Book of the Month - A History of Heavy Metal

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.

Disappearing from a high street near you

The news that HMV and Blockbuster have gone into administration this week, following a path trodden recently by Jessops and Comet, has prompted plenty of nostalgic responses. The commentary seems to be - 'We used to go to these places all the time, and now they're going!'

But that's surely the point - we used to use these places, but many of us (myself included) have been seduced by how much cheaper things are on the web. Ironically, in some cases the service was better too. Going into a shop and talking to a human could be a miserable experience depending on the human you talked to. You don't get that problem online. You can also see instantly if something is out of stock, rather than trolling all the way into town, searching through the CD racks in HMV, say and then finally being told by a dead-eyed gawky member of staff that 'if we had it, it would be in the rack'. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

I sound a bit bitter there, but truthfully, shopping in HMV wasn't a pleasant experience. I'm not sure what they were trying to sell in the end. It seemed like everything. The result was that often when I went in looking for a particular CD or band, they didn't have it. People bemoan Asda and Tesco only stocking chart-toppers and popular stuff. But HMV went that way first.

The problem was that HMV wasn't a record shop, but people still thought it was. People looking to buy music went in and were disappointed that instead of racks of CDs they seemed to be trying to sell high-end headphones or One Direction badges. People looking to buy headphones wouldn't automatically think 'HMV - that's the place to look.'

The head honchos at HMV have defended their retail policy saying they had to branch out into new markets, but if the internet has taught us anything it's that niche expertise is in short supply. Anyone can become a unit shifter of DVDs or CDs online - and they will always be cheaper. What you can't buy online is the expertise of someone who can say 'If you like this band, then you might want to have a listen to this as well.' Amazon try that with their recommendations, but the robots are a way off from knowing what to recommend.

I often have a discussion with people about how expensive coffee shop coffees are. My point is that you aren't buying a latte and a biscuit for £3.00 or whatever. You're buying somewhere warm and comfy to park your arse for an hour or so. Shops that get it right don't just sell products, they sell something else - like knowledge, expertise, informed insights and so on.

I think, ultimately, real-world retailers are going to have to get smarter about how they sell stuff and know what they are really selling. I've been talked down to in Jessops because I didn't want to spend more than £100 on a camera. Sorry, I wasted your time, Mr Jessops shop assistant who, incidentally, probably doesn't have a job now. I've been treated rudely in Blockbuster and made to feel scared about failing to return a DVD in time. But when DVDs are dirt cheap in the supermarkets, I don't have to feel stressed about returning a DVD any more. I've had bad experiences in Comet and HMV as well.

The bottom line is this - if people liked shopping in those stores, they wouldn't be disappearing from the High Street. The emotional attachment people had formed - as seen in the nostalgic memories people are tweeting - wasn't a strong one. In the old days we went to those places because we had to, not because we wanted to.

The old days are gone. And so are the shops.