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Up until
now, Continuum's 33 1/3 series has been strictly academic
or music history affairs. Each slim book features an in-depth
look into one of modern music's classics for those who, as
Continuum puts it, want to know "everything there is to know
about an album." And unlike VH1's Behind the Music,
which often shoots for the lowest common musical denominator,
Continuum publishes books aimed for the trivia-obsessed, minutiae-collecting
music geeks. As such, the books are generally dry, fact-driven
affairs. And even when they step back from fanboy geekdom
with a title like Celine
Dion's Let's Talk About Love, it is still an exercise
in pop culture academia.
Now John
Darnielle, the driving force behind the Mountain Goats (whose
All Hail West Texas will hopefully enter the 33 1/3
series someday), and one of the best lyricists in music currently,
has possibly created a new type of music journalism by placing
it inside a work of fiction. In this study of Black Sabbath's
Master of Reality, Darnielle writes as a young Californian
man named Roger who has been committed to a mental treatment
facility for unnamed reasons. Through his required daily journal
writing, Roger tells Gary, the counselor who will be reading
this journal, all about Master of Reality, one of Roger's
tapes that was confiscated when he was committed against his
will.
Darnielle's
strategy has its pros and cons. Helpfully, it allows Darnielle
to tap into the youthful, energetic part of any music fan
that doesn't care about the heady academics of music and simply
wants it to be good—or, in this case, to totally rock
(it is Sabbath, after all). Because Master of Reality
was one of Roger's confiscated tapes, he focuses on it as
a goal: a tiny part of his real life that he can hope to regain
in this place in which he has been enclosed.
Additionally,
by writing as a teenage boy, Darnielle can revel in that obsessive
music fan mindset of an age where someone may have
written journal entry after journal entry detailing why Master
of Reality is better than Paranoid or how the music
is so viscerally affecting. Darnielle writes of the album's
opening track:
Imagine
that you are a man from space! And you don't speak English
and you never heard of weed, and you landed in California
and the first person you met up with took you to his house
and said "Hey check out this band." And then he played
you "Sweet Leaf." In my opinion, the man from space would
hear that song, just the crunchy guitar sound and those
bass notes, Geezer Butler is the best bassist it sounds
like his strings are made from lime jello salad, and he
would start banging his head! Because the riff on 'Sweet
Leaf," that is something anybody could understand. ANYBODY.
As truthful
and insightful as that claim may be, it does illustrate the
negative aspect of writing as a teenage stoner metalhead:
Teenage stoner metalheads aren't the most eloquent writers
and apparently use a ridiculous amount of exclamation points.
At times, the narrative becomes immensely irksome with the
single-mindedness of a nearly entirely Black Sabbath-centric
journal. Thankfully, Darnielle gives this up halfway through
the book and fast forwards ten years to write as the man that
Roger has become after his time in various corrective institutions,
with a marked improvement in written communication skills.
At this
point, it becomes clear how personal a work this is to Darnielle.
He spent several years working and living as a psychiatric
nurse at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California,
so his passages about mental treatment centers and how they
feel to the young men and women inside of them come from a
real place. He goes so far as to dedicate the book "to all
the children to whom I ever provided care, in the earnest
hope that your later lives have brought you the joy, and love,
and freedom that was always yours by right." When Roger is
committed from the youth facility to the State facility, his
apologies for breaking rules and assertion that he really
did try his best to get better has the honest heartbreak of
a young man who's about to have his life ruined as he's tossed
into a harsh world for which he probably isn't ready.
Additionally,
Darnielle's youth of child abuse by his stepfather was well-documented
on his album The Sunset Tree. Having had experience
using music as a reprieve from awful situations, he believably
details how Roger uses Master of Reality to get through
his days in his shitty apartment, with failed relationships,
and menial jobs. Beyond the simple tactic of writing as fiction
instead of straight-ahead analysis, this approach sets Master
of Reality apart from the rest of the 33 1/3 collection.
Twenty-something Roger's reflections on Masters of Reality
have a patina of melancholy and an unusual combination of
thankfulness and loss to them that no cold and clinical methodology
could have captured, which increases the value of this book
tremendously. And frankly, a heady discussion of Black Sabbath
would ignore how visceral the music is.
Though
the teenage journal has its uses, it acts as a hindrance for
Darnielle, who already has considerable music journalism experience
from his own music blog, as well as writing a monthly column
for Decibel magazine. He is more than capable of giving
readers the hit of "dwelling on their favorite albums" that
they have come to expect from Continuum's series. And while
the gimmick is novel and sets up the book's much-improved
second act, it causes the first half to suffer.
Once
he abandons the conceit of writing as a 15-year-old, however,
he's better able to illustrate the strength of Black Sabbath.
Instead of writing about how it "rules," how great the musicians
are, and how one can tell Ozzy is a real guy and not some
rock star (still a worthwhile point), Darnielle begins to
write about what the album means. Where all the other
33 1/3 books speak on the importance of albums in the
pantheon of modern music, Darnielle writes on the importance
of Master of Reality to a person who loves the band
and the importance of music in the life of anyone who has
ever needed it. Where other authors express their allegiance
through the collection of trivia, Darnielle illustrates it
in a much more personal way. Master of Reality allows
the reader to revisit the album not through new facts about
effects pedals and examining liner notes, but by reminding
them why music like this means so much to them to begin with.
Besides.
How could you dissect the academic details of anything when
you have "Children of the Grave" cranked to eleven?
(July
2008)
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