Fargo Rock City (23 page)

I suppose I might be missing the joke here (after all, Danzig's second LP was titled
Lucifuge,
which must be a synthesis of the word “Lucifer” with the word “fudge”), but if this was supposed to be funny, I don't think his adolescent disciples got it either. Basically, Danzig sings about dying and going to hell; some people want that sentiment to be a joke, and some people want that sentiment to be serious. Taken either way, it's mildly amusing but mostly boring.

That leads us back to Ozzy Osbourne, who was rarely boring and usually hilarious. At various times in his career, Ozzy has behaved like a satanic pope. Though a lot of his devilish material from Black Sabbath seems trite today, he was the guy who made this into an artistic template. On the cover of
Blizzard of Ozz,
he brandishes a crucifix as a weapon; on
Diary of a Madman,
he inverts one on the wall. In fact, the
Blizzard
… cover even pictures Ozzy with a black cat (apparently, his art director must have been heavily influenced by
Hansel and Gretel
). But—somehow—Osbourne made these clichés seem clever and vaguely plausible. Alice Cooper was more creative, but Ozzy was more sincerely fucked up.

Now, it's important to realize that there is no question about whether or not Osbourne has any allegiances to the devil. He does not. In fact, he seems legitimately bothered that so many people associate him with the occult. Other rockers have denied allegiances to the devil, but none were ever as clear as Ozzy on the song “Rock and Roll Rebel.” He uses no metaphors and does not leave any room for interpretation: “I'm just a rock and roll rebel / I tell you no lies / They say I worship the devil / They must be stupid, all right.”

I do not question Osbourne's sincerity on this issue. I do, however, question the validity of his indignation. Even if you discount his participation in the Black Sab catalog, his efforts in the 1980s were not exactly gospel hymns. Like Jimmy Page, Osbourne found the work of Aleister Crowley fascinating, and he talks about that fascination in 1981's “Mr. Crowley.” If you're trying to convince people that you don't worship the devil, this is not the way to do it. Personally, this kind of songwriting strikes me as very cool, and I can completely understand why Osbourne (or anyone) might find a mountain-climbing freak like Crowley interesting. But there's no way you can express those ideas without justifying people's suspicion that you're a devil worshiper (and biting the heads off birds doesn't help your case much either).

What's even crazier is the growing number of pro-Ozzy apologists who suddenly want to put a different spin on his message.
In his book
Running with the Devil,
Robert Walser insists Ozzy is “mocking” Aleister with “Mr. Crowley.” Oh, of course. That makes sense: Osbourne is delivering “satire” about a dead man of whom 90 percent of Ozzy's audience
had never even heard of
prior to the release
of this particular song.
There is no need to make excuses for Ozzy's affinity for the occult. He's not trying to teach people stuff; he's trying to be cool. Ozzy Osbourne is a rock star—
that's his job!

That's not to say Osbourne is too stupid to understand sarcasm; I suspect he's smarter than most hard rockers, and he's definitely smarter than just about everyone else who dropped acid every single day for two years in the 1970s. There's even a lyric in “Mr. Crowley” where Oz rhetorically asks Aleister if he sent his message “polemically,” which is not a word often used in metal songs. Walser's argument also meshes with a song like “Miracle Man” off 1988's
No Rest for the Wicked,
where Oz skewers PTL leader Jim Bakker (who is precisely the kind of self-righteous charlatan who would have wanted Osbourne's music outlawed). Of course, in the video for “Miracle Man,” Osbourne pretends to sodomize a pig. That doesn't negate his argument, but it certainly should remind everyone that all of this—and I mean absolutely
all of this
—is simple theatrics. If it wasn't, rock 'n' roll would be as boring as real life.

Ultimately, that's probably what made me so interested in devil rock: I was able to inject my reality with the kind of dark fiction that would have made my poor mother shiver. That's the only explanation I can think of to explain why I slept beneath a pentagram from the age of fourteen to seventeen.

Actually, it might be more accurate to say I slept beneath a Mötley Crüe bumper sticker, but the satanic bottom line was the same. My obviously cool brother-in-law had sent me the sticker through the mail, and since eighth-graders don't have cars (and since my older sister balked at the opportunity to promote the Crüe on her '73 Plymouth Scamp), it was affixed to the headboard of my bed.

I keep trying to picture myself as a fourteen-year-old, nestled
in my comforter (which featured raccoons participating in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics), sleeping blissfully beneath this menacing symbol of Satan. This paradox should be symbolic of
something,
and I'm pretty sure it probably is. But I honestly have no idea what that would be.

You hear a lot about how TV and film can desensitize kids to sex and violence. The argument is that fictionalized bloodshed makes actual violence less disturbing; a modern teenager may see a real car wreck and understand that the people inside are
really
dead, but the event doesn't affect him. Heavy metal desensitized me to devil worship in the same way.

A popular trick in my junior high study hall was to steal a kid's notebook and draw a bunch of satanic symbols on the cover (pentagrams, skulls, inverted crosses, the digits 666, and—if the prankster was artistically gifted—the head of a goat). The hope was that the kid's mother would find this notebook and assume her son was going to don a hooded death robe and sacrifice the family beagle. We all found this unspeakably amusing.

The 1980s were generally a good era for faux satanism, especially in the Midwest. At the beginning of all our social studies classes, we always started the hour with “current events,” which was a great way to kill time. Students would raise their hands and inform the class about whatever they perceived as a newsworthy “current event.” These events could be almost anything; it could be the
Challenger
explosion, or it could be information on prominent athletes from nearby towns who were arrested for open container. Very often, these “current events” would include a new rumor about which North Dakota community was currently shackled by satanism. Bismarck seemed to be the state's most demonic city, because somebody supposedly found a bunch of bones and satanic scrawlings in a series of caves on the city's outskirts. In Maury Terry's book
The Ultimate Evil,
the “Son of Sam” killings can be traced back to cult activity in Minot. Even smaller North Dakota towns, like Oakes (pop. 1,300) and Langdon (pop. 2,000), were periodically mentioned as cultic hotbeds. In fact, parents in Langdon had to have an emergency meeting at
the high school to address the risk of Ouija boards randomly possessing local teenagers.

The reality of these rumors is irrelevant. As cloistered kids living somewhere else, we always assumed they were partially true. But we also assumed the tales were ridiculous overreactions. They had to be. There was just an understanding that all adults were confused about Satanism; they saw it as a one-way ticket to hell (and—in the meantime—prison). But we saw it as a cultural accessory. It
was
kind of scary (certainly scary enough to be cool), but it was never outside of our control. Satanism was weird, compelling, and—in extreme cases—deadly. But it could also be taken in doses. You could kind of “experiment” with the occult by buying certain albums. Groups like Damien and Armored Saint provided an opportunity to dabble with sacrilegious dynamite, and there really wasn't any consequence. Here again, heavy metal was an aqueduct for vicarious, harmless evil. Even as an adolescent, I understood that the kind of kid who thought Bruce Dickinson was telling him to worship Satan was the same kind of kid who would have been corrupted by the hum of a refrigerator.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the connection between metal and Satan didn't have that much to do with the music itself. From a purely technical standpoint, “Shout at the Devil” isn't any more clear about its intentions than Pearl Jam's “Satan's Bed,” but the latter would never be seen as occult.

Of course, if Ozzy Osbourne sang those same lyrics, “Satan's Bed” would almost certainly be seen as a song about lying down with Lucifer for carnal destruction. This stuff was always about the source. The specter of metal satanism is one genre of communication where the medium really is the message.

Heavy metal's finest hour: The three best-selling records on the planet are Bon Jovi's
New Jersey
, Guns N' Roses'
Appetite for Destruction
, and Def Leppard's
Hysteria
.

Every time I invite a hipster over to my house (and this happens far more often than I'd like to admit), I put myself in a precarious position.

At some point in the evening, the visiting hipster is going to look at my CD collection—the single quickest way to assert any individual's coolness quotient. I do the same thing anytime I'm in another person's home. My problem is that (obviously) I am an '80s metal fan, and that devastates my indie rock cred. Since I'm not a musician, I'm not sure why this should matter; it certainly seems ridiculous that private citizens should need indie rock cred. But it always seems important, especially if I'm trying to sleep with the aforementioned hipster. And CD collections don't lie: No matter how many times you mention Matador Records, you cannot consistently explain why Poison is nestled between Pizzicato Five and Polara.

Of course, this situation can be played to one's advantage. You can out-hip a hipster by taking things to the next level—you can promote yourself as an Ironic Contrarian Hipster, the Jedi Knight among trendy rock fans. Being an Ironic Contrarian
Hipster is rather complicated; it forces you to own over a thousand CDs, and you have to hate all of them. In fact, the only things you can openly advocate are artists like the Insane Clown Posse and Britney Spears.

Once you get the reputation as an Ironic Contrarian Hipster, you'll suddenly have a lot of freedom. You can sit around and watch
Roadhouse
and
Footloose
all day, and you can eat at buffet restaurants and wear stupid clothes and smoke pot before work because it's “wacky” to be a “bad employee.” Most importantly, you can throw away all your cool records by Stereolab and Built to Spill and listen to stuff that's actually good. This mostly equates to classic rock, new wave groups with female vocalists, Fleetwood Mac, any band from Sweden, and hair metal. If questioned about these choices, you simply scoff and smile condescendingly at your accusers. It also might be a good idea to tell them they need to “think outside the box” (or something like that), but you must say it in a way that indicates you would never actually use that phrase in a real conversation, despite the fact that you always do.

Unfortunately, there will be a point where someone will call your bluff. There will come a day when someone will say, “Hey man, I don't care how far outside the box you think—there is nothing cool about owning Iron Maiden's
Best of the Beast.
” And if they are serious and if you are not stoned, you will be forced to host a serious argument about the musical merits of heavy metal.

Arguing for the aesthetics of hair metal probably seems like an impossible task. There are no respected sources to provide support, and you can't simply suggest that the sonics are too complicated for the average listener to understand. There is no high road. You can tell people they just don't “get it,” but that's really a self-defeating argument. Opponents will inevitably insist there's nothing to “get,” and they're not going to feel any regrets about missing the nothing that you are apparently “getting” and making it into “something.” In other words, they will pretty much have you over a barrel, and your only recourse will be insisting that Ani
DiFranco is trying a little too hard to look ugly, which really isn't that compelling of a point in most musical debates.

Usually, the fundamental strategy in prometal arguments hinges on an insistence that most metal
is
horrible. In order to seem rational, the metal advocate is constantly saying things like, “Yeah, I agree that most of those bands did suck,
but
…,” and then they try to build a larger point out of the ashes of a seemingly negative confession. They admit that hair metal did not succeed in a macro sense, but it was sometimes brilliant in a micro sense. This is the only way to seem like a sensible person (it's the same philosophy one uses when trying to support the Libertarian Party).