Thought vomit is a series of hastily considered, discursive bullshit.
Here’s a scene from 1980’s comedy classic Airplane!
Did you notice that Robert Stack’s Captain Rex Kramer is using a telephone in the car? Probably not now that cell phones are ubiquitous. This gag was even turning a shade of passé when it was shot: NTT rolled out a version of 1G in Tokyo in 1979. NMT, Nordic Mobile Telephone, was kicked into service in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway in 1981. Not that Airplane!‘s writers should’ve known about the burgeoning field of mobile telephony networks. And, naturally, there’d be some future nausea hanging around that still gave this punchline some kick when I first encountered it in the early ’90s. But, yeah, unless you told me to look for it these days, I probably wouldn’t even see it.
I’ve always been fascinated with these kinds of instances of incongruity that get obliterated by acclimation or evolution. Jokes that no longer land, theories that are suddenly so elemental that they read more like pothead non-epiphanies.
In metal, I refer to these moments as the Van Halen Effect. Much like the phone convo above, Eddie Van Halen’s pioneering shred was quickly subsumed by the guitarists who followed. While Van Halen’s playing is still impressive due to his skill and artistry, I often wonder if younger people can hear it without applying their own context upon it.
And, to be clear, that aforementioned youngin’ context is that Van Halen’s neoclassical-y noodling has been thoroughly normalized by 40 years of pop, hammered into the public consciousness most forcefully in the ’80s through hair metal, already a lesser variant of Van Halen, and “Beat It,” which uses a Van Halen solo like wallpaper rather than spotlighting it as the main attraction. The question, then: Does “Eruption” still wow with a Marty-McFly-type reaction or have legions of clumsy hair metal hacks diminished its impact? Followup: If no one tells you that “Eruption” is impressive, do you think it’s impressive if it has been so normal for so long?
In the extreme environs of metal, Swedeath is has been closing in on something approximating the Van Halen Effect, especially after metalcore/hardcore’s brief beatdown dalliance with HM-2s in the late-’00s through mid-’10s. Nihilist laid the groundwork for that chainsaw-up-in-your-guts sound, Entombed and other Sunlight Studio customers codified it, and then you have 30 years of bands basically re-recording the template, adding light touches of modernity that are then sucked up by the next band.
Regarding the children of Entombed, these bands are not hacks in the same way an ’80s fretboard tapper with perms and feather earrings were hacks. I like most of them fine because I’m a mark for a dimed HM-2 and I have the VSTs to prove it. Brutally Deceased can hang with the god tier, Baest does a good take on a Floridian variant (the members are Danish, hail death metal globalism), and on and on. But it’s kind of undeniable that the ur-texts — Entombed, Dismember, Grave, etc. — are superior. Or are they? Keep in mind, I am old and, more importantly, I got into the game when a bunch of old heads barked at me that those bands were the “real” ones. If you were raised on Bloodbath already being a classic and never had to go through record store/message board hazing, what does that do to your brain when you finally encounter Clandestine? Can you hear it like I hear it? Do you feel like I do, kid?
Like any culture debate, this conversation can easily take on an old-man-yells-at-cloud fervor; especially in metal, especially because metal is naturally imbued with an elitist pedantry that lionizes innovation, so long as that innovation has been thoroughly vetted for enduring appeal. This innovation, then, becomes “true,” the way to do the core version of a sound, kinda like how “prog” in the rock sphere refers mostly to a narrow slice of experimental European rock in the ’70s. In turn, this delegate-elected trueness gilds the “originating” artist with a gleam of genius, even if that genius comes down to being in the right place at the right time or lucking out into a fortuitous fuck-up that just stuck.
Indeed, how many of the bedrock sonic details of metal are simply because artists didn’t have money and had to be resourceful, or were goofing around in the studio, or, you know, didn’t know what they were doing, full stop? And yet, entire schools of metal would rise up around them regardless, standardizing technique and equipment and preaching copycat perfectionism, even though the respective foundational moments, those originating sparks of genius, were just…uh…random.
This is a very human thing, to discount the idea that some things, important things at that, are just the confluence of random-ass events. And, digging down in search of supporting data, to find some Occam’s razor epiphany, is usually more indicative of one’s own interests, expertise, and biases.
Take Sam Miller’s piece on Don Mattingly’s 1987 Topps card. Mark Arduini bought a box of old baseball cards and pulled one of the then-young Yankee slugger. He turned it over and was struck by a WTF. “On the back, under Mattingly’s career stats and above a line of baseball trivia,” Miller writes, “Arduini read the one-line Mattingly bio. It was a jaw-dropping scoop: ‘Don’s birth certificate states he was born in 1962, not 1961 as shown in most baseball records.'”
Miller traces the card’s tidbit back to Bill Haber, “baseball’s one-man FBI” who was responsible for the backs of Topps baseball cards from 1967 to at least when Mattingly’s was minted. His pre-internet skill? Being indefatigable in his quest for correct data.
Haber’s superpowers were persistence, creativity and the United States Postal Service. He would send letters to funeral homes and cemeteries, to ballplayers’ descendants, to newspaper archivists and to public agencies — along with the fees demanded for broad public records searches — hunting for clues. Sometimes, he just needed to pin down a cause of death. Other times, it was up to him to unearth, nearly from scratch, the biographical data of players who might have appeared only in a game or two, perhaps under only a surname, perhaps under a fake surname. As Madden recounted in his tribute to Haber: “Most recently he solved a 100-year-old mystery involving a player listed in the record books only as John McGraw (not the legendary N.Y. Giants manager) who pitched in one game for Brooklyn of the Federal League in 1914. The only other information was that he was born in 1890. It took years of painstaking research for Haber to determine McGraw’s real name was Roy Hoar which he changed to Heir and then played professional ball under the name McGraw so as not to lose his amateur status at Carnegie Tech. The final clues to Hoar’s true identity were supplied by his two sons, whom Haber tracked down in California.”
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29043681/cracking-birthday-mystery-don-mattingly-1987-topps-baseball-card
Haber was obsessed with biographical milestones, particularly dates. “He had multiple index cards for every player who had ever played, Carter remembers: one for date of birth, one for cause of death, one for middle name and so on, all filed in long rows in his Brooklyn basement.” He was also quite fastidious when it came to stats, constructing the tables that appeared on the back of cards by himself. “His son, Marty Haber — for a time locally famous as the Brooklyn Cyclones’ on-field emcee Party Marty — once boasted that ‘six people filled his position at Topps.'”
So, when Haber saw this 1986 item or a similar account in a different paper that pulled it from the wire, he knew what to do:
Here’s the thing: Mattingly was lying.
But this time, the Hall of Fame folder goes on to show, Mattingly couldn’t keep a straight face through the whole news cycle. A New York Daily News article, under the headline “The Hitman Comes Clean: I’m 26,” gets Mattingly to reveal the plot: A year before, he had been in a terrible slump when his birthday arrived. Eleven games into the season he was slugging .267, still looking for his first extra-base hit, and reporters wouldn’t stop asking him about it: “Every day, the same question. I was tired of answering the same question, so I changed the subject. I grabbed a writer and told him the book had me one year older than I was. And that became the story for the next few days. By the time that story died, I had a couple of extra-base hits and I didn’t have to answer that question anymore.”
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29043681/cracking-birthday-mystery-don-mattingly-1987-topps-baseball-card
As a journalist/historian, you have to account for the fact that people might be lying, I guess. Still, it’s hard not to take information like this at face value, to believe that certain things transpired for more legitimate reasons than a player wanting the press of his back, that said player was a rational actor. These two research paths are part of the divide in the response to the recent Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance. Skeptics hate it since it’s so cynical in its aggrandizement of its central figure. It exists because Jordan wants it to exist and many of its talking heads are there to blow smoke up his ass. The Jordan pizza incident, for instance, doesn’t exactly receive a rigorous fact-checking. However, nostalgic basketball fans and Randian middle managers love The Last Dance because it reinforces dominate narratives about Jordan and winning, respectively. In other words, for the latter cohort, it’s a 10-part series massaging their confirmation bias.
Anyway, much like how Haber was trained by years and years of collecting needle-in-haystack biographical data to trust something approximating primary sourced verification, classic rock radio still makes Van Halen seem impressive through context clues. You get a block of rock with “Panama” next to, say, Bad Company, you’re able to intuit that one of those things is not like the other. Metal does this through its shorthand similar-artist citations, where reviews tend to boil down to A sounds like B, with B positioned as the origin of the sound, for better/worse. After a while, you just unconsciously interpret metal this way, filtering everything through the A/B model. What is new must’ve come from something old. You’re taught to see it.
You could say that this is what separates metal from Airplane!: No one is making movies with phone-in-car gags today. The counter is that they do make comedy with Airplane!-esque comedy beats. Genre spoofs like Not Another Teen Movie, rapid-fire joke machines like 30 Rock, etc. In that respect, Airplane! is like metal. Because nothing in metal ever dies, it’s only rebirthed again and again like an eternal vending machine, any idea put to tape is game to be recycled and then evolved or devolved to fit its specific “true” context. This ups the importance of these ideas, making it nearly impossible to imagine a time before them, especially if the idea predates one’s own awareness of metal, that being when metal could be considered in the present. Again, one is trained through social interactions and available information to see metal through this kind of lens.
Even though Haber got it wrong, Miller wrings a happy ending for all from the tale. For me, these kind of stories leave me questioning what I even know about metal. If I missed a metal Mattingly owning up to something or relied on a Jordan-ass version of events, what does that mean for all of my assumptions? I’m just wired to doubt myself this way. What I don’t know means more to me than what I do. This works fine when I’m researching some arcane bit of old-school metal lore. Less so…in the rest of my life. Capitalism ain’t a fan of this mindset. Is what it is. Still, the point is, while I’ve been told to look for a lot of things…what if they’re not actually there?
On the other hand, the sense that there is no truth is so old, I might as well be answering a telephone in a car.
– Wolf Rambatz
Plague Rages 