Classic Metal Class Session 2 Tomorrow Noon Central!

We're doing another of the online Classic Metal Class sessions tomorrow, Saturday May 16 at Noon Central Time, and anyone who wants to attend is invited! 

If you'd like to register for the session - which you'll need in order to get the Zoom link and the cool handout on the topic for this session - just click here and fill out the form.

I'll be joined again by special guest, Scott Tarulli - guitar professor, band leader, studio and gig musician, and a good friend and colleague - and we'll be discussing the "Black Sabbath-Deep Purple Nexus".

By that admittedly strange term, what I have in mind is not just the early metal music they composed, played, and recorded, and not just their massive influence on so many other metal acts that were to follow.  I also mean the musicians they took in from other bands, developed, and then spun off and out into other bands.  There's a lot of connections between these two main poles of the nexus and the other acts that fit into it.  These include three important metal solo bands - Gillan, Ozzy Osborne, and Dio - and two other major bands - Rainbow and Whitesnake.

So join us tomorrow for a conversation that will range over classic metal music history, philosophical ideas and speculations, and most likely a lot more (including a kids' cartoon)!

Classic Metal Class - Session 1 This Saturday!

Classic Heavy Metal - the stuff from the 70s and 80s - has been a major part of my life since I was a kid, and before I even knew what that kind of music was called.  I've also been either studying or teaching philosophy for three decades now.  Those areas have bled over into each other from time to time, and I've been fortunate to have friends and colleagues - including Scott Tarulli, Blitch 66, and (my wife) Andi Sciacca - with whom I could "talk metal" in deep, detailed, and animated conversations.

In addition to enjoying heavy metal as a fan, I've also long been researching the history of the genre.  I've been wanting not just to engage in writing about classic metal, but also to engage in some teaching and interactive discussion about it.  So I'm starting that up this weekend with a the first 1-hour session of Classic Metal Class - and you're invited!

I'll be hosting the class on Zoom at Noon Central Time, Saturday April 25.  Here's the signup page (our Zoom is capped at 100 people).  I'm planning on presenting for the first 20 or so minutes, and then we'll open it up to discussion and Q&A - and guitarist, bandleader, and professor Scott Tarulli will also be there as a special guest, participating in the discussion!

The topic I've selected for this first session is a basic but also controversial one:  the early years of metal (1970-1974).  "Controversial?" you might ask?  Yep!  There's quite a few "origin stories" to heavy metal, and the simpler they are, usually the more wrong they turn out to be.  We'll be discussing the "it was just Black Sabbath at the start" narrative (usually coupled with "and then it was Judas Priest"), and showing how much richer, more complex, and more interesting the real story of metal's early years is! 

We'll also be touching on some more explicitly philosophical issues like how and whether we can define music genres; what the essence of heavy metal is (if there is one); what makes a band "important" or "influential"; and why this music caught on in the first place.

So join us this Saturday for what promises to be a lively discussion of this music we love!

3 Undeservedly Panned Albums from 1983

Even the greatest of bands can suffer occasional missteps, turning out an album or two that aren't just below the high standards their earlier releases established, but genuinely, head-shakingly, take-a-swig-to-wash-away-the-taste bad.  It's true that music critics can be a demanding and rather eccentric lot -- and as a profession, they've been off base at times in condemning some amazing albums, bands, or even movements of music -- and fans, as well as the chart numbers and album sales figures they drive can prove a faddish and finicky lot.  But there are indeed efforts and experiments by bands that make even the real cultists, the diehard believer fans ask "what the hell are they doing?"

Metal Origins: Some Key Early Bands

There's been a tendency in recent years -- one I see particularly among fans into more recent "genre" metal (all the stuff ranging from "black" to "sludge" to "viking" . . .) -- to accord the origins of heavy metal primarily to on band, Black Sabbath.  This claim has been given considerable weight by a key practitioner and early innovator, Rob Halford, for whom it's become somewhat of a party-line that first there was Sabbath, and really nobody else doing it, and then there was Judas Priest.  My aim, in this and some follow-up posts yet to come, is to argue that this is far from the case -- that the story is much more complicated and interesting than that.

Don't get me wrong -- in the narrative as I reconstruct it, Black Sabbath certainly gets given their rightful pride of place.  They possess a napoleonic status of "first among equals."  I'd even go so far as to say that without Sabbath, metal might have coalesced rather differently -- and perhaps less powerfully, less coherently -- as a genre.  But it's a mistake to portray them as the sole seminal band.

Video Flashback: Black Sabbath - "Trashed"

Of Black Sabbath's many albums, I can easily say -- though this is still supposed by many to be anathema -- that Born Again was early on and still remains one of my favorites.  Ian Gillan's collaboration with the band was short-lived and, from his description, ill-fated.  But, that period produced some excellently playful, grit-guitar heavy, imaginative songs that, for me, ought to be Sabbath standards:  Digital Bitch, Hot Line, Disturbing the Priest -- and of course one of the heaviest metal songs ever composed, Zero the Hero.  The entire album -- panned by many at the time -- has really stood the test of decades.  The songs have aged well without becoming dated and faded.  And, this holds as well for the opening track, Trashed.

I didn't actually get to see this early-MTV era video for the tune until just a few years ago.  I bought Born Again as an album, and played it enough times to wear the record down quite a bit, back in 1984, along with a trove of 8 or 9 other Metal LPs through the gimmicky Columbia Record Club  (effectively tripling the size of my metal record collection!), so Trashed early on became one of those songs permanently burnt into the figurative mp3s of my own wetware memory.  It's quite interesting to watch this video -- or rather the two videos, as you'll see below -- looking back retrospectively from the vantage point of several decades.

"Define" Heavy Metal, You Say?

You'll notice that, at first, it looks like I've placed the quotation marks in the wrong places in the title of this entry.  But, no. . .  they're set around just the right term -- define.  You'll see, or rather read, why momentarily.  First though, a bit of back-story.

I would say that one of the words I hear most often from non-philosophers in early-on conversations with philosophers, almost always placed in the interrogative is "define," as in "now, how would you define. . . ?" or "what's your definition of . . . ?" or "can you define. . . .?"  Occasionally, most often I'd say in student papers, I end up seeing the indicative ". . .  is defined as . . .  according to the . . . .   dictionary/encyclopedia/my uncle Jake, etc."

I don't hear "definition" pop up all that often when philosophers are plying their trade, teaching, or talking amongst themselves.  Why is that, you might wonder?  Well, although we hale from a profession and tradition that gets a good early start with Socrates wandering around asking people for definitions of key concepts, like virtue, justice, knowledge, and so on. . .  most of us have come to realize -- one way or another -- just how difficult it can be to provide adequate definitions for any really interesting concept, experience, phenomenon.  "Give me a definition of. . . "  You demand that in many philosophical circles, and they rightly peg you as right off the bus, really or just ironically naive, or as playing at debater's tricks