There’s something surreal about still being able to glut on a banquet of streaming material as the Hollywood strikes rage on in the background.
Add to that the ‘feast or famine’ vibe of my own personal summer vs autumn streaming experience: there was very little new stuff I wanted to watch over the summer, and then October came along and I’m once again spoilt for choice.
Not that this is a new mood for me. For all the economic chaos we’ve been labouring under in the Western world since 2007 or so, that doesn’t really seem to apply to cultural consumption. Audio-visual “content” is piped in at a regular pace through our obedient army* of trusted apps.
The “TBR” pile only grows and grows, and in my case, twists and morphs into Cronenbergian variants as I give up on one pile to forge another, confident in my prediction that this time, this will be the one that gets devoured.
Ready for them re-reads
This all stands in marked contrast to how I remember experiencing culture in the ’90s. As a geeky son of emigres who lived in Malta and spent summers back in native Serbia, but who was trained to desire the globalised products of the Anglophone sphere, I was often left blue-balled by my inability to grasp at all the stuff I wanted — nay needed — and required to consume. Consume, of course, on the basis of an imagined diet whose prescription was as vague as it was specific.
Getting comics in Malta was nigh impossible at the time, though there was a grassroots ‘comics club’ established by a pair of passionate — though often frustrated — friends who often treated its members as foundlings… which, in many ways, we were: orphaned in our need to latch onto story-products which would not otherwise have reached us were it not for their benediction.
The lack of a foundational cultural identity — or rather, a fragmented one that I wasn’t particularly keen to embrace or even poke at, given that Serbians were officially the aggressors in the nineties’ most significant conflict, rudely blotting the End of History with its own traumatic fallout — is perhaps what led me to latch onto various subcultures: comics were one, metal music was another.
Funnily enough, our trips to Serbia were particularly useful when it came to the latter. The mess of the post-Milosevic era meant that bootlegs could proliferate with impunity — public television channels even aired brand new cinema releases on their evening schedule — so we’d end up taking a bunch of CDs home and gain some degree of bragging rights with out metal head buddies.
Because for all that it was still struggling under the weight of a post-war depression, Belgrade in particular remained a European cities, and subcultures still functioned with an historic sense of purpose, and kindred spirits could be found if you knew where to look. Malta, for all its aspirations of being an up-and-coming place, still operated on a provincial logic.
This was also why the rapid rise and fall of Napster — whose fall was made largely redundant by the floodgates opening up to handily-available variants — was a balm to us in Malta. Suddenly, we could all be on the same page as our international counterparts. Metal Hammer and Kerrang were no longer dispatches from the future.
And yet, fast-forward to the present day, and what I look forward to most re-read season. This is how I’ve unofficially dubbed autumn, over and above its many reliefs and delights (ostensibly cooler weather at some point — climate change permitting — the excuse to binge on horror faves ‘cos Halloween, etc etc.).
It’s about acknowledging a split. On the one hand, there’s so much desirable stuff to consume. On the other, all of that noise is just so piercingly alienating. And caring for the self is all about remembering what makes you, you. The foundations built by all those things that left an impact, for some reason.
This runs counter to the prevailing cultural narrative, of course, which is probably why I always feel an internal pushback whenever I try to implement it. But the relief of re-reading a favourite book is immediate, and immense. It’s a relief akin to the best of drug-free hedonistic pursuits: sex, swimming and a volcanic eruption of laughter during a friends catch-up.
Consumption is what sold us the end of history. But we were nowhere near the end, of course. And regardless, there’s always been a ton of history to feast on in the meantime.
*though a master-slave dialectic may be the more appropriate metaphor here.
So Slipknot have released a new album and it’s a winner, beating even Ed Sheeran in the charts and delivering a slice of post-nu-metal that satisfies this nostalgic punter on so, so many levels.
But beyond the simple enjoyment of tucking into the fresh material of a band with whom you’ve intermittently come of age, is the refreshingly optimistic realisation that something previously thought irrelevant can be good again; that the adage of ‘has-been’ is something our culture has been getting wrong all these years.
Neither is it an entirely alien feeling, either: I’ve personally been very glad to fall in love with The Pale Emperor, another latter-day release by a supposed has-been who was a musical guiding star for me even before Slipknot took over in the late nineties.
I still remember popping in a bootleg cassette of Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals and thrilling to the wash of immersive-yet-subversive sounds; the photocopied wrap-around cover not being cut entirely right, so that the album read ‘Mechanical Anima’ in what felt like an apposite error: the pained screams of a mechanised soul, the ghost in the machine aching to express itself in mournful, trickster anger.
But we’ve seen this elsewhere too. The Cure, by all accounts, knocking it out of the park at Glastonbury (wish I’d been there for that one). Actors we thought washed up at the movies returning to shine on the smaller screen, reaping the benefits of the kind of long-form storytelling afforded by the TV Renaissance to character actors whose creases accommodate stories of nuance and depth.
Weaponised nostalgia: Netflix’s Stranger Things
I’m convinced that this isn’t just the Stranger Things impulse: it’s not just about the indulgence in nostalgia for its own sake. For one, this surely the historical time-frames we’re dealing with here are too compressed, too recent to offer the kind of generational time-hop necessitated by the kind of the thing the Stranger Things does?
Granted, twenty years is a sizeable amount of time. It used to be a lifetime, not all that long ago. But just like we’re getting re-assessments of The Matrix and American Beauty (Brian Raftery’s Best. Movie. Year. Ever. offers an excellent analysis of the cinematic mainstream in that low-key magical year of 1999), this is more about taking stock than sinking in the warm bath of cultural nostalgia.
Maybe it has something to do with the way distribution models have changed. Both American Beauty’s Alan Ball and The Matrix’s Wachowski siblings, with varying degrees of success, have managed to find a foothold in the realm of TV. And with MTV no longer being the benchmark of what’s cool and popular, maybe musicians not being beholden to their cycles also serves as an opportunity.
Yes, social media is hardly ever a good thing. It’s too image-obsessed. It’s too fragmented and fickle. Far too easily beholden to manipulating and manipulateable algorithms to ease our minds into believing that our enjoyment of pop culture is not an expression of some folksy universality. Instead, it’s just us bending the knee to our corporate overlords yet again.
And yet, and yet. Being part of an ever-shifting stream means the ‘has-been’ is an obsolete term. When the hegemonic order is dispersed — again, when MTV is no longer the arbiter — age really does become just a number.
With MTV no longer being the benchmark of what’s cool and popular, maybe musicians not being beholden to their cycles also serves as an opportunity
A number, much like Slipknot’s own members styled themselves, at first. Now of course, their masks and costumes have evolved into something eminently Instagrammable, but that’s a rich discussion to be had on another day.
I’m no music critic and I actually can’t claim to have heard Slipknot all that much beyond their blistering sophomore effort Iowa (2001), but there’s certainly something to be said about how We Are Not Your Kind has burrowed its hooks in me pretty deep.
It comes down to that well-calculated blend of the familiar and the new. In this case, experience doesn’t communicate exhaustion, but depth and maturity. Like a friend you haven’t seen for a while returning from an exciting year of adventuring across countries, continents and galaxies, eager to recount their experience over refreshments in safe and comfortable surroundings.
The nine Iowans comprising Slipknot’s classic line-up wouldn’t be all that familiar with dingy arcades on Mediterranean beaches, but We Are Not Your Kind’s opener ‘Insert Coin’ certainly evokes that for me: these oil-caked, fry-up-stinking hovels are the kind of places we’d get some shade in while dipping in and out of the sea during those carefree summers.
One of these summers was that of 1999, where we’d scratch together pocket-money to get our hands on the band’s scene-changing, self-titled debut album. In a post-Napster, pre-Spotify world this would be a talisman of contemporary metal soon to be joined by the likes of Soulfly’s ‘Back to the Primitive’ and Fear Factory’s ‘Digimortal’, whose cuts we would still get to enjoy in grotty one-room nightclub venues, now closed, and whose single-row metallic pissoirs I remember with markedly diminished affection.
As an overbuilt, overcrowded and overpolluted floating hovel, Malta provides plenty of atmospheric angst of its own
Because while the angst inherent in Slipknot’s repertoire has something of the universal about it, neither should it be all that surprising that the sun-kissed Mediterranean isle I hail from is partial to a bit of metal.
Many of the bands that serve as mainstays of this scene rehearse in badly-lit, terribly under-oxygenated garages located in the depressed industrial town of Marsa and the mushrooming suburb of Birkirkara… as an overbuilt, overcrowded and overpolluted floating hovel, Malta provides plenty of atmospheric angst of its own.
It’s an angst that certainly finds cathartic release in We Are Not Your Kind’s hit single ‘Unsainted’, whose blasphemous undertones speak to Malta’s only-recent de facto liberation from Catholic theocracy while admittedly also existing as tropey metal mainstays. The song is a distillation of just the kind of anthemic perfection that launched Slipknot into the mainstream; boasting a killer chorus limned by jagged but thumping surrounding verses, like an speed-injected Cadbury Creme Egg framed by a Marmite-marinated crown of thorns.
For me, it’s a reminder of the energetic core that’s the true appeal of metal music. The magnetic pull that can’t be denied; that others will find in other genres, but that nothing else really replaces for me even now, when my own tastes have evolved beyond what I’d used to listen to twenty years ago. Yes, I’ll tell myself that I only really listen to the likes of Opeth and Tool anymore, but when songs Korn’s ‘Blind’, or Fear Factory’s ‘Replica’, or Slipknot’s ‘Wait and Bleed’ and indeed ‘Unsainted’ pop back up on the horizon I can’t help but run towards them.
But neither should we diminish the importance of evolution and maturity; the adding of something new to the mix. The washed-up actor whose career finds a new lease of life on Netflix or HBO should use their hard-won scars and creases to their advantage, not cover them up. Otherwise, that’s how we end up in Stranger Things territory (please accept by continued and non-flattering references to this show as mere shorthand, I actually enjoy it quite a bit).
Thankfully, We Are Not Your Kind does manage to achieve that elusive blend of the old and new. It distills Slipknot back into their essence, but like truly seasoned artists, they still manage to slide in a reminder that they’re aging gracefully.
‘Spiders’ is a kooky Mike Patton-like number that still manages to be true to the ‘Knot’s Halloween-horror roots, while ‘My Pain’ cranks up both the atmospherics and melancholy. But this isn’t a mellowing out so much as a deepening of the musical landscape they’ve created. More than anything, Slipknot feel even more ‘cinematic’ now, wedded to their inspired imagery in more ways than one. More John Carpenter than Cannibal Corpse, and all the better for it.
And perhaps this is why We Are Not Your Kind resonates with me so much right at this moment. While it’s hard to resist the nostalgia and romance that their debut evokes for me (see above), and I’m in a place where I’d rather fight for the hovel that is Malta to become a little bit less so; to salvage what is left of its green spaces, and for local bands to be able to practice in more than just grotty garages.
More than anything, though, the sonic architecture makes for a perfect writing accompanyment. It pummels at me to write and create works with uncompromising verve and energy, while offering that break of atmospheric concentration that’s also necessary to the process.
In short, it is a perfect soundscape of horror, which can take many forms, and whose protean variety I am continuing to find utterly thrilling.
Plus, “Horror will never die” says John Carpenter himself… another supposed has-been whose musical career offers a dignified middle-finger to that very notion.
Easter is approaching on this once-aggressively Catholic island, which is only marginally less so nowadays, as this snap I took a couple of days back gloriously, dramatically illustrates:
Easter of course also means spring in full swing, and the twisty turny weather that it brings with it has left me feeling a bit ‘off’ on a few days here and there, where drowsiness becomes the order of the day and where you feel abandoned to the mercy of the uncontrollable climate-gods and their whims — they are in you, controlling your moods and there’s not much you can do about it. Both humbling and annoying in equal measure, but I also know it’s nowhere near the deluge that is the summer-swelter juggernaut, for which I am subconsciously preparing with no small amount of trepidation.
But come rain on shine, my penchant for the cooling moods of Gothic melodrama will remain unquelled, and it’s not just the above photo that stands as proof of this. Recently, the punk-metal band BILA (no, they’re not all that sure about their genre-configuration either — I asked) got me on board to participate in the music video for their song ‘Belliegha’, in which I was tasked to play a folk monster by the video’s director, Franco Rizzo.
The no-budget, three-day shoot ended up blossoming into a glorious display of pulpy goodness, and it was about as fun to shoot as it is to look at, I reckon. You can check out the whole thing here. For those of you on the island and keen to hear more, BILA will be performing at Rock the South on April 14.
The Belliegha’s aesthetic certainly lies on the (deliberately) crummier side of what I’ve just been talking about, but we also had a chance to once again showcase our more elegant attempt at the Mediterranean Gothic during past couple of weeks, as the National Book Council invited co-writer/director, producer Martin Bonnici and myself to speak about our short film ‘Camilla’ at the Campus Book Festival.
Flanked by Martin Bonnici (left) and Stephanie Sant (right) at the Campus Book Festival, University of Malta, March 29, 2019. Photo by Virginia Monteforte
The event was focused on adaptation, translation and subtitling, and to this end we were thankfully joined by Dr Giselle Spiteri Miggiani from the translation department, and someone with tangible experience of subtitling for television and cinema.
Despite having premiered back in November, it feels as though ‘Camilla’s journey into the world is only just beginning. Some encouraging feedback and an overall sense of enduring satisfaction with the work as a whole — bolstered by the memory of just how smooth a project it was to put together — leaves me with a decidedly un-Gothy optimism about its future.
But true to the spirit of fertility, resurrection and renewal that also characterises this season and its many associated festivals, there’s another bun in the oven that appears to be just about ready for consumption.
After some five-odd years of rumination, regurgitation and tinkering, the fifth draft of a horror feature I’ve been working on under the auspices of the aforementioned Martin Bonnici appears to be production-ready.
Of course any number of things can happen in the run up to finally getting this thing filmed, but I can’t help but let out an extended sigh of relief at finally finishing a draft of ‘Inheritance’ that’s about as smooth as I’d like it to be — with the required suspension of disbelief being dialed down to a minimum, the dialogue as lived-in as it’s ever been, and the narrative beats aligned to both character motivation and the story’s thematic underbelly.
I’ll have to keep mum on details for the time being, not least because a jinx at this stage of the film’s evolution would be particularly heartbreaking. Suffice it to say that the project marks the fulfilment of a vow made back in 2014, on national media. A vow to make the Maltese cinematic space just that little bit punkier and weirder.
This all feels like good juju, since summer is approaching. And carving out a pretty alcove of darkness feels like just the thing. Take it away, Banshees…
So, the sixteenth issue of ENCORE Magazine, which I have been editing since it’s eleventh edition, should soon be out and about in its designated pigeon-boxes across Malta and Gozo, after having debuted last Sunday – nestled as it was in between the pages of the Malta Independent during a particularly torrential day.
Below is the text for my editorial for this issue, which covers the period of March-May 2019. Being a quarterly magazine, the trope of the seasons is difficult to wriggle out of when writing these things, I’ve realised. But then again, why even bother? In the end, what is more enveloping than the climate? We Maltese Islands-dwellers learnt this the hard way last weekend, and the world will have to lean into its realities even harder once climate change truly hits a stride…
But in the meantime!
Here’s the editorial.
An apposite atmosphere of fresh beginnings wafts over this edition of Encore Magazine, and I for one could not be more glad at the aura of promise that this brings about for the Maltese cultural scene at large. We delve into not one, but two, art spaces in Valletta: MUZA and Valletta Contemporary — showcases of the visual arts whose legacy, angling and approach may be different, but which nonetheless stand as a testament of both an active visual arts scene with no small modicum of both public support and enthusiastic private patronage.
The two entities, both in their early stages, could also be seen as craning up (chin held firmly up) as the smoke of Valletta’s tenure as European Capital of Culture begins to clear.
But it is not just cultural initiatives that are rising from the ashes of the busy and hectic year that was 2018. Even the island’s most prominent public cultural body looks forward to some refreshing changes, as is evident from our interview with Mary-Ann Cauchi, the new Director of Strategy at Arts Council Malta, who outlines her vision of a holistic and democratic approach to public funding and support for local artists.
But neither are we forgetting about the roots of the matter — that is, the education of budding artists, now given a boost thanks to the additional availability of so-called VET subjects. A student fills us in on the revealing progress of pursuing an educational path less taken, and that allows for flexibility and uncertainty: such a necessary component of any honestly-undertaken creative endeavour.
Speaking of generational developments and creative flexibility, we also delve into the perception of nudity and sexuality in the Maltese visual and theatrical arts; in what can serve as an addendum to our consideration on the evolving attitude towards censorship in a previous issue. And in another further gentle jolt to preconceptions, the latest edition of our Encounter running feature pits a tattooist against a filigree artist, in a conversation that shines an interesting light on the blurry fault lines between ‘art’ and ‘cosmetics’.
This is, of course, all counterbalanced by insights into the exciting events that lie ahead during the Spring of 2019, reminding us once again of the truly refreshing pleasures of new beginnings.
Enjoy.
Teodor Reljić
As ever, I would like to thank Encore Magazine director Ruben Zahra, proofreader Tricia Dawn Williams and the team at Kuluri (Reuben Spiteri and Daniel Borg) for helping put together this challenging (read: post-Christmas) edition of the magazine. Thanks also go to our many contributors. The magazine can also be viewed online.
Still another warm Italian night, still not quite recovered from that woozy post-Worldcon feeling, but I had to jot down a few words about Brooke Bolander’s Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies; the Hugo-nominated short story which this year lost to Amal El-Mohtar’s beautiful Seasons of Glass and Iron but which remains a highly recommended — and recommendable — reference point for me.
It’s a story that’s better experienced than explained, so any analysis on my part will just be enthusiastic gloss. But I will say that the one thing that strikes me about it — and, crucially, keeps me returning to the story for sloppy seconds, thirds, fourths, etc — is that it actually feels like a pop song.
A really, really good one. (More Grimes than Britney.)
I’m a child of Barthes so I don’t want to get into whether this was intentional or not, but the feeling it transmits is the same. There is an instant emotional hook — the rape of a celestial being — which then proceeds in literal ‘beats’ (the bullet-pointed, inexorable march of delicious revenge) and then offers up the ultimate, redemptive kicker: in the many times that I’ve re-read it, the appearance of the title line in the story has resulted in joyful tears.
Above all, this is a sign of well-constructed fiction, and the self-consciously bite-sized nature of Bolader’s story only makes it all the more amenable to the pop song metaphor.
That’s certainly how I will experience it, over and over again.
Fluke or not, I’m happy we have it out there in the world. Do give it a whirl.
First off the ground is the most recent — the launch of Awguri, Giovanni Bonello at Palazzo Pereira in Valletta, which I’ve spoken about earlier and which was commemorated at a very posh — but otherwise very pleasant — party organised by Merlin Publishers and the other ‘conspirators’ involved in this festschrift for Judge Giovanni Bonello, who turned 80 last year and who apart from a distinguished legal career, penned his own micro-histories which Merlin cherry-picked through and passed on to ten selected authors.
Judge Bonello was nice enough to say — in a moving speech at the event — that we lent an extra dimension to his otherwise “two-dimensional” figures; but all I’ll say is that I certainly had great fun with my story ‘Bellicam machinam vulgo petart appelatum’, which allowed me to meld the history of an already-sensational character — Caterina Vitale — with Gothic pastiche. Being encouraged to channel the likes of Frankenstein and Dracula into something of my own certainly felt like opening a fount that was dying to be opened; as was being able to indulge in an ornate, baroque literary style (whose convoluted sentences proved to be something of a challenge to read out loud during the launch party, however!)
Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller play a distant-but-constricting father-daughter pair in Maren Ade’s critically acclaimed comedy Toni Erdmann
“Growing tired of their distant relationship following yet another whirlwind visit from his go-getting daughter, Winifred decides to pay a surprise visit to [his daughter] Ines in Bucharest. When his plan for enforced bonding fails, Winifred changes tack – and persona – by adopting a wig and fake teeth and introducing himself as ‘Toni Erdmann’ to Ines’ friends and colleagues… while a horrified Ines looks on as her father threatens to compromise her professional and social standing.
“While this sounds superficially amusing and perhaps even creepy, what in fact develops is a touching study in second chances. For Winifred, this is something of a last-ditch effort to make up for any mistakes he may have made while raising Ines – his bumbling nature throughout suggests there may have been many – while Ines is suddenly given a chance to inject some humanity in her ambition-driven, corporate existence.
“Ade’s deceptively loose directorial style leaves plenty of room for the excellent performances by Simonischek and Hüller to shine through, building the film at a humane pace that ensures its emotional peaks feel entirely earned, and not forced into place by a script aiming for formulaic pressure points.”
Brikkuni debuting songs from Rub Al Khali during a concert at the Manoel Theatre in October 2015 (Photo: Chris Vella)
“Because [Brikkuni frontman Mario Vella’s] expressions of anger and disillusionment, harsh and inflected with dark humour as they sometimes are, always come from a place of earnest emotion. Vella’s not one for protective irony or tongue-in-cheek games: his political, social and critical observations are always made plain for all to see – something that holds true for both his oft-legendary Facebook posts and the content of Brikkuni’s songs in and of themselves.
“And with Rub Al Khali he has taken his earnest approach into what is arguably the most vulnerable place imaginable. Brikkuni’s third album is a concept album, of sorts. A concept album about the dissolution of a ten-year relationship. Yeah.”
Close shave… too close: Mariele Zammit and Stephen Mintoff. (Photo: by Christine Joan Muscat Azzopardi)
“But ironically, for all the hard-ons it seeks to inspire in our beleaguered protagonist, the second half of the play is remarkably limp as far as narrative drive is concerned. After poor Jamie is drugged and drugged over and over again and seduced into having aggressive – though it must be said, not entirely unsatisfying – sex with Diana, the play abandons its previously established vein of cheeky black humour and simmering tension in favour of a terminal descent into tired ‘torture porn’ territory.
“That Buckle is a fan of the in-yer-face theatre genre will surprise absolutely nobody – at least, not those who have followed the trajectory of Unifaun Theatre with even a fleeting sideways glance over its admirable run – and let’s face it, we all knew Unintended was heading towards a gory climax of some kind. But the problem is neither that the violence and degradation on display are ‘too much’, and neither, really, that this was a predictable move for the debut play by Unifaun’s founder and producer. The issue is one of simple story structure.”
‘Witch’ by Goblin, composed for Dario Argento’s giallo classic Suspiria (1977) appears to have a compelling series of tributes – deliberate, direct or otherwise – in more recent songs. But I am not a music critic is this is all based on intuition.
Valhalla Rising – Theme – Peter & Peter Kyed
The occult connection is something of a given in this, one of my favourite films of all time, but Peter & Peter Kyed’s main theme to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising carries over the same ominous percussion as Goblin’s incantatory trip. Bonus link: Refn is a dedicated giallo fan who will be putting his money where his mouth is.
Burn the Witch – Queens of the Stone Age
Certainly a more upbeat experience than either of the above, but the breathy-screamy sample at the beginning marks a clear link to its goblinoid predecessor. Radiohead’s recent namesake track channels The Wicker Man instead – shoving us into northern climes far from Argento’s Italy but closer to Refn’s own sublime and brutal hills. Bonus link: Both Valhalla Rising and The Wicker Man were shot in Scotland.
“The flea market ethos, like many countercultural values, paid its respects to a modernist notion of prelapsarian authenticity. In an age of plastic, authentic material value could only be located in the “real” textures of the preindustrial past, along with traces of the “real” labor that once went into fashioning clothes and objects. By sporting a while range of peasant-identified, romantic proletarian, and exotic non-Western styles, students and other initiates of the counterculture were confronting the guardians (and the workaday prisoners) of commodity culture with the symbols of a spent historical mode of production, or else one that was“Asiatic” and thus “underdeveloped.” By doing so, they singled their complete disaffiliation from the semiotic codes of contemporary cultural power. In donning gypsy and denim, however, they were also taunting the current aspirations of those social groups for whom such clothes called up a long history of poverty, oppression and social exclusion. And in their maverick Orientalism, they romanticized other cultures by plundering their stereotypes.” – Andrew Ross
I first got to know about Elmore Leonard through Quentin Tarantino – on that note, Tarantino introduced me to a whole raft of pop culture curios – and I started digging into Norse mythology after Marvel Comics planted a seed in my brain thanks to their version of Thor.
Lovecraft swam into my purview during my teenage years – though I would delve into his stories much later, again – motivated by this initial, delayed spur – through the likes of Metallica and Cradle of Filth, and Lord Dunsany I read after finding out that actually, both Lovecraft and my former literary hero JRR Tolkien were influenced by him.
One of the joys of delving into the DNA of your favourite creative people is finding out, once you crack that shell, what lies beneath. Everyone is influenced by someone else, and this hall of mirrors is what arguably characterises our relentlessly postmodern age. (Should that be post-post-postmodern? I’m not an English undergrad anymore, which frankly means I’m past caring.)
In the case of the late David Bowie, it was Marilyn Manson who did it for me – specifically, the Marilyn Manson of the androgynous Mechanical Animals era.
Now of course, I had known who Bowie was long before my friend Herman loaned me a bootleg tape of the said Manson album (come to that, I of course knew who Manson was before that talismanic tape too). Family lore has it that my aunt and father went out to buy the latest Bowie LP to reach Serbia during a respite from the hospital as my mother was getting ready to give birth to me, even – and I’m sure that same record was spun in my presence after I eventually popped out into the world on that fateful May day in 1985.
But I think I first started to gain an understanding of what Bowie was “about” thanks to Manson’s very deliberate and openly acknowledged cribbing from Bowie during that comparatively brief chapter in “the God of Fuck’s” career.
I wouldn’t really be able to talk about the technical make-up of the songs in Mechanical Animals, so I doubt that I’d be able to construct much of a formal argument in favour of why these songs ‘worked’ on me the way they did.
But neither was it a case of being transfixed by the superficial aspects of Manson’s project, dazzling and sort-of* subversive as they may have been in the pop-culture mainstream at the time. And I say this at the risk of discounting just how mind-blowing it was to me to watch Manson’s performance of The Beautiful People – taken from Antichrist Superstar, the album previous to Mechanical Animals – at the MTV Video Music Awards back in 1997 (I was twelve). It still gives me a thrill of sadistic pleasure to remember the cut-aways to the likes of Sean Combs apparently scandalized by Manson’s bare-bottomed, fascist-attired attack on MTV glamour culture. The hypocrisy of someone like Combs taking apparent offense at Manson still strikes me as telling, in a “gotcha” kind of way.
But Mechanical Animals was certainly a ‘softer’ beast, and its immersive qualities are what seduced me. Beyond the obvious, catchy charms of The Dope Show and I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me), songs like The Last Day on Earth and my personal favourite, Coma White, transported me somewhere alien but strangely calming.
The electronic wash that characterises the album still gives me a sense of something cold but meditative, and it’s all helped along by the androgynous surrogate – ‘Omega’ – that Manson created for the purpose of the album. As I would later learn, creating an artistic persona, particularly an androgynous one of this kind, was cribbed from Bowie, who admittedly trumps Manson on this front – not only because he ‘got their first’ but also because he had a far clearer vision about when to adopt these personalities and when to drop them**.
But at the time, it introduced me to the concept of, well, the concept album. Not only that, but the concept album as propped up by an invented personality the performer deliberately took on. In short, the idea of music as storytelling, which has resonated with me ever since.
It’s this echo of Bowie that I’ve carried with me ever since. Of course I’ve listened to Bowie since that time too, though not, I must admit, with the kind of visceral fan-like fervour the teenage me bestowed upon Marilyn Manson.
That’s another thing about influences. You can be introduced to artists askance. Simply put, it wouldn’t have made much sense to me to force myself to listen to Bowie at the time. I was into hard rock and heavy metal, and Manson was a more palatable jumping point into the Bowie milieu for me at that point. This is, of course, the problem with recommending essential works to people with the kind of evangelical zeal we reserve for the very best. We tend to forget that everyone’s on their own journey, and telling them that you HAVE to read/watch/listen to this at that point in their life makes little sense.
If you’re meant to reach it, you’ll reach it. In the meantime you can follow the breadcrumbs you recognise.
*I think I opted for ‘sort-of’ partly because I know Bowie did all this before
**Manson’s dithering post-Holywood career is a testament to this… compare it to how Bowie, despite some flailing years of his own, remained so much in control that he even recorded a final album as a farewell
1. Your job is to try not to think of Dredd, but think of something more fragile and immersive.
2. We’re going deeper and wider, and the horror is closing in.
3. Running, jumping. But no fancy parkour. Stylised flames (you have no idea where they came from) just about lick an army of weaponised motorbikes. You notice the giant octopus from the edge of your vision.
4. This is what passes for romance in this world – or at least at this point in time. You recognise the threat and, hands trembling and sweat pouring in FFWD streaks, you try to formulate a plan.
5. Is it a plan of escape, or attack?
6. The moment of hesitation. Death or glory? Whatever the case, this is the point at which we – the sadistic, baying audience – get to revel in the beautiful, dark maw of what’s chasing you. The Gothic, blissful evil that’s more powerful than you could ever have imagined.
7. You have a power, a weapon – whatever. It could be an army of tanks or an armada or a hive of mind-controlled killer bats. Whatever – you’re channelling it, and you’re winning.
8. But for how long?
9. What happened? What’s the outcome? Somebody’s calling, which means somebody is alive. Will they live to fight another day?
Soft Disturbances 