deus ex machina
19th July 2005, 20:15
I. INTRODUCTION: The Technophobe Meets the Fuzz Box
On your feet! Or on your knees! Here they are, the amazing Blue Öyster Cult!
--Blue Öyster Cult, On Your Feet or On Your Knees
The purpose of the Fascist formula, the ritual discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus, which is at first sight irrational, is to allow mimetic behavior. The carefully thought out symbols (which are proper to every counterrevolutionary movement), the skulls and disguises, the barbaric drum beats, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures, are simply the organized imitation of magic practices. . . .
--Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 184-85 [henceforth DE]
Anyone . . . equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet . . has already capitulated to barbarism. (Adorno, "Perennial Fashion--Jazz" 205 ["PFJ"])
When that modern apostle of high culture, Theodor Adorno, died in 1969, Western popular music was going through yet another technological mutation that Adorno might well have considered more "barbaric" than the jazz he so often condemned, an even longer, harder nail in the coffin of enlightened humanistic individualism. Rock guitarists had recently added the technique of screaming amplifier feedback to their repertoire, and the development of the distortion effect box (or "fuzz box") enabled any garage guitarist who could lay down fifty dollars for such a device to mechanically reproduce the dissonance of a cracked amplifier speaker. Such technical innovations were music to the ringing ears of blues-riff-based "power trios" like Cream and Grand Funk; and the acid-psychedelic hard rock of Jimi Hendrix not only punctured the blissful balloon of the hippie "Summer of Love," but sounded--to some--the amplified death knell of civilization itself.{1} And at last, Adorno's key epithets for earlier pop music, "mechanical soullessness" and "licentious decadence" ("On Jazz" 45 ["OJ"]), would seem to have become more prophetically true than ever.
The codified synthesis of hard blues rock and psychedelic/acid rock into what would become known as "Heavy Metal" can be said to have begun in 1970, the year after Adorno's death{2}--as if deferentially awaiting his passing. Led Zeppelin had just released Led Zeppelin II [LZ2] in October, 1969, and Black Sabbath would cut its second album, Paranoid [Prnd], in September, 1970. These two albums provided the first two "anthems" of Heavy Metal, "Whole Lotta Love" and "Paranoid," respectively.
Continued (http://www.usd.edu/~tgannon/hm.html)
On your feet! Or on your knees! Here they are, the amazing Blue Öyster Cult!
--Blue Öyster Cult, On Your Feet or On Your Knees
The purpose of the Fascist formula, the ritual discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus, which is at first sight irrational, is to allow mimetic behavior. The carefully thought out symbols (which are proper to every counterrevolutionary movement), the skulls and disguises, the barbaric drum beats, the monotonous repetition of words and gestures, are simply the organized imitation of magic practices. . . .
--Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 184-85 [henceforth DE]
Anyone . . . equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet . . has already capitulated to barbarism. (Adorno, "Perennial Fashion--Jazz" 205 ["PFJ"])
When that modern apostle of high culture, Theodor Adorno, died in 1969, Western popular music was going through yet another technological mutation that Adorno might well have considered more "barbaric" than the jazz he so often condemned, an even longer, harder nail in the coffin of enlightened humanistic individualism. Rock guitarists had recently added the technique of screaming amplifier feedback to their repertoire, and the development of the distortion effect box (or "fuzz box") enabled any garage guitarist who could lay down fifty dollars for such a device to mechanically reproduce the dissonance of a cracked amplifier speaker. Such technical innovations were music to the ringing ears of blues-riff-based "power trios" like Cream and Grand Funk; and the acid-psychedelic hard rock of Jimi Hendrix not only punctured the blissful balloon of the hippie "Summer of Love," but sounded--to some--the amplified death knell of civilization itself.{1} And at last, Adorno's key epithets for earlier pop music, "mechanical soullessness" and "licentious decadence" ("On Jazz" 45 ["OJ"]), would seem to have become more prophetically true than ever.
The codified synthesis of hard blues rock and psychedelic/acid rock into what would become known as "Heavy Metal" can be said to have begun in 1970, the year after Adorno's death{2}--as if deferentially awaiting his passing. Led Zeppelin had just released Led Zeppelin II [LZ2] in October, 1969, and Black Sabbath would cut its second album, Paranoid [Prnd], in September, 1970. These two albums provided the first two "anthems" of Heavy Metal, "Whole Lotta Love" and "Paranoid," respectively.
Continued (http://www.usd.edu/~tgannon/hm.html)