This book was a makeweight in a 'buy two for £7' deal in HMV, which used to be a record shop but now is a more general emporium of random things. Including books. (I bought Slaughterhouse Five and The Boys from Brazil in a previous deal - both reviewed back in September.) It felt sort of suitable that I would be buying a book about music from HMV despite the company's drift away from selling music.
A History of Heavy Metal by Andrew O'Neill is based on a stand up comedy show about heavy metal. Without wishing to be too rude, that's pretty apparent from the way it's written. The narrative goes off on tangents. There are a lot of opinions. And it gets quite repetitive after a while, like he's forgotten what he has previously told you (twice) about a particular album or how he thinks Metallica declined in greatness when they went commercial.
The thing is that heavy metal is inherently ridiculous. Andrew sort of recognises this, but rather than let the stupid excesses of the movement speak for themselves, he feels the need to put his own gloss on it by telling you they were stupid. And fair enough, if you despise 'glam metal' as much as he does, maybe recounting stories from those bands is tedious. I did like his comment about forcing himself to watch a documentary about Motley Crue as research for the book. I understand how painful that must have been - but really it did feel like the minimum amount of effort in terms of actual research.
But although Andrew is willing to admit that metal is often just very silly, he also tries to paint it as an important movement, uniting outsiders and providing a community for people who don't feel they fit in. Which is all fair, I suppose. He tells his own story of getting into metal a couple of times in the book and that was more interesting than being told, again, how his favourite Death Metal albums were amazingly innovative and genre-defining.
Overall the book could have done with more stories, more nuggets gleaned from research and fewer opinions (or at least just being told those opinions once). There was plenty left out and glossed over - the entire Satanic Panic in the USA in the 1980s, for example. But maybe he didn't know much about that because I'm aware that religious moral panics are often opaque to people outside the religion.
Several times he alluded to stuff, but didn't return to the topic to explain it further. The reader is just assumed to know what went wrong with Celtic Frost, for example. That's the one that really stuck out but there were several others. It feels like the book is aimed at people who don't know much about heavy metal; the interrupted explanations wouldn't be helpful.
He also has a very annoying authorial habit of putting jokes and tidbits of information in footnotes. These really interrupted the flow of reading. A long time ago I was told that if a point (or a joke) is worth a footnote, then you should really think about including it in the main body of the text. The continual footnoting did make me wonder if he doubted his ability to land a joke. Truthfully, many didn't land. They just got in the way.
Although I wouldn't particularly recommend the book, it did have some highlights. I liked this comment on page 84 so much I read it out loud to Cathy:
"Def Leppard's enormous success in the States is what the other... bands were aiming for, though none went for it with quite the same ferocity, plus of course they possibly lacked the shark-eyed commercial killer instinct and pop chops to write the sorts of songs that millions of people want to hear. Bear in mind that most humans are awful, and so if millions of people want to buy your art... it's probably not good art."
That final sentence really made me laugh.
And towards the end of the book (p.271) this rather astute comment caught my eye:
"One of the major advantages of cassette tapes was the lack of random access - you just started it where you'd left off. As a result albums and mix tapes got listened to more evenly. Records and CDs favour the beginnings of albums, and MP3s lead to the universal experience of listening to someone dj-ing at a party and skipping tracks halfway through. Being spoiled for choice means many people give albums less time to grow, and fewer listens in general."
I remember listening mainly to cassettes in my formative musical years in the late 80s and early 90s (when, I admit, I really liked Def Leppard) and I think he is on to something here. There are a lot of album tracks I listened to in order to get to the bits I liked because fiddling about with fast forward or rewind was annoying. Even the few albums I had on CD got taped onto cassettes because I didn't have a CD played in my bedroom, but I did have a succession of tape-players.
(It's strange, because at the time there was a big movement saying 'home taping was killing music' but I got introduced to a lot of bands whose albums I have subsequently bought and rebought in different editions because a mate taped me a copy to listen to.)
There's a certain level of nostalgia at work there, and that is a theme for the book. The chapter titled 'In the Late Nineties Every Band I Loved Went Shit' gives it away. The following chapter slagging off Nu Metal feels a bit like an old guy complaining the music the kids are into is rubbish. The nasty comments about Linkin Park felt awkward given Chester Bennington's suicide - which was actually in the same year this book was published. I'd have taken them out for the paperback release because it really comes across as punching down.
The book ends with a rather silly series of predictions that heavy metal will eventually take over the world, which mainly seems to be a rather long gag about the heat death of the universe arriving before the release of a new Guns & Roses album. It felt like unnecessary filler when the previous chapter about the current state of heavy metal had ended on an optimistic high point.
And a note on indexes - the book really needed two, an index of bands and artists and an index of topics.
So, this is 'a' history of heavy metal. I think 'the' history is probably still waiting to be written.
