McSweeneys: The New Lords of Chaos?

PT. 1


"We have read your letters, we have heard your call.
We were brought together 'cause we've got the balls
To play the loudest metal, so hard and so wild and mean.
You'll live forever, we were born from your belief."

-Manowar, "Army of the Immortals"

As I strolled though Word in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, my eyes locked onto the corner where the new books are arrayed. A cover with scripted gold lettering and blue border framing the four words All Known Metal Bands challenged me to make one guess at what could be contained within its hardcovers. Daring to imagine what those words COULD mean is a silly proposition. It is what it is. An impeccably laid out book of over 50,000 names of metal bands researched and put to paper by Dan Nelson, published by McSweeneys.


The sheer scope of what Nelson (as well as the publisher, and the project's designer) attempts is obviously quite easy to overlook. As the myth of creation would have it, the Blues had a baby and called it Rock n' Roll. Then at some point Rock had a bastard child, and it was given the name Heavy Metal. As the unending march of decades continued, the genre became legion, and it's names were many, often bordering on the violent and sometimes misogynistic, and reading AKMB almost creates a Lenny Bruce effect, by breaking down names into meaningless masses of letters and sounds. Whether or not Mr. Nelson is a fan of metal or simply finds pure aesthetic value in the names themselves is somewhat unclear. However, a brief glimpse at his past projects (eyeoftheblackbird.net) suggests that Nelson might share the same metal muse that inspires people like instillation artist Banks Violette.

And though his motive remains obscured in the Cloudscape (see also: Clouds of Sadness, Clouds Disperse, Clouds Turn Black), what Mr. Nelson has created is less a book in the traditional sense than a bound art project giving light to the names, and not the sounds created by the people behind the monikers, and in the process he uncovers the simplest and most direct way to glimpsing the psychology of a band: what they choose to name themselves. Mr. Nelson has succeeded in highlighting one of the youngest and most frequently misunderstood musical movements of the last 30 years.

Pt.2

I have never known Brandon Stosuy to fuck around. His work in The Believer (published, of course, by McSweeneys) has touched on human subjects like sculptor, director, and Bjork's lover Matthew Barney, drone lord Stephen O'Malley, and a host of other folks never given critical press by other so called "thinking" periodicals. His piece "A Blaze in the North American Sky" in the Music Issue places the somewhat underground American black metal scene into a socio-political context that can only be published in a magazine like The Believer. When he writes "...as the U.S. dollar continues it's nosedive, our black-metal impulses become validated. We've become a nation of scrappy, lo-fi underdogs...", he strikes at the heart of the Beast of Damnation unleashed in America today.

With pieces on subjects ranging from the possibility of Gil Scott-Heron as a prophet and the street distribution of homemade hip hop cd's, to interviews with Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Sublime Frequincies), Irma Thomas (soul goddess), and Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi, Dischord Records), and three short essays on jazz, this issue might well have set a new standard for music writing in our New World. And adding to that small revolution is Ross Simonini, who has complied what is possibly the finest piece of free music given away with a magazine that I can remember. Intersecting and conjoining some of the most well-respected artists in the American underground (Animal Collective, High Places, Gang Gang Dance) with musicians from all over the world and their various styles is a highlight of the year. Simonini has produced more of a personalized super mix-tape than a simple promotional item.

This sense of personalized style seems to be the m.o. of The Believer, and their 55th issue is beyond necessary to purchase.