Música: School of rock: V is for violence
The thirst for violence in music begins in adolescence. The excuse is raging hormones. The solution? Heavy metal, of course. However, I think the best way to tackle violent music is to look specially at three bands whose different takes on violence have appealed to me at different points in my life.
Case study one: Slayer – War Ensemble
Chugging power chords, howled vocals, atonal wailing solos and drums that were so fast you weren't sure whether they were actually anchored to the rest of the music at all. To my 15-year-old self, this was the pinnacle of what I wanted from metal and the reason that interest quickly waned afterwards.
As a teenage musician, it frustrated me hugely that no one else could see the worth in Slayer. I was impressed by the instrumental ability, but also stunned by the atonality of the guitar solos and how this sounded (to me) as progressive as the serial music that we heard in school. Or how rhythmically it sounded like a modern relation to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (listen to the clip at 3:10) where the chugging dissonant chord achieves its brutality through a series of accents that are irregular enough to be entirely unpredictable.
Case study two: Sonic Youth – EVOL
As I entered my 20s, my metal phase waned and I started to get into various types of alternative rock. The violence within these bands became less literal and more of a creeping threat. Easing me in to this new form of violent music were Jane's Addiction, who sang about serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Ted Just Admit It ends with full-blown serrated riffing, it kicks off with an oppressive, lazy groove – too slow to do anything but bake in the Florida sun – with waves of distorted guitar lapping at your ears. From here it was a shortish leap to Sonic Youth's Tom Violence from the EVOL album where the violence is a shimmering possibility and the guitars hang like vultures, hovering around each other in a reverb-soaked canyon. They eventually break down completely into an ominous, drumless blur, a trick Sonic Youth have used repeatedly over the last two decades. On Expressway to Yr Skull, after promising us from the start that "We're going to kill the California Girls", the band finish the song with a blast of noise which precedes My Bloody Valentine by a few years before laying it to rest with nearly three minutes of gently clanging clouds of overtones bleeding into one another. Listening to it again now, it's amazing how the song just drifts slowly into nothing and just hangs there.
Case study three: murder ballads
As collected by Francis Child and later across the US by Harry Smith, the peculiar bloodlust of folk music still chimes morbidly with us now. The Blue Sky Boys slit the object of their desire's throat on the Banks of the Ohio and chucked her in the river for the crime of not marrying them. This is made even creepier with the dual vocal, as if the song is sung from the perspective of a pair of psychotic conjoined twins. Meanwhile, the music is a gently lilting Appalachian swing with a fluttering mandolin – the aim is to add pathos rather than provide a bloody soundtrack.
The senseless killing is brought up to date by Nick Cave. O'Malley's Bar makes for an exhausting, though frequently hilarious, 15 minutes during which our narrator variously crumbles the barmaid's throat in his fist or (in my favourite line) "With an ashtray as big as a fucking really big brick/ I split his skull in half." Nick chooses a creeping barroom shuffle as appropriate accompaniment. But if it's subtlety we're looking for as a contrast to Slayer's hammerblow approach, you don't get subtler than Karine Polwart's beautiful arrangement of The Dowie Dens of Yarrow. Three righteous killings, three woundings, one cowardly murder and finally a suicide framed in the sparsest piano picking out the bones of a rich harmony.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/aug/13/school-of-rock-violence
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