Such Exquisite Dumbness

A review of Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, by Ian Christe.

by Andrew Hearst • The New York Sun • April 29, 2003

One day in the early 1990s, a young Canadian heavy metal fan put a chair in the center of his living room, turned on a video camera, cued up a Metallica album, and launched into the most hilariously earnest display of fantasy musicianship ever captured on tape. Glaring straight at the camera, and wearing a pair of Bart Simpson shorts, the scowling young man re-created every snare hit, every kick-drum thud, every cymbal crash on the recordings—but he did it on an imaginary drum kit. The young air drummer quickly forgot about the tape he had made, but someone later found it and released it into the underground trading circuit without his knowledge. "Metallica Drummer!," as the video came to be known, developed a cult following in the late 1990s, probably because it’s so revealing of the fantasy world that lurks in the imagination of every music freak. To paraphrase Walt Kelly, we have seen Metallica Drummer, and he is us.

In his comprehensive but frustrating new book, Sound of the Beast, the writer and musician Ian Christe demonstrates a mastery of heavy metal’s details that would make Metallica Drummer—not to mention Metallica’s actual drummer, Lars Ulrich—grunt with envy. Mr. Christe chronicles heavy metal’s fist-pumping journey in prose as bombastic as the music itself. The start of it all, according to the author, was Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut album. Downplaying the considerable influence of other hard-rock bands, especially Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, on the development of the fledgling genre, Mr. Christe writes that there were "scant few stones an investigator could overturn to find precedent for how completely Black Sabbath brought and embodied a revolutionary new beginning."

With Ozzy Osbourne and his fellow Sabs leading the way, and with help from a few independent record labels and magazines, the music began to thrive. Bands such as Judas Priest developed formal song structures and whiplash-inducing dynamic shifts; Kiss delivered cartoonish theatricality; Iron Maiden honed mythical lyrics and blistering harmony guitars; Metallica churned out an endless supply of sinister, bottom-heavy riffs. Cross-fertilization with punk, funk, rap, and other music styles resulted in an array of offshoots, including metalcore, funk metal, avant-garde metal, and hardcore rap.

And then there was 1980s hair metal, the music's inevitable cooptation by the mainstream—an era explored in much greater detail, and with much more humor, in Chuck Klosterman's endearing 2001 memoir Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta, a brave attempt to make a case for the cultural significance of Mötley Crüe, Poison, and their ilk.

In his completist zeal to cram in every last detail about the music and its various subgenres and sub-subgenres, Mr. Christe has failed to craft a compelling narrative or to place developments in a larger cultural context. The book opens with a few paragraphs of unsurprising biographical details about the members of Black Sabbath, whose childhoods, apparently, were little different from those of many other British kids born during or soon after World War II.

How did four not-so-bright young men create music of such raw power, such exquisite dumbness, that it helped change the face of late-20th-century popular music? What did Sabbath’s music reveal about the band’s fans, who were mesmerized by the earsplitting volume and spooky lyrics? Did the band lift lyric ideas from Edgar Allan Poe? Opening the book with a 10- or 20-page Sabbath minibiography would have been a perfect way to set up some larger themes. The author makes passing attempts throughout the book to address a number of these larger themes, but he never develops them into a sustained argument.

Most of the quotes in Sound of the Beast are from musicians. Had he included more insight from major-label marketing executives, say, and more stories from mere fans, he would have presented a fuller picture of heavy metal’s socioeconomic foundations and cultural influence. Mr. Christe has been such a devoted fan of the music for so long that he’s unable to stand outside the story and look on it with the dispassionate eye of a journalist or historian. It makes you want to bang your head—against your desk.

“I look back now and think everybody was really naive,” Celtic Frost frontman Tom Warrior tells the author in a section about heavy metal’s successes in the 1980s. “I just liked the revolutionary character of the whole thing. That a bunch of idiots went out into the world and made this a household music, and it worked.” In Sound of the Beast, Mr. Christe tells us what the bunch of idiots did, but he doesn’t really explain why it worked. His explanation appears to be something like Because metal rocks. Which is, let’s face it, a pretty good explanation. It just doesn’t make for great reading.