. The sheer number of touring acts was staggering. Ozzfest remains a significant summer draw despite the waning energy of headliner Ozzy Os-bourne. At the old stomping grounds of Donington, England, Iron Maiden headlined the Download Festival to a sold-out crowd of more than 60,000, then toured 10,000-capacity arenas across America with metal mainstays Dio and Motörhead; all three acts retained the poise and power of their substantial legend. There is enough demand for Ratt and Saxon to support two warring versions of each band, and the former lead singers of Mötley Crüe and Judas Priest took to the road as solo acts performing metal classics.
Presenting its first album of new songs in five years, Metallica released a new album titled St. Anger in June of 2003. After a long period spent on ice—with no bass player and James Hetfield undergoing rehab for drug and alcohol addiction—Metallica seemed anxious to record anything. While falling short of prerelease hype touting a full return to thrash metal, the record was a welcome dose of sloppy aggression after a decade of calculated finesse. There was a renewed desperation in the album’s opening track “Frantic,” yet the results seemed awkward and rushed.
Metallica jumped into the studio perhaps prematurely, with producer Bob Rock playing bass and helping stitch together a patchwork of ungainly riffs using Pro Tools computer editing software. After recruiting a new permanent “family member” in ex—Suicidal Tendencies/Ozzy Osbourne bassist Rob Trujillo, the group wisely packaged St. Anger with a free bonus DVD of the entire album being rehearsed start to finish by the revitalized Metallica.
Still, the state of affairs for the top-selling band in heavy metal history was more than weird. They retained the services of a therapist to help them finally “grieve appropriately” over the death of Cliff Burton, and broker a reconciliation between Lars Ulrich and Dave Mustaine. Meanwhile, when not playing tennis with John McEnroe, Ulrich oversaw the sale of works from his substantial art collection. The drummer had long ago moved on from rare NWOBHM singles to collecting art brut paintings by Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and artists from the 1950s-era CoBrA movement—his understanding of the art world was as thorough and shrewd as his teenaged grasp of early 1980s British metal.
While army interrogators cued up “Enter Sandman” in their holding cells, Ulrich in late spring of 2002 sold a mural-sized Basquiat for a record $5.5 million at Christie’s, and a Dubuffet for $4.7 million, just part of a cach
e of seventeen total works. He had plopped down $5 million for the Dubuffet just five years earlier; yet, as the drummer told the London Telegraph, he was making room in his life for a newfound taste for architecture. The auction proceeds were earmarked for construction on a 200-acre mountaintop estate outside San Francisco—the house that metal built.
St. Anger debuted at number one, and the CD sold over a million copies in its first month. Yet the level and intensity of vitriol directed at Metallica—derided as “Metallicash,” “Metallicrap,” or simply “Sell-outica"—reveals how significantly the metal community now views Metallica as a Napster-baiting, MTV-driven commodity. Deluged by Metallica bobbleheads and hockey jerseys from a merchandise machine that rivals that of Kiss, many feel that Metallica’s armlock with its fans has switched to a chokehold. Detractors were slow to realize, however, that the band’s increasingly ferocious live performances were the strongest in nearly fifteen years.
As Metallica rediscovers its heavy metal soul, two creatively booming areas of metal are likewise revivals of resurrected genres from the 1980s: power metal and metalcore. Both were transitional styles laid to rest prematurely in their day: power metal, the transitional step between heavy metal and thrash metal; and metalcore, the crossover that led thrash metal into grindcore. They have not merely been rediscovered by younger musicians but reinvented and fully realized, just as Scandinavian black metal bands in the mid-1990s adopted and perfected the original black metal of Bathory and Venom. With the metal scene moving comfortably nearer the mainstream, there is room for new variations that bring new intensity to less overtly extreme forms of heaviness.
Power metal in the 2000s is a largely European phenomenon, situated between the pompous frills of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” and the melodic Iron Maiden-on-speed of Germany’s Helloween. Around 1985, a pocket of bands like Warlord and Jag Panzer followed Iron Maiden in spirit, only to have commercial hopes crushed by the rise of thrash metal. Yet power metal bands Fates Warning, Savatage, and Manowar persevered and evolved. Through them, and cult acts Iced Earth and Blind Guardian in the 1990s, the spirit of sword-waving heavy metal has survived.
Completely unlike such sullen metal scourge as Motörhead or Slayer, the soaring vocals and scrubbed-clean production values of power metal appeal to the listener’s sense of valor and loveliness. The grandiloquent Italian sextet Rhapsody, whose ranks include a rubber-masked narrator, describes its sound as “symphonic epic Hollywood metal"— a madrigal adventure of swirling capes and dueling guitar and synthesizer arpeggios that begs to follow The Lord of the Rings onto the big screen. Likewise, the Finnish act Nightwish, debuting in 1997, spins a strain of lush, vain heavy metal that looks to fairy princesses and astral planes to escape from the horrors of the real world. It was also probably the first self-professed heavy metal act to record a cover of the theme to the Broadway musical Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Not all power metal bands are innocent to the angry techniques of modern metal. Labyrinth and Lost Horizon shrewdly bolster their passion plays with high-speed double-bass drum work inspired by Scandinavian black metal, a form equally orchestral yet infinitely more villainous. For unforgettable encores at select European shows in 2002, the like-minded progressive group Dream Theater performed Metallica’s Master of Puppets or Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast in their entirety, presenting pristine tributes to two universal heavy metal classics.
In the clubs of America during the 1990s, however, the legacy of heavy metal was being dissected at entirely different angles by hardcore bands like Integrity and Coalesce. This new breed metalcore scene picked up from the heavy-booted late-1980s mosh pit punk-metal of Sick of It All and Crumbsuckers, as well as the crazy speed-frenzied emotional style of C.O.C. and the Accused. Though fast in the 2000s, this music is not played at the insane blur tempos of grind-core—one exception to that rule being the highly technical Dillinger Escape Plan. Others, like Himsa, Freya, and Poison the Well, are virtually copyists of early 1990s melodic Swedish death metal.
With a mentality preordained for the moshpit came Hatebreed, a punishing Connecticut outfit whose brutarian stomp bashed into the spotlight during tours with Slayer and Ozzfest in 2001. Their major label debut, Perseverance, carries a torch for the thick grunting type of heavy metal that dimmed with the loss of Pantera. Converge, from Boston, takes a more cerebral approach, blasting a barely contained assault of raw tortured emotion. Their tumbling guitar riffs reckon to the hectic breakthrough period of Slayer and Metallica circa 1984, and the band’s masterful Jane Doe CD sounds more like Reign in Blood than anything Slayer has done in a decade—with off-kilter angst in place of calculated evil.
Interestingly, this latest meeting of metal and hardcore punk minds comes at a time when the hardcore scene most needs a boost to overthrow the derisively labeled mallcore bands, the naughty yet non-threatening pop punk groups who wear their tattoos like designer labels instead of inner scars. This is a mirror reflection of when heavy metal first turned to hardcore influences in the mid-1980s to defy the extra-super-hold of hair metal on the music industry.
Even without leather gauntlets or long hair, the metalcore bands seem equally ready to start a heavy metal riot than any of their more rigidly defined contemporaries. Heavy metal is durable and unmistakable, even when channeled in new forms. The band Unearth, from Massachusetts, employs a battery of onstage rock star moves sampled directly from the arena shows of Yngwie Malmsteen and Scorpions, complete with behind-the-head guitar tosses and unison clockwork moves. The union of those traditions with the swarming mass of arms and limbs of a hardcore crowd creates a potent live experience.
As has long been the case in Europe, heavy metal festivals remain crucial junctures for bringing together the wandering heavy metal fan base. Long-running events like Dynamo Open Air in Holland are now joined by Bang Your Head and Wacken Open Air in Germany, and Beast Feast in Japan. Most encouraging for Americans, after more than a decade of dominance by the inconsistent Milwaukee Metalfest organization, a full slate of festivals has emerged including ProgPower, Classic Metalfest, HellFest, and Krazyfest, each mixing genres and specialties. The most successful, the New England Metal and Hardcore Fest, after drawing more than 5,000 fans in its second year, launched a spin-off event in New Jersey, directly challenging Metalfest for the first time, to the benefit of the loyal punters.
Though it has yet to produce the landmark albums of its era, heavy metal begins the new century revitalized by a fresh generation of devotees. As the earliest headbangers reach their fifties, the music is beginning to enjoy a degree of respect that was previously elusive. Mainstream coverage of metal no longer plays on tired one-note stereotypes of metal fans as slack-jawed adolescents. While the details remained alien and mysterious—and ill-informed generalizations remain the norm—current coverage at least minimally acknowledges metal’s pervasive problem with dignity.
Overall, the music’s longevity is its own badge of honor. Its resilience during periods of flagging popularity has kept it alive and in-dependent—and attacks by retrograde forces at home or abroad will only increase its outsider strength. Whether in Iraq, Italy, or the suburbs of New England, heavy metal presents a cultural life wherever one is most needed. By channeling the universal need to scream into a steady and ever-varied roar, heavy metal has found its science and survived.
As of 2003, the term “headbanger” has even been awarded its place in the English lexicon, introduced and defined in the eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as a noun arising in 1979 to mean: “a musician who performs hard rock” or “a fan of hard rock.” For the record, the missing term there—"heavy metal"— was introduced previously, defined rather loosely as: “Energetic and highly amplified electronic rock music having a hard beat.” Thus, imperfectly defined, heavy metal remains mysterious and very much alive, a search for truth in a storm of folly.
APPENDIX A
The Best 25 Heavy Metal
Al
bums of All Time
AC/DC Back in Black
ANGEL WITCH Angel Witch
BATHORY Under the Sign of the Black Mark
BLACK SABBATH Black Sabbath
CARCASS Heartwork
CELTIC FROST To Mega Therion
DESTRUCTION Infernal Overkill
DREAM DEATH Journey into Mystery
EMPEROR In the Nightside Eclipse
EXODUS Bonded by Blood
HOLY TERROR Terror and Submission
IMMORTAL Battles in the North
IRON MAIDEN Killers
JUDAS PRIEST Unleashed in the East
KREATOR Terrible Certainty
MERCYFUL FATE Melissa
METALLICA Ride the Lightning
MORBID ANGEL Formulas Fatal to the Flesh
MÖTLEY CRÜE Shout at the Devil
MOTÖRHEAD Overkill
NAPALM DEATH Fear, Emptiness, Despair
RAINBOW Rising
SAXON The Eagle Has Landed
SLAYER Hell Awaits
VOIVOD Dimension Hatross
APPENDIX B
Index of Genre Boxes
Black Sabbath 11
Hard Rock 16
1970s Protometal 23
Punk Rock 31
NWOBHM 41
Early American Metal 53
Classic Heavy Metal 70
Video Metal 81
Power Metal 95
Early Black Metal 109
Demos of Doom 114
Porn Rock” 123
Thrash Metal 137
German Speed Metal 141
Glam Metal 159
Metal Movies 166-167
Hardcore Punk 176
MetaIcore 181