Rediscovering heavy metal, Part 1

Heavy metal was the first genre of music that I loved on my own that was separate from the music that my parents listened to.  It all started with bands like Guns 'n' Roses, Judas Priest, and Ozzy Osbourne.  My small group of friends in forth and fifth grades traded cassette tapes back and forth, introducing each other to new finds.  Eventually we moved on to heavier bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies, and Slayer.  But then we also started moving away from metal as we began to discover punk rock in the early 90s.  I saw bands like Bad Religion and Green Day in tiny clubs before they came into national prominence.  My brother took me to my first shows with his group of friends.  As I got more into punk rock and tried to get to as many shows in Cleveland as I could, I pretty much stopped listening to heavy metal.  The things that I used to listen to didn't seem to keep pace with my new interests and fascination with diy.  Between Cleveland and Columbus I saw hundreds of bands with my friends and I even played drums with a few bands in our own shitty performances.

So,  it wasn't until much later that I started listening to metal again through the influence of a few new friends.  But it really grew on me.  Metal had changed.  There was more of it, a lot more sub-genres, and it got really heavy.  I had also changed.  I was still into a lot of the same punk that I had always been into but I was more open to the variety of music out there.  I always knew that there was a lot of cross-over between punk and metal, but I had clung to a kind of anti-prog, anti-excess purity in punk that just stopped being so significant to me.  Plus, I re-discovered that a lot of what I had found in punk was there in metal, too.  It was fast and aggressive.  They are both unapologetic for being what they are, and they both strive to create accepting communities within their fandom.

The very first foray that I made back into metal was listening to Slayer's Undisputed Attitude.  A friend had burned a copy for me because he figured (rightly so, it turns out) that a punk cover album would be a good transition.  The album is spotty (aside from the interstitial solo, the cover of "Filler/I Don't Wanna Hear It" is easily the best track on the album) but it beat the shit out of The Spaghetti Incident?"  That friend was really into Metallica, so I heard a lot of his drunken convincing that I should give their later catalogue a shot.  This didn't work out as well.  I liked their early stuff but couldn't really get into anything after ...And Justice for All.

After a lot of trial-and-error, I found my way back to the niche of metal that I really liked, and it started to go into heavier rotation than a lot of the punk that had been my mainstay for so long.

When I moved back to Ohio and near my family, I had the chance to start going to shows with my brother again.  He had left punk behind a while back and had stuck with heavy metal.  We shared some of the same taste in music, though I think he can run into some pretty questionable stuff (he would, of course, disagree) and we started planning to go to shows again.

Over the last couple of years I have had the chance to see a lot of great shows with him.  We saw the oddly-matched lineup of The Eagles of Death Metal (who do not play death metal), Russian Circles, and Mastadon.  We missed part of Russian Circles but stood through the entirety of Mastodon's 2+ hour long set.  We also went to see Gojira, who are among my favorite bands now.

I don't have a satisfying ending to this post because I want to write about a show we recently saw and this is already getting long.  I recognize that this post breaks the tone and theme of content matter that I have established for the blog so far.  That's what you get.

Re-reading books, Pt. 2

The word on the virtual street has it that J.D. Salinger's family will be releasing the author's previously unpublished works in the near future.  Actually, I can pinpoint my precise level of insufferability even more exactly.  I was riding with my friend and his son to get dinner when I heard the piece come on NPR.  I shushed everyone in the car so that I could turn up the radio and listen to the news about the most English-majory of 20th century American authors.  Every good English major already knew that Salinger had kept writing after he had withdrawn from the public and many of us thought about the treasure trove of material he must have been accumulating.
After hearing the news, I decided to dig up a couple of my old Salinger books to prepare.  Just last night I finished reading Seymour an Introduction.  
About the best and the worst thing that I can say about it is that it is pretty much what I remembered it to be.  I guess the problem is more with me, the reader, returning to an author who had meant so much to me at a point when I was rather impressionable.  This reader found some solace in Salinger's paradoxical blend of sincerity and irony that would prefigure such authors as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, and other of the so-called post-postmodern.  It was new to me when I read it in college but now the irony seems worn and more cynical than I remember.  The sincerity is also a bit thinner and edges into bathos.  This is most likely a reflection of my own attitudes at different times in my life.  The tropes have lost their shine, as it were.
I will read the new books when they come out.  I am even planning on reading Franny and Zooey in the near future.  There is a part of me, though, that hopes that Salinger will have aged a bit more in his writing away from the public.

Bedtime reading

I have a habit of picking up and starting new books to read while lying in bed and preparing for sleep.  Usually I will already be in the middle of 4 or 5 other books or will be close to finishing something that hasn't been keeping my attention and the prospect of something new will lure me away from whatever it is that had been on my plate before.  Usually I will keep up with the rhythm of reading this book for a few nights before realizing that I don't know who a pivotal character is or what is happening in the narration.  I won't really know what is going on because the novel has just been a soporific.  Most times I will fight through this until I figure it out, sometimes I will go back and re-read the beginning to get things right, and on rare occasions I will just give up.
Yesterday I finally threw in the towel on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verse after getting about 200 pages in.  I had put this book on my 2019 reading list because I have moved this book with me probably at least 6 or 7 times and had it in apartments in at least 3 states and I just needed to finally get through it.  I had read a lot of Rushdie in college and graduate school and generally enjoyed it (there was a stretch of time when I thought, like many a good student of postmodernism, that Midnight's Children would feature prominently in my scholarship).  This did not turn out to be the case with Satanic Verses.  The novel opens with two men falling out of the sky and there is some allegory relating them to Islamic angels.  There are famous actors and spurned lovers.  This is about all I got from it.
In my grad school days I would have powered through the book so I could add it to the tally and may even have made my way through some turgid scholarship about it so that I could stay as confused as I would have been in the first place or discover how I had mis-read it.  Instead, I started reading a Murakami book which I anticipate liking more.