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Master of Arts thesis
< chapter III - works cited > Conclusion Steel Mirrors: New Metal and Other Works in Popular Culture Not all of the elements I have identified in new metal are new to music. In fact, most of the individual qualities have been written, recorded, and/or performed in underground, experimental, independent, and alternative music, or in music from outside North America. Jazz music has employed the "scat" technique for years, hidden tracks are not unique to new metal, and lyrics plagued with doubt can be found in many types of alternative music, such as goth and industrial. What is new about new metal's use of all of the elements I have discussed is new metal's astronomical popularity. Korn organized and executed one of 1998's biggest and most successful tours, the "Family Values Tour," which had, at various points, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Rob Zombie on the playlist. Marilyn Manson has appeared on the controversial television program "Politically Incorrect" and has performed small roles in Hollywood films. New metal is striking also because it combines all of the experimental, underground, and alternative elements I have mentioned which have appeared, singularly, in other types of music. Almost everywhere in today's popular culture, confusion reigns. As more and more real, physical, tangible things become infinitely reproducible thanks to technologies ranging from e-mail and the internet to plastic surgery and cloning, those participating in mass culture become less and less certain about what, and who, is real. This condition has become so significant that it is now inappropriate to use the word "real" without qualifying what one wants one's usage of the word to signify in any given context, for it can now mean a broad range of concepts and states. We can now travel exactly half-way around the planet and still hear the same music and television programs being broadcast, as well as eat in the same restaurant, as is so lucidly illustrated in Brian Fawcett's book Cambodia. It appears that the paths of exploration and the lines of thought followed by popular musicians and screenwriters and by cultural academics are drawing very near to each other; new metal is not the only medium exploring and reflecting the issues I have discussed. In the film Thirteenth Floor, computer scientists invent an entirely simulated virtual world, only to discover that their own world is a simulation. In The Matrix, our world is shown to be a simulation created by Artificial Intelligence entities with the purpose of keeping human beings docile and submissive while the entities, in order to survive, drain the electrical energy from crops of human bodies. Characters become omnipotent inside the virtual reality of the matrix simply by opening their minds and willing their desires into being, just as Deleuze and Guattari argue, in 1000 Plateaux, that anything can be accomplished by travelling along lines of flight in rhizomatic schemes. It is no coincidence, then, that the film's protagonist illicitly sells a mysterious something contained on a miniature computer disk, which he hides in a hollowed-out copy of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Even television programs such as The X-files and The Outer Limits are suggesting that Rod Serling's original Twilight Zone is nowhere else but our own world. While Korn's Jonathan Davis is pleading that he doesn't know himself anymore, characters in The X-files and The Thirteenth Floor are realizing that they have not been exactly who they thought they were. With the vast expansion of the middle class in the last century, the boundaries between "high" and "low" culture have become as blurred as everything new metal vocalists are singing about; it appears that the gap between the "serious," "informed," and "important" thought of our learned institutions and "frivolous," "light," and "harmless" entertainment is shrinking. Given that a profitable mass culture film is using the work of Jean Baudrillard as a set piece, it appears that today's mass culture contains very important insights into, and reflections of, today's society, world views, and economy. While trends in both the academy and mass culture have often reflected important phenomena and sentiments occurring in society, it has been less common for academic discussion to address elements of popular culture (although cultural studies has been gradually moving in this direction), and for works in popular culture to allude to academic treatises. Today more and more so-called high-cultural expressions and low-cultural expressions are articulating, with postmodern voices, concerns regarding real life and authentic identities being overtaken by—or simply becoming—simulation. It is no longer easy for academics to ignore warnings uttered by popular culture, or vice versa. New metal's popularity is also very striking. In the past, mass culture has generally craved and supported happy, positive, comforting expressions which confirm the satisfactory nature of the state of the world. There has even been a generally proportional relationship between the "harmless," benign, "happy" qualities of given heavy metal bands and their popularity, as has been illustrated by the popularity of bands such as Twisted Sister and Guns and Roses. Regardless of the quality of the work in question, music and film have generally been hampered in their popularity by carrying a dismal tone. Films such as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and Amistad, even bearing the filmmaker's typical happy endings, are examples of high quality productions which have not been given permanent places in the daily conversations of most North Americans, perhaps because of their unhappy stories. Mass culture has generally looked to popular entertainment for an outlet of escape from unhappiness. But in the 1960s and 1970s this began to change. American folk music became an outlet for angry protest, followed by punk and heavy metal. Still, partisans of these new styles were either relegated to the underground or converted into forms more palatable to record-marketing executives and record-buying teenagers. Then, at the beginning of the 1990s, Nirvana and Pearl Jam brought unhappy music briefly to the tops of popularity charts, opening the door for bands such as Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. A handful of bands like Nine Inch Nails and White Zombie held the place of unhappy music in popularity charts and dance clubs, almost like bookmarks, after the demise of grunge. Then Rage Against the Machine started new metal but it was Korn who catapulted new metal into its trajectory towards hyper-popularity with their self-titled début album in 1994. Now, as I have already described, music that is more unhappy, dissatisfied, and angst-ridden than any music which has occupied this position in the past is entering charts at the number one position. Why is the demographic group who used to love songs like "California Girls" and groups like New Kids on the Block now collectively gravitating towards such unhappy, insane utterances? Why have adolescent car stereos rejected light-hearted high school anthems like "Smoking in the Boys Room" for such twisted songs as Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff" and Korn's "Freak on a Leash"? This generation has ousted those carefree songs and replaced them first with such still-comprehensible, straight-forward songs as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Pearl Jam's "Daughter," and subsequently with bizarre, quasi-authentic identity-crisis songs like Marilyn Manson's "The Dope Show" and Korn's "Got the Life." Is the top of music popularity charts really the place for explorations of postmodern concerns about simulacra, or anxieties about the lost locus of authenticity? Whereas before, heavy metal vocalists who were relegated to underground subcultural scenes stood tall and wore proud faces soaked in machismo, stomped about the stage powerfully, or made love to their microphone stands, today's new metal vocalists literally bounce up and down in pure rhythmic dancing motions, pumping their fists as their bodies match the music while their faces contort to match the anguished lyrical content. This paradoxical behaviour is a reflection of the new metal phenomenon: popular celebration of unpopular emotions. In the popular media, dancing has seldom been an act of anger or confusion. Generally dance has accompanied love songs or harmless pop songs, like in the songs of Michael and Janet Jackson. Yet now heavy acts like Limp Bizkit include dance on their stages and Korn's Jonathan Davis asks listeners, in his lyrics, to "get your boogie on" and "come dance with me." Generally, "unsettling" experiences have been those which produce sensations of anxiety, unease, and discomfort. But "unsettling" is a very appropriate adjective for this new music towards which many people are gravitating. Perhaps new metal audiences perceive their own experiences reflected back to them in new metal. New metal is the music of a generation that is nearly completely devoid of innocence—a generation that has produced a pre-teen anti-child-labour crusader, childhood sex and drug abuse, and countless American gun-toting children. The loss of innocence felt by North American youth began to be expressed in grunge music, but that music clung to a hope that, by forcing them into the open and discussing them frankly, the evils it expressed could be banished. This did not happen. New metal expresses a finalized traumatic fall from grace for youth. Instead of "deuce coupes" and daddy's T-birds, instead of school dances and surfboards, popular music has now labeled its fans "The Children of the Korn," who were "born from your porn and twisted-ass ways ... sitting in a daze, in a purple haze," with Jonathan Davis as their leader, warning that "you better check my pulse 'cause nothing seems to faze." Today's children, as reflected by new metal, cannot be children. They know too much, and have seen and heard too much. They cannot be innocent, naïve children, and yet, naturally, they cannot be adults. They cannot be well-behaved because media imagery will cause their peers to mock them, but they cannot be delinquent because they will be punished. Thus today's youth are utterly confused, and see themselves reflected in new metal's messages and imagery. The messages contained in new metal are not limited to a simple statement about the loss of innocence suffered by today's youth. As I have stated, new metal is also characterized by postmodern elements which reflect and express its culture's increasing confusion regarding identity, reality, illusion, and truth. Examining new metal from an objective distance—looking beyond the immediate torment in the music—can invite larger considerations regarding the nature of culture as a whole. The convergence of popular and intellectual/academic concerns, being postmodern in itself, can lead to an investigation of what constitutes postmodern culture today, and what postmodern culture is saying about today's social conditions. If, as Baudrillard and Korn seem to be saying, everything is a duplication of something else, then perhaps everything is postmodern, in which case nothing is really postmodern except for the entire gestalt of our world. If the "post" in postmodern signifies novelty, and everything is postmodern, then perhaps novelty is not possible, perhaps nothing can ever again be "new." One effect of the postmodern turn in culture, the narrowing of the gap between the popular and the intellectual, does point to new possibilities. For example, I myself have become an embodiment of this process/condition in the very act of studying a mass cultural product from the position of the academy. Rather than remaining positioned comfortably within the walls of a university and scrutinizing mass culture from a distance, I have come from the realm and substance of that mass culture and brought information about and experience of it into academic discourse. The fact that new metal shares the concerns of academics (one might argue that in new metal popular culture is "catching up" to academic study) may cause us to wonder about the meaning of postmodernism, as well as postmodernism's lifespan: are we not facing the need for a new "era" in our literary/cultural continuum? If modernism preceded postmodernism, what is postmodernism preceding? New metal complains that present reality is dubious, shifting, and blurred. My study of the phenomena reflected by new metal reaches far beyond the scope of the music or even of popular culture and invites further investigation into the effect of hyperreality and absolute advertising on the psychology of individuals, on the behaviours of different groups of people, and on interactions between individuals and groups. Other dimensions of new metal such as differences between the interpretations of this music by males and females and the role of different cultures and ethnicities in new metal and new metal's relevance to those cultures merit analysis. There is also the evolution of new metal itself. The bands I have examined continue to release recordings and top charts. Indeed, Limp Bizkit's lp recording "Significant Other" was released while I was working on this thesis, and Korn released a fourth full-length album, entitled "Issues," as I completed it. My study of new metal has been a part of my attempt to draw attention to the state of culture on a larger, more widespread level. New metal is but one facet of a culture reflecting the deep-seated ontological, spiritual, and existential anxieties plaguing our society. It is important that we listen to what is being said by new metal artists as well as by intellectuals such as Jean Baudrillard, for we need to come to terms with the possibilities that lie before us. We may then actively choose and determine the future of our culture and avoid Marilyn Manson's dire lyrical prediction: "Capitalism has made it this way. Old fashioned fascism will take it away." |
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