Category Archives: Blog

Not The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Posted on by

lepore_wonder_woman_coverI reviewed Jill Lepore’s book The Secret History of Wonder Woman over at the Atlantic a little bit back. I had one serious issue with it which seemed like it was probably not of much interest for a mainstream venue. But I thought I’d point it out here.

That issue is…the title, and in many ways the thesis of the book, are misleading. Lepore presents the Marston family history of polyamory, and therefore the connection between Wonder Woman creator William Marston and his lover Olive Byrne’s aunt Margaret Sanger, as unknown. If this was the first book you’d ever read about Marston and Wonder Woman, I think you’d come away with the impression that Lepore is the first one to reveal that Marston and his wife Elizabeth lived in a polyamorous relationship with another woman (Olive Byrne).

This is most obvious at the very end of the book. Lepore says, “The veil of secrecy kept by the family over Wonder Woman’s past proved impossible to lift.” She then cites writers in 1972 and 1974 who apparently didn’t know about the polyamory (Joanne Edgar and Karen Walowit.) She writes “The secrecy had consequences” and argues that there was a distortion because of this in the understanding of feminism. Margaret Sanger in the 1910s through Wonder Woman in the 1940s through WW fan Gloria Steinem in the 1970s were all connected. Because people didn’t know about the Marston/Sanger connection, they saw feminism as waves rather than as a continuous whole.

The problem with that thesis is that people have in fact known about the Marston/Sanger connection for around 15 years (or at least, that was the best guess of folks on the Comix-Scholars list serve, where these matters were recently discussed.) Marston’s polyamory was written about as early as the late 90s, and it was certainly widely known after Les Daniels wrote about it in the Complete Wonder Woman at the beginning of the 2000s. Lepore could easily have said that; Les Daniels is mentioned in her notes, and this would be the place in her narrative to acknowledge him and earlier researchers. But she doesn’t. As a result, readers are likely to believe that they’re the first ones who are learning about these “secrets.”

This isn’t to say that Lepore discovered nothing. She had access to tons of archives no one else has seen, and she has numerous jaw-dropping revelations — that the Marston polyamorous relationship appears to have included another woman (Marjorie Huntley), that Marston, Elizabeth,and Olive participated in New Age feminist sex parties, that Olive and Elizabeth were bisexual (a point that seemed fairly obvious, but has been disputed.) The book is important for anyone who cares about the early Wonder Woman, and Lepore’s work is in many regards ground-breaking. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the book’s thesis seems to rest on the revelation of the one secret Lepore didn’t discover.

As a result of this confusion, the book ends up being unnecessarily ungenerous to the numerous scholars who’ve written about the Marston Wonder Woman over the last 15 to 20 years. But more than that, I don’t think it’s ideal to frame the story of Marston and his family in terms of secrets. The closet is among other things a relationship with, or lever for, power. By urging the reader to adopt the position of the knower or the revealer, Lepore makes the story of Wonder Woman about the reader’s and the author’s rush of discovery — about the revelation of truths that the Marston family wanted to hide. The point of the story becomes not what Marston and Elizabeth and Olive made of their lives and politics and sexualities, but what secrets the book can uncover. Lepore doesn’t really contextualize that in terms of the history of gay identities or marginalized sexual identities, or of the closet; she doesn’t present the secrets as part of a history of practices that have both protected and trapped queer people, nor does she discuss Marston’s work as itself engaged with, or part of a tradition of, queer theory. I think that ends up positioning the Marstons as objectified others for the book’s readers, which again sits uneasily with the history of the closet and of the marginalization of queer people and alternative sexualities, whether lesbian or polyamorous.

Not that that’s the only takeaway from the book, certainly. And I do think Lepore is right that the history she uncovers, even if it isn’t a secret exactly, demonstrates that feminist history is more varied than people tend to think. Most obviously, the Marstons show that sex-positive and queer feminisms were around long before the third wave. Hopefully Lepore’s book will make that fact better known, and the next folks to write about Marston and his meaning can take it as more common knowledge, rather than as a revelation.

Update: Peter Sattler has a great follow-up to this post here. Jeet Heer also has a bunch of thoughtful comments below; so scroll down and then click over to Peter’s post if you want to continue the conversation (I’ve closed comments here to keep the conversation easier to follow over there.)
______
If you’re interested in reading me babble on more about Wonder Woman, I have a book coming out shortly. Lots of info and links about that here.

The Best Roundtable No One Has Ever Heard Of

Posted on by

Irreplaceable

 
One of the things you discover when running a roundtable on unpopular music is that the music tends to be unpopular. While we certainly had some readers and some discussion as we talked about obscure old blues, obscure punk, obscure world music, and obscure Jpop, in general this has not been a high water mark for traffic on the site. We probably would have done better to do a roundtable on Beyoncé or even the Rolling Stones. It’s the artists with lots of fans, it turns out, who have a lot of fans. There are some people, maybe, who want to discover new things, or are intrigued by a random band name (Virgin Black! Wilmer Broadnax!) But for the most part people want to hear about something they’ve already heard about. I’m not usually one to see the critic as parasite, but it’s pretty clearly true that attention to criticism is dependent on the extent and success of the subject of the criticism’s marketing campaign.

So it’s clear why no read the roundtable. But why aren’t these bands popular to begin with? In some cases, the answer seems like it’s probably just bad luck. If you live in New Zealand, the likelihood of massive success in the States (or worldwide) is going to be substantially reduced. If you never managed to put out an album because of mismanagement or happenstance, the chances of longterm notoriety are much reduced.

At the same time, though, it’s often the case that “bad luck” can be read as “wrong genre.” In his piece on The Music Machine, Sean Michael Robinson points out that 60s psychedlia was a time of album worship. In some times and some eras (early rock, for example), putting out singles might not have marked you as marginal, but not when the Music Machine was playing. Along the same lines, Paige McGinley explained that the blues nostalgist enthusiasm for the male guitar performers is a big part of the reason why Esther Mae Scott, who blues woman in the Ma Rainey tent show tradition, has no recorded music online. Rahawa Haile argues that Eritrean music is marginalized because of an intra-African history of colonialism, where Eritrea is seen by as a kind of embarrassing footnote to the much better known tradition of Ethiopian music. Ben Saunders explains that the Cardiacs were too prog for punk and (presumably) too punk for prog; the incompatible mix of genres left them without a logical fanbase or audience.

Other performers here are simply from genres that don’t garner tons of mainstream attention: Wilmer Broadnax in quartet gospel; Jane Jensen in goth; Windahm Hell in extreme metal. And some, like Natural Snow Buildings or Sleepy John Estes seem to have deliberately oriented themselves towards a smaller audience, either by eschewing traditional marketing or by situating themselves deliberately as local rather than national or international performers. Sometimes genre consigns you to obscurity and sometimes, some artists choose (relative) obscurity as a genre.

Either way, though, I think the roundtable shows pretty conclusively that what lasts, or what is famous, or what’s in the canon, has only a tangential relationship to what is “best” — in part because issues of genre comes before what’s considered best, rather than after. When Rolling Stone makes a list of the greatest bands of all time, performers in Eritrea and New Zealand and Thailand aren’t on the radar. When people talk about the greatest blues performers, it’s men they’re thinking of often, not women. When they talk about greatest singers, gospel isn’t considered. When they talk about greatest albums, you don’t list acts that don’t have an album. Music that’s unheard is generally unheard not because it’s somehow worse than music that is heard, but because somewhere along the way, it was in that set of things that got filtered out.

The genre of things that got filtered out is never going to break blog traffic records. But, like any genre, its fans will testify to its virtues. Thanks to Ben Saunders for coming up with the idea for this and helping to organize it, and to all the contributors, readers, and commenters for joining us. It’s been a great roundtable, even if (or partially because) not many have listened to it.

Utilitarian Review 11/15/14

Posted on by

Wonder Woman Conquers the World!

I’m starting to get some reviews in on my Wonder Woman book. I’ll list them in Utilitarian Review weekly as they come in. For a complete list of reviews/interviews/events/articles and more related to my book, go here.

And the first full review of the book is from Publisher’s Weekly.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Bill Randall answers the question What is Manga?

We finished our last full week of the Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of roundtable. Entries included:

A thread on the Best Artist No One Has Ever Heard Of (I voted for my friend Bert Stabler, because no one appreciates him enough.)

Chris R. Morgan on the punk pain of Thoughts of Ionesco.

Otrebor on classical music and metal in Windham Hell and Virgin Black.

Dana Schechter on the mysterious psych folk duo Natural Snow Buildings.

A.Y. Daring on EGOIST, the band behind the anime “Psycho-Pass”.

Quinn Miller on Norma Tanega’s “Walking My Cat Named Dog.”
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

— the glorious salvation of Beyonce fan fiction.

— Nicki Minaj, superheroes, and fascism. (I also woke up very early and stuttered my way through an interview with the CBC on the same topic.)

For Pacific Standard I wrote about Jeffrey Zacks’ Flicker and how our brains can’t tell film from reality.

At Reason I wrote about how the UK copyright system is even worse than ours.

For the U of C Magazine I wrote about Wonder Woman and Bella and why the greatest superpower is love.

At CBR I explained why Adam West Batman is the only real Batman.

At the LA Review of Books I explained why spoilers are good, and all your art shoudl be spoiled.

I discovered that this transcript of my interview on CNN about Emma Watson, men, and misogyny is online.

At Splice Today I complain about the tragedy of Noah. Get your own damn name, stupid kids.
 
Other Links

Janell Hobson on Nicki Minaj and the performance of white supremacy.

Mary McCarthy, on why she feels it’s important to acknowledge that her sister’s death was a suicide.
 

Adam+West+Batman+Bomb

Hey People, Come Free With Me: New Voices from 1966

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
___________
People remember “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” when they do, as the name of a single that saw radio play sometime around 1966 and 1967. It was this Motown-fueled Tin Pan Alley jingle that brought early mainstream success to Norma Tanega, a “classically-trained multi-instrumentalist” with “Panamanian and Filipino roots,” a BA from Scripps College (1960), and an MFA from Claremont Graduate School (1962).
 

 
Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog is also the name of Tanega’s stellar debut album that includes this single. The 1966 New Voice Records release, engineered by Gordon Clark at Stea-Phillips Studios, is a revealing mid-1960s attempt to mass-market an unorthodox entertainer. These twelve tunes combining folk, blues, and roadhouse revival are all under three minutes, and half are under two and a half minutes. The record is self-evidently studio-produced gospel garage rock; left coast experimentation via New York City and the Catskills. Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog, which took Tanega to London, is earnest, expansive, and simultaneously cynical.

The first track, “You’re Dead,” uses ambivalent sarcasm to cultivate double meanings about life and living within domination. Imagine suits offering Tanega’s “Be sure that you compromise” as a potentially more palatable version of the “It-is-not-he-or-she-or-them-or-it-that-you-belong-to” in Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” “You’re Dead” raises queer questions about ambition, compassion, and interconnection, beginning with its spare warning: “Don’t sing if you want to live long. They’ll have no use for your song.”
 

 
Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog is thoroughly queer, with messy senses of mind, gender, and time. The quick-hitting second track, “Treat Me Right,” is kinky pastiche. Directives include “Open up my brain with your eyes and drive me down” and “Smooth the wrinkles from my brain, burn me up, and slap me down.” Note the shout.
 

 
“Jubilation,” a free love anthem, leans toward later Rufus Wainwright epics: “Come be one two three with me you and I and us: jubilation. Jubilation! Jubilation! It’s the time to live!” The track that follows counters the piercing euphoria of Tanega’s crystal clear call for multiple partners. The affectless trepidation of “Don’t Touch” unleashes a screed reminiscent of the blitzed-out sound of the Silver Jews’ “Advice to the Graduate.”
 

 
Building on the deadpan in the Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog tracks “You’re Dead” and “Treat Me Right,” the swanky “Don’t Touch” creates a straight edge soundscape out of new frontier anxiety, like a pre-AIDS-pandemic Safe (Haynes, 1995). The rousing backing vocals so striking in this track, “Treat Me Right,” and “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” also appear in “A Street that Rhymes at 6 A.M.” and “I’m the Sky.”
 
“A Street that Rhymes at 6 A.M.” is the first track on the B-side and one of the high points in the LP’s crescendo of crowd-sourced feeling. It presents a counterpoint to the motif of cultural alienation unfolding across “Don’t Touch,” “What Are We Craving,” “No Stranger Am I” (a song Dusty Springfield also recorded), and “Hey Girl.”
 

 
This song’s surf style, tom-tom licks, and wailing harp bookend the B-side along with a less tortured precursor to Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos.” “I’m the Sky” ends the album with folk operatic chanting: “it’s love, it’s mine, it’s yours, it’s life, it’s free.”
 

 
It is with songs like these that Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog answers the question, posed in the title of its ninth track: “What Are We Craving?” The record offers people and pleasure as provisional antidotes to “goldseeking” and social norms.
 

 
Ironic and complex, Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog has wowed me ever since I discovered it while browsing. I had not heard of Tanega then and no one has mentioned her or recognized the name since. I saw the cover and had to have it.
 

Screen Shot 2014-11-13 at 9.01.50 PM

 
On impact there was the queer promise of a song called “Hey Girl.” This track takes us back in time to Lead Belly and to other performances of this traditional folk song—also known as “In the Pines”—including to Nirvana’s 1993 rendition, released as “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” on the band’s MTV Unplugged CD. Tanega’s “Hey Girl” reframes the story of suffering through its undercurrents of non-monogamy. Within the depressed trend of the B-side, the song serves as a climax in the album’s sexual outlaw aesthetic. Scandalous, roomy, and idiosyncratic, the sound suggests a culture of collaborative experimentation evident in the cool power of Tanega’s presence.

This presence is on display in YouTube footage that seems to be from the production of a show like the BBC’s Top of the Pops; and it is the backstage downtime during recording sessions for that program that provides the setting for Tanega’s real-life “meet cute” with lover Dusty Springfield who she later penned tunes for and lived with in London. In this footage, Tanega appears to perform along to a studio replay of some cuts. These artifacts amplify the importance of marketing, engineering, and design in Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog’s accomplishments.

The LP’s Bob Crewe packaging was what initially piqued my interest in the music. (I think I bought it while traveling, perhaps in Washington, D.C.) Optical wordplay springs from Tanega’s wallpaper-printed name, offset by an intriguing back cover blurb attributed to Bil Keane. The author of The Family Circus comic strip? This brief essay, titled “The Positive Side” is signed from San Francisco. Combining reactionary moralizing and innuendo-laded slang, the sugarcoated endorsement refers to Tanega’s “gift…of positive perception.” It describes the making of the album—with co-writer Norma Kutzer and producer Herb Bernstein, who conducted and arranged the recording—as a “movement toward the positive side,” presumably away from social protest.
 

Screen Shot 2014-11-13 at 9.02.00 PM

 
I’ve never met anyone who knows Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog. I’ve never seen another copy of the LP in person. I’m a devoted fan, but I know only this one album out of the fourteen Norma Tanega has recorded with a range of collaborators.
 

ha

 
Even without the context of Tanega’s later work, Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog offers an intuitive history lesson. The sound is distinctly of its era; ahead of its time; and steeped in the past. Candy-coated cerebral lyrics deconstruct cultural notions of massification by marrying self-extraction and engagement. This album is the hippest thing ever pressed.

The palpable irony on the cover and the fact that Tanega took up with Springfield in the ensuing years render Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog sublime as a historical object. The individual titles that compose this challenging easy listening record, which are juxtaposed on the back cover with Keane’s fantasy of a clean youth movement, flag liberatory content. The music is sublime, too, and calls for retrofitting with more recent intertexts. A concept album along the lines of the Pixies’ song “Where is My Mind?” the record has a mix of influences and moods reminiscent of Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes, the Joos’ Starlite Walker, or Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Tambourine, harmonica, choir, bells, and clapping support Rorschach lyrics of sonic queer communion suggesting that we might be better off “long gone…and out of this world.” Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog envisions—and feels into existence—queer modes of connection. The cat-to-dog provocation of the hit single is just a start.

Video for the Post-Apocalypse

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
___________
 

568017

 
Unlike How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, and Lost, the anime series Psycho-Pass is a show that does not reach its full glory until the end. Each episode has a crossfade between the final minute of dialog (always poignant) and the opening bars of the ending theme song, “Namae No Nai Kaibutsu”. (A different band, Ling Tosite Sigure, wrote the opening theme, but I don’t like their music as much.) With the annual deluge of Xmas Pop Hits upon us, you’re going to want to hear about the angsty, operatic pop-rock band EGOIST, who wrote that beautiful song from this acclaimed anime series. After a very scientific survey of a few friends, I have determined that not enough people know about EGOIST and they are a band you’ve never heard. Whether or not they’re the best band you’ve never heard of is up to you.
 

 
If you’ve watched the show Guilty Crown, then you’re likely familiar with EGOIST. If not: in Guilty Crown there is a fictional band called Egoist, whose songs were written and performed by the two mononymous real life artists, Ryo and Chelly. After the show ended, Ryo and Chelly kept recording music together in real life and got to keep Egoist as their band name, but they stylize it as EGOIST. Their first studio album entitled Extra Terrestrial Biological Entities was released in 2012, and their third single, “Namae no Nai Kaibutsu” was the ending theme song of Psycho-Pass season one, which is how I first encountered them. Unlike everything else you’ve probably watched in the last decade, there are no romantic story lines in Psycho-Pass, and various characters quote Nietzsche and Derrida at length throughout the first season. That doesn’t directly impact the music, though it does add to the overall tension throughout the series and the music compliments that perfectly. There are many ways to do an excellent job with a soundtrack. The music integration at the end of each episode of Psycho-Pass makes the show feel like a 22 minute music video for a post-apocalyptic dystopia.
 

 
So that you can better picture EGOIST’s sound, let me illustrate for you the story their music pairs with. Psycho-Pass the show is set in 2113 Japan. A technological advancement called the psycho-pass has completely revolutionized the society. A psycho-pass is a mental health indicator and its reading is the output of a supercomputer in the heart of the city, connected to millions of surveillance devices in every home, business, street, and electronic device in the city the show is set in. There are also cute giant robots that roam the streets reading the vital statistics of passers by because it’s set in 2113 and robots can do that. The clearer your psycho-pass reading, the healthier and happier you are. All day, every day, everyone is constantly monitored for signs of their mental health and the data is analysed by a super computer that is also responsible for making and enforcing laws. Police officers have weapons but their safety mechanism only unlocks if the computer deems it necessary. If your psycho-pass is clear, you’re “free” to do as you please. If you begin to experience any kind of neurotic or psychotic mental stress or illness, you are then labeled as a latent criminal and sent for therapy to rehabilitate your mind. If you refuse therapy and your mental health continues to suffer, you are terminated by officers of the Public Safety Bureau.
 

 
The show centres around a young prodigy named Akane Tsunemori who has started a job as an Inspector with the Public Safety Bureau’s Criminal Investigation Unit. The youngest Inspector in the PSB, she is responsible for finding and terminating those who have turned from latent to actual criminals. On Tsunemori’s first day on the job, she unravels the first few threads of a very sinister secret about what’s actually behind the psycho-pass readings and what we’re not saying when we claim that we want “peace on earth for all”.

You have to derive a base level of enjoyment from electronic-dance-rock-pop in order to enjoy EGOIST but if you like Poison or Justin Timberlake, you don’t have to explore your taste profile too deeply in order to bop your head to the beat. And really, how far away is a pop rock beat from your heartbeat when you’re engrossed in a good chase scene? Their music is alternately the soundtrack of several different anime series, the soundtrack for my dramatic morning walk to the bus, and the soundtrack you’d want playing in the post-apocalyptic future as you battle mechademons for your freedom.

“Best” is a subjective term but EGOIST a) has a cool backstory and b) you’ve almost certainly not heard of them. Therefore, EGOIST needs to be the next band you explore.

You can find Extra Terrestrial Biological Entities on iTunes and Amazon.

Natural Snow Buildings

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
___________
 

natural_snow_buildings-the_snowbringer_cult

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of French duo Natural Snow Buildings. In fact, a lot of people haven’t. Stylistically, their music isn’t what you’d call the most “popular”
of genres, but even for those whose musical tastes fall far from center, the band is still largely unknown, and your average modern music fan – of any genre – would likely be surprised at the lack of information available about them.

Sometimes tagged as “Experimental Psychedelic Folk,” “Psych-Drone,” “Experimental,” “Acid Folk”, etc, Natural Snow Buildings defy simple classification. I think it sounds like fire and alchemy, like the churning of bones and rocks and sinew. Many of their strongest pieces are deeply repetitive, trance–inducing, and visual in an organic, hallucinatory way. Sonically they use texture, noise, drone, and melody in an almost raga-like form, utilizing instruments like guitars, percussion, woodwinds, strings, and any number of other mysterious sound-making devices. Some pieces are largely instrumental – others use vocals front and center. Individual songs sometimes reach well past the 20–, 30–, even 40– minute mark, allowing each song to grow and expand, to gain density and substance until the apex is churning and spinning, opaque, frenzied. Other works are delicate, rippling, and infused with a childlike fragility. It’s like watching wild nature growing in slow motion, sometimes violently, sometimes so gently it seems to stretch on for an eternity.
 

 
Despite the band’s impressive creative output – almost 40 albums, EPs, limited edition cassettes, compilations, and CDs – the vastness of Natural Snow Buildings’ discography lies in stark contrast to what we know about them personally, which reveals nothing about their inner workings. Perhaps this is by design: when you can’t talk about the artist, there is only the work itself to consider. Both the story and the music of Natural Snow Buildings are quite mysterious; you are required to fill in the blanks and make it your own. While I wholeheartedly respect (and envy) their decision to keep matters private, admittedly I too would like to know more about them. As humans we are by nature curious about the things we like; we define ourselves in part by the choices we make and our understanding of how things work. In this case, the lack of information itself is intriguing and becomes the story, almost mythically so. In 2008, they made over ten albums. How can this be possible?

Of the band members, we do know a few facts: the project consists of two people, one male and one female, Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte, respectively, both from France. They met in 1997 at university in Paris and began working together musically in 1998. In 2004 they relocated to Vitré (Brittany), in northwestern France, where they still live. In addition to working as a duo, both members have released solo works: Gularte’s under the name Isengrind; Mehdi’s under the moniker Twinsistermoon. The recordings are made at home, and their lo-fi nature further lends the sensation that we’re way beyond eras or earthly planes. Solange does the artwork for their releases, and her visions are as odd and gorgeous as the music itself, and a crucial part of each release. In earlier years, many of the releases were handmade and produced in very limited quantities (sometimes as few as fifteen copies), but over time the bands’ work has been reissued on established independent labels, helping bring their work to a somewhat larger audience.
 

 
2009’s triple LP “Shadow Kingdom” came out on the UK label Blackest Rainbow, and in 2013 Ba Da Bing reissued three records: the 2008 self-release, “Night Coercion Into the Company of Witches,” 2009’s “Daughter of Darkness,” and 2008’s “The Snowbringer Cult,” a 3X LP release which is in fact one solo record from each member, and one record as the duo. However, the bands’ most recent release – 2014’s “The Night Country” – is yet again a self-release.

In 2013, someone posted a large portion of the band’s music on YouTube for free (hopefully with the band’s approval). Here we can take our time exploring a large part of their catalog, as each album is provided in full with individual tracks indexed. The playlist starts with more recent releases and reaches back to 1999. Listening to it all can be a challenge, and sometimes exhausting. Some of the work is stronger than others, but that’s truly a matter of taste, as there’s a deep consistency in the music’s transformative and immersive nature.
 

 
We don’t know what makes these people tick, and why they choose to stay under the radar, but it doesn’t really matter. This is merely a personal feeling, but keeping to yourself helps your priorities remain intact, if making work on your own terms is more important than working towards a traditional, “successful” career. If an artist is released from the task of promoting their career, they have bypassed many of the distractions that damage focus, which runs the risk that the work (in quality, content, and output) may suffer. I truly don’t know if this is what’s behind the band’s ideals, but if this idea figures in at all, it’d make sense. These days, a great many independent artists spend a large part of their time on DIY efforts (via PR, social media, touring) to help expand awareness about their work, and increasingly less time on creating the music which inspired them in the first place.

Why do we want to know more and more about the people and the details when we love their work? Does it bring us closer to them, or is it a fluke, a mirage? We all face a lot of distractions in our daily lives, so let’s take pause. Sometimes, enjoying something in its purest form seems to be more than enough.

Dimmur Paganini

Posted on by

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
___________

niccolo-paganini-1335360833-hero-wide-1

 
Metal and classical sound like one another to me. Ok, that’s stretching the truth, but there’s a fundamental something that makes those two seemingly polar genres ring the same to my ear.

Metal’s got highly distorted and compressed music. Classical doesn’t. But for the life of me, I can’t think of a piece of music more metal than Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Throw in Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos,” too. Fast forward to the present and living composers, and it’s no coincidence that the work of Arvo Pärt is a favorite amongst many metal musicians. Likewise, classical’s timeless feel of grandeur gets channeled within me just as strongly with the compositions of In the Woods… or via the ubiquitous black metal minor scale harmony.

You can trace this convergence of the genres back to Yngwie Malmsteen, the famously obnoxious guitarist extraordinaire who partially modeled his egregious personality after that of Niccolo Paganini, the 19th Century Italian violinist whose extreme ability, flamboyance and eccentricities raised him to mythical status. Before Malmsteen’s incorporations of classical scales opened up massive new directions for the genres in the early ‘80s, metal was the doom and gloom pioneered by Black Sabbath, a band whose roots were in blues and who adapted that style into something heavier.

Since then, if you choose your genres right, you can hear the ghosts of Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Albinoni (not always too subtly, either) in many of metal’s subcategories, but you’re most likely to find them in power metal bands, and in black metal bands, too, with names like Emperor, Symphony X, Stratovarius, Angra, and Dimmu Borgir being the most famous.

But this article is about the most underrated bands. Here are two that are criminally underrated and uphold the theme of the interchangeability of metal and classical.

Windham Hell.

Windham Hell is as indispensable a cult pick as it is a nerd’s dream. The band’s sound is something along the lines of if Yngwie Malmsteen recorded black metal albums with limited, semi-improvised means in the bedroom of a log cabin in the same woods where the owls-who-are-not-as-they-seem from “Twin Peaks” flew ominously overhead.

Windham Hell’s compositions often have a stark, menacing tone to them — the sometimes present, incoherent grave-moan vocals, the dissonant application of classical scales underpinned by aggressive, driving metal riffing and beats, and the often off-kilter song structures that brings all these jagged elements together, sometimes into a miasmal hell that would befit a Paganini-inspired legend, and sometimes into a calm, lovely musical respite… but Windham Hell was always something uniquely alien and utterly delightful in its genius — perhaps a genius that was as idiot savant as it was technically gifted — but like a cult show or movie like “Twin Peaks,” the cult appeal is owed as much to all the things that are wrong, goofy, or off-kilter about it as it does what isn’t.
 

 
The band’s ultimate and definitive formation was Leland Windham and Eric Friesen, two guitar genius recluses who lived in Snoqualmie, a rural, forested part of Washington state. Windham was as dedicated to mountain climbing as he was to shredding maniacal classical leads, and the theme of the cold, unforgiving, beautiful granite faces he loved so much were a major theme in his band’s music. The CDs would come with photos of Windham hanging upside down on a horizontally jutting rock face, or photos of mountain goats he would find on his excursions. Friesen was obsessed with playing guitar, and was also an accomplished drummer (while many think the drums on Windham Hell’s albums are a drum machine, they are in fact an e-kit played by Friesen) who released a couple solo albums under the name of Friesen Hell. One of these albums, Friesenburg Concertos, is Friesen’s “hail to the gods” of classical music, in which he plays various classical pieces that he learned entirely by ear, as he did not read music.
 

 
It was possibly Friesen who pushed the “Twin Peaks” worship angle in Windham Hell’s mystique. Whoever it was, the duo had a lot of parallels to play up. Snoqualmie is the real name of the place where the legendary show takes place. The third and final Windham Hell album, “Reflective Depths Imbibe,” was recorded behind Mo’s Motor, which is where Leland and Laura Palmer drive off from in the “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” movie. Leland Windham shares two names with major “Twin Peaks” characters, Leland Palmer and Windom Earle. Indeed, any and all similarities Friesen could find to “Twin Peaks,” he worked, like how the violin in “Alpinia” was played by a Bob (parallel to Killer Bob), and a keyboard bit was courtesy of a Mike (yet another “Twin Peaks” character.)

The “Twin Peaks” worship was so deeply entrenched in Windham Hell’s inspiration (with songs like “Glacier Walk in Me” and “Clear Blue Plastique,” and liberal usage of sound clips from the show amassed in hidden sections at the end of the albums), that Windham Hell’s music has come to be like the alternate soundtrack to the Black Lodge for me: a creepy, gorgeous, passionate body of work that is equally menacing as it is goofy; emotional, beautiful, evocative as it is dissonant; and metal as it is classical.

PS: In case you were wondering, the name Windham Hell is a spoof of the music made under the Windham Hill Records label, who specialized in folk and new age music. The band’s last album was released in 1999, and will likely stand as its last work, as Eric Friesen passed away in 2006.

Virgin Black.

On the other end of the spectrum from Windham Hell’s cult bedroom insanity is the music of the Australian entity Virgin Black, whose career pinnacle came in 2007 with the release of the 2nd part of the band’s “Requiem” trilogy, “Requiem Mezzo Forte,” and the subsequent release of the 3rd part, “Requiem Fortissimo,” in 2008. (The first part of the trilogy, purportedly recorded with the rest of the albums, has yet to be released. The trilogy is meant to be listened to in succession, with melodic themes that run through the albums.)

Virgin Black’s sound is like Gothic doom-influenced classical music. The classical aspect here is largely tied in to singer Rowan London’s operatic singing style, and how all their records have featured classical elements, like cello and piano, given a heavy treatment, but it wasn’t until that landmark 2007 album that Virgin Black’s sound moved out of the backroom studio and the digital box, and into recording an entire record with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, making a full record that didn’t just have orchestral segues, but was mostly orchestral, punctuated by passages of heavy guitar and bass and tastefully simple, pounding drums and martial snare rolls.
 

However, some of what or what is not going on in Virgin Black’s records is a bit of a mystery, and what I think is the truth is so awesome it gives me minor chills. I know what I witnessed. I saw Virgin Black on tour at Slim’s in San Francisco in 2008. I saw a small, muscular man in a see-through black mesh shirt take the stage as Virgin Black’s frontman and keyboardist. He seemed to be wearing mascara, and he had an odd, out of place, kind of alien demeanor about him, like he was physically there but his spirit was in different places at once. I saw this man deliver the male operatic vocals from the records, and then, I saw him deliver the female operatic vocals as well. He would seamlessly switch back and forth between the two, as well as the deathgrowl parts from the material of “Requiem Fortissimo,” and the realization that when I was blown away at the sweeping, crushing beauty of the compositions and vocals of “Requiem Mezzo Forte” and its seeming choir of singers, it seemed I had in fact been hearing the work of a man who was somehow a soprano and a tenor. Like a castrato who was allowed through puberty but never lost his choir boy voice. Maybe there’s some kind of pitch shifter voice box that allows one to do something like that. Whatever it was, I was blown away.

Subsequently, I swear I’ve looked up Virgin Black on line and found a wikipedia page in which Rowan London was dubbed something not terribly flattering like “androgena.” I swear I saw this page, and I remember it having information that supported my perception that indeed, Rowan London was *every* voice on the Virgin Black records. This elevated already superb albums into the godlike in my view: that someone could possibly have that much musical ability to physically pull something like that off, and do it in the context of such beautiful music. However, any trace of those words are no longer there. Maybe they were changed. Maybe I dreamt the whole thing. I probably did, as the soprano voice on “Requiem Mezzo Forte” is credited to Susan Johnson, but my appreciation of this band’s work was forever raised even farther when I saw them that day in San Francisco.

There’s not much information or interviews with Virgin Black out there, and the band has been on a long hiatus. Even if the final, purportedly completely choral and orchestral work is never released, “Requiem Mezzo Forte” stands as perhaps the finest example of the seamless marriage of classical and metal, featuring massive, timeless melodic themes as tremendous as the performances… whoever those performances were done by.