Weed Metal is some secret handshake shit. Its the kind of thing where the genre's mention alone is like skipping past all the forced drinking, ass paddling and shit eating right to the magically complicated high-five part of becoming a Delta Kai or rugby player or whatever other bullshit club you're trying to get in to. DNA type shit. If you fire an Electric Wizard torpedo and it collides with another figurative submarine in spite of the worlds balls-to-the-wall silent drive then you and that submarine will be like two peas in a little underwater pod, no Alec Baldwin required.
I love it.
But the genre has a dirty secret, though it isn't a particularly hard one to sort out. Even a minor glance behind its mud speckled veneers reveals its true origins: hippy shit. The patchouli scented fingerprints of the 60's counterculture are all over modern Sludge. The relationship of the genre to hippie culture is like America's relationship to slavery: as repulsive as one might find the latter in both situations it is only because of them that the former exist as we know it today. Keep in mind, I don't necessarily consider either America or Weed Metal as flawless in practice. The States have always had awful problems with racial relationships, gender politics, class structure and censorship. Just as horrifying is the treatment of Sunn O))) as a legitimate musical endeavor. Still, when an aspect either entity is really running on all ideologically foundational cylinders it is some truly breathtaking shit.
The historical circumstances of Weed Metal are tied inextricably to the ethos surrounding the genre. Basically, a schism in rock music occurred. There is nothing particularly new or interesting about that since new sub-genres have been burping out of rock and roll's guts forever. From rock to punk, punk to hardcore, hardcore to whatever unlistenable bullshit is being shat out today by guys with makeup on who are not Gorgoroth or Faster, Pussycat. And this is just one of the maaaany chains of genre change out there. What is particularly interesting is the ideological dynamic of the two groups in question here. You see, the original archetype was the "hippie" and from that archetype’s body came the Death Hippie (a term I did not make up but am claiming ownership of NOW), an entity which orbits around the same desired stimuli (rock music and weed) as hippie culture but which is, at its core, its opposite number. Weed Metal is the musical extension of the Death Hippie and in being this the genre succeeds at what hippie culture as a whole tried and failed to do then (and now) without really meaning or even wanting to.
Sonically speaking, the WM anti-culture could not help but come from the hippie rock sound just as all rock cannot help but have crawled out from the same greasy womb which was Robert Johnson’s Devil Blues and, since rock and roll was still a relatively new phenomenon, the sixties counterculture was able to adopt it in its entirety. Eventually the inescapable psychedelic influence molded the genre into a self-consciously cerebral near parody of itself with its intended esotericism (I’m looking at you Strawberry Alarm Clock). Now, I’m not saying that the entire generation was musically flaccid because there was a ton of awesome music which came out of the period. The MC5 could indeed kick out the jams motherfucker, Hendrix played like a dirty fucking animal and the Stones were always great so long as they weren't dumbly aping Woodstock. Its just that all of it was too focused on the external, an issue which I promise to address eventually.
Some WM groups now even borrow certain psychedelic elements of the hippie rock sound (lots of fx, janglely guitars, a distinctly Asiatic flavor, and jazzy bullshittery) but never is it used as a means through which to offer homage or to create the illusion of importance (which is what the intention of "mind expansion" certainly was and is). Instead it is a blunt instrument to rock with, another stone for the caveman to throw at the moon. For example, the Japanese murderophiles Church of Misery have embraced the sort of fuzzed out, occasionally shreddy, fx-ical reverberations of the hippie scene. This should not be held against them as is it not a cultural endorsement or a means to add pretentious depth but rather just a tool with which to ornamentate the key technical components of Weed Metal: Girth and Rhythm.
What am I talking about? Huge fucking grooves, that's what. Correction: huge fucking blues grooves. The huger the better, both in terms of aural density and sheer volume (how big it sounds) and internal intensity (how big it feels). The quality of recording isn't important either so long as the grooves are big and dirty. And slow too, at just the right moment where speed is definitely not a virtue. When perfectly applied, a groove can make all the wanky chops in the world be understood as nothing more than the math problems and jerk off sessions they are. Chops have their place but too often emphasis is thrown more on technical ability and not on the actual human aspect of rock music which is that soul power, brother. Soul, soul, soul, sell yours for rock and roll all you want but don’t you dare try to scam rock out of its own.
Vocally, Weed Metal works with a wide palette of approach from the melodic subtlety of Pete Stahl in Goatsnake to the horrifying sounds that itty, bitty former junkie Mike Williams somehow makes come out of his Creole throat for Eyehategod. Each and every technique aims to enhance the third typical element of Weed Metal (weed consumption is considered assumed here folks, c’mon): darkness.
Weed Metal is also colloquially known as doom or sludge and this is for a reason (I only prefer the tag Weed Metal because I like to listen to Bongzilla when I get high and Bongzilla like it when I’m high listening to Bongzilla and Bongzilla like to be high while being Bongzilla and in this web of stoner recognition is the ever present shadow of total hopelessness amongst the resin). Facedowninshit aren’t completely right when they say “Nothing Positive, Only Negative” but they are close. This shit is dark man, but that don't mean we can't still kick some ass, y'know (if you don't know I hope to make you know soon).
Of course, none of this explains anything about the history except what any dummy could already see and I know that you're no dummy and this shit needs to get crackin'. So let us take a crack indeed at the first archetype in order to understand the second:Today, the hippie movement has aligned itself with the practically useful idea of “sustainability”. I've heard it applied to everything. In class I have sat through presentations on Sustainable Composition or Green Comp and I have groaned at the cooption of another sensible idea made more political than it needs to be. Unfortunately the idea of sustainability could not apply functionally to the “hippie” lifestyle as it was dreamed, mandated and then popularized. Though drugs were not necessarily intended by the architects of the initial movement to be foundational they would move into alignment with that very movement and eventually become synonymous with it. A culture that is not only in a static state of drug ingestion but also seemed to suggest that being high could go on indefinitely without consequence allowed the uglier elements of community and reality to wreak some serious havoc on the anti-institution movements own institution.
The pseudo-collapse of the of the Haight-Ashbury mecca in '67 is a good example to start with. Of course, the H-A has since reestablished its cred by fostering the illusion of it still being a forest of Bohemian delight. Ben and Jerry’s have done the same thing in the way they approach the public and I view that company as well as both Ben and Jerry individually as morally culpable for the kid outside of my Great Western Works class playing that goddamn acoustic guitar beneath a tree as though that is a place where a guitar should be played (“Yeah, I was just walking around campus and suddenly was gripped by the urge to play guitar right here where you girls were coming out of class. Fate is so crazy. May I lick your nipples?”). That’s not really fair I guess. Their Oatmeal Cookie ice cream is some good shit.
BUT ANYWAYS, the illusion of sustainability of the drug utopia was coming to a close due not to political machinations but rather because of things like addiction and homelessness and the problems that come with them. Heroin and speed did a pretty good job of gutting the area for a while what with the crime and the rape and the people supposedly eating stray cats. ( I heard that last thing from VH1's The Drug Years which I actually just turned on in the midst of writing this and don't really believe it. Actually, that whole program irks the hell out of me me because they discuss some of the key figures of the Death Hippie archetype and now I feel like a Johnny-Come-Lately. The one thing I do have on my side in this is that I don't operate from behind the rose colored glasses that the modern retrospective view of the 60's takes. ) All of this was contrary to the overly intellectualized, entirely politicized idea of the sustainable hippie lifestyle which was purported to be the ideal lifestyle.
To demonstrate the scene going crazy, going insaaaane, and flying off the rails The Diggers even committed a glib act of symbolism. A parade! called Death of Hippie. What FUN! They also closed their soup kitchens and homeless shelters it what seemed to be the symbolic act of being a bunch of assholes. And so concluded 1967.
Then in 1968, as if on cue, there emerged a symbol for the radical paradigm shift towards the natural human capability for ugliness, a figure who dramatically illustrated the reality of the situation. Charles Manson was only a Death Hippie in a literal sense. Charley was a crazy fucker who convinced others to kill for him but he was not the Death Hippie as an ideologue. He was not an agent of counter counterculture (thank you Charlie Dub). He believed in the typical hippie gibberish but spiked it with piquant insanity. And he was influenced by drugs. Was he created by them? Nah, but they sure didn't help.
What he was was just a bigger version of the effect of drugs on the human psyche. Drugs exaggerate experience and distort them, that's why we take them. Is it so ridiculous then to assume that people knew what was to be expected when drugs are taken? Weed certainly wasn't some new invention. As for the psychedelics, what should one think will happen when you put a chemical compound into your brain with the intent to make it malfunction? These substances are not vitamins but so often in the murky recollections of the 60's the subjectivity of drug experience is ignored. The one I'm talking about most prevalently here is weed. Weed can make you feel bad. When the high dissipates in rolls the ennui and the depression. It makes decisions seem easier than they should. It makes couches feel like destinies. Don't get me wrong here, I love weed but I also understand that everything that goes into your body has a consequence.
And that is what Uncle Charley represents. The confrontation of ideals and reality where real human experience dwells. He is a figure of depressing compromise for the drug culture. Weed Metal gets that today and old CM has always been a symbol of some sort to stoner metal society to one degree or another. Eyehategod used a Manson sample in one of their songs and when I listened to it when I was high I got the shit scared out me both by the crazy motherfuckery of what he was saying and the authentic feeling truths he used to illustrate the mad schematic. So, while Manson should not be regarded as an actual Death Hippie or even as the prototype he was one of many signifiers that counter-cultural ideology and reality would not coalesce. He was a switch that was already being thrown anyway and who ultimately meant very little while simultaneously representing everything. (here is another Church of Misery gem about Mr. Manson)
Hunter S. Thompson, on the other hand, was a Death Hippie. He was counterculture but also acutely aware of the power of violence and the ugliness of behavior. He wrote anti-hippie pieces and, interestingly enough still has become exalted by the entirety of the drug culture including the modern and vintage arms of the hippie forces who would have us believe that everything done was pure and universal. I mean, c'mon, of course all those old bastards recall those days fondly. They were the cool kids who were actually getting laid after they sparked their dirty little j’s rather than the rest of the R. Crumb types (God bless his honest, filthy heart) who showed up for some of that free love stuff and got promptly shut down for not adopting a uniform. But that can be discussed later.
The writing of Hunter S. Thompson lacked beauty. He seemed to have no interest in the stuff. What is was chock-full of (besides dirt and blow) was reactionary bile that came from a place of radical honesty and, if Keats has taught us anything, it is that Truth is Beauty. I’ve heard critics (ahem) say that he was only interested in shock but that a little too simple. Yes, he liked to massage those visceral emotions out of us but that too is in keeping with the Death Hippie archetype: humanity at any cost. The dude also liked to get party and then run amok preferably with sick cars or guns but he was aware of the consequences, of the practical reality of doing this.
"But, Jesus Christ, what does it all mean to rock music already?" Well, these two figures illustrate physically the intense aural paradigm shift that was about to blow out the worlds proverbial asses.
Rock Music has always had its receivers tuned to the abject darkness. For the longest time it was all based around the little tricks Robert Johnson picked up from the Devil himself. But since rock musicians are typically young and often (and more importantly) total fucking dum dums, they get everything all wrong. Zep understood the nastiness of their surroundings but really wasted the potential of those negative vibrations by playing with ouiji boards, singing about hobbits and fucking girls with fish. The Doors seemed to get it but were ultimately proved incompetent and ignorant by their posture as “artists”. That was a common problem well into the 70's. I love the Who but I certainly don't want to have to regard an opera made by them as having some kind of real value.
And there is the straight dope of the issue (get it?). Rock musicians thought they were artists. Haha, nope, sorry guys. Wanting to be taken seriously as something other than a provider of purely visceral experience is a copout to be made by wusses and frontin’ ass bitches (so to speak). This was the same problem of the hippie counterculture movement and it continues to be a problem today (for rock, for all those self described hippies). They wanted to matter soooo much that they even tried to make their partying to have political consequence. That is pure narcissism and the 60's stunk with it. I mean, everyone understands that there is nothing at all funny about peace, love and/or understanding but to have those sentiments artificially attached to every piece of life, even our escapes from life, is unbearable. Today we have the dubious privilege of listening to the old timers talk about the purity of what they were doing and how they stopped the war and as a result of that the new breed can’t compromise their shallowness and their ideals with their assertions that the fossilized bastards were right in thinking that by trying to levitate the pentagon they actually made a difference.
It is for this reason that Black Sabbath (or Black Fucking Sabbath or Sabbath or Fuckin’ Sabbath or whatever you want to call them) got it so, sooooo right. Their music reflected the immediacy and selfishness of youth without all of the sociopolitical hangups that were jumbled up with being a kid back then. For them this was art in the same way Doyle regards his trucks interior in Sling Blade: It is art only because it kicks SO MUCH ASS that it could not be anything else. This new attitude represented a certain degree of devolution. Sabbath were responding to music that was prevalent, impotent and a little too sure that it was the good guy.
While making it okay to rock just to rock again they infused their jams with a strong sense of blue collar values. Sabbath were not college kids. Ozzy’s parents were factory people. Tony Iommi got his goddamn fingers smashed off working as a machinist at age 17. He had to pay the bills. People always got to pay them bills. They push down on us constantly and are certainly not limited to the dough we got to pay just to stick around. This is not meant to mean that they were stupid (they might have been, I dunno) but rather that they were not sheltered from a life of hustlin’ to survive that the counterculture had with their universities and manifestos and Alan Ginsbergs dressed in white beating on sets of bongos.
But still, one must always keep in mind that they were a bunch of friggin’ longhairs at a time where there was approximately zero distinction between long hairs. They liked to party but rock music had been subverted into the counter-cultural movement to the point where separating the two entities was nearly impossible. Basically, if you liked weed and rock music you had no choice but to subscribe to the political pretense of the genre. Rock as a whole was all caught up in gears of the hippie machine and because of this ALL metal is essentially indebted to it.
But still, those bills had to get paid so Sabbath worked. They had thicker necks and with them more natural, human desires. For them rock music did not have to be tied up with political pretension all the time. I mean, they still had feelings about that shit but they also like Boris Karloff and the blues and were real enough in their desire simply to kick ass that they were able to transcend the pretentious intellectual baggage that came with music in the late 60's. Other bands had rocked (I mean, someone had to) but were too self-aware in their rocking and had spawned the generally terrible flower power sound which dominated the late sixties. So Sabbath became sonic Death Hippies. There was no other option really except for buying in (which would be selling out).
So then, did Black Sabbath consciously channel their surroundings? They may say that they did these days but now they are rich and have bought into their own mythology. This happens all the time and while money isn't necessarily a catalyst to swallowing the public’s proverbial load (get a load of the broke ass punk dudes who think they are some important motherfuckers in the doc American Hardcore) it cannot be argued that the monetary attachment of value doesn't discourage someones head from getting bigger. I mean, Ozzy is selling World of Warcraft with Verne Troyer and William Shatner and calling himself the Prince of Darkness while the rest of Sabbath are touring with Dio like his time in the band were the good ole days for Chrissake. Its all very disturbing stuff and proof of the highly theoretical “Mo Money, Mo Problems” equation. When one takes this into account along with other peculiar anomalies like an earlier lineup of Sabbath having a saxophone player then the question of consciousness becomes even more suspect (kind of).
But intent should ultimately have no weight on the issue. If they meant it means the same thing as it would have had an ancient and evil god of Rock possessed their minds and hearts and made them create something as magnificently UGH as Sweet Leaf. I would believe something like that more easily than a full awareness of action. I mean, the story goes that the reason those crazy bastards tuned down in the first place was so that Tony could play easier with that gimpy hand of his. Environment and experience were everywhere and with that came a more traditional idea of what constituted a “good life”. On Faeries Wear Boots they tell it like it is:" [the Doctor] said son, son, you’ve gone too far./cause smokin and trippin is all that you do." BOOM Enter consequence and the awareness thereof. With this in place they could be irresponsible rock stars who got laid and paid and stayed high all the time and still have more soul than Country Joe with or without his Fish.
The only other place you’ll see such a remarkable understanding of personal dilemma which stems from getting high all the goddamn time and generally acting like a debauched asshole is the South. Southern Rock is a mutt formed from country and blues heavy rock music and has informed a unique personal perspective on rock music. An easy label is morality which stems from the core values that every Southern Renaissance writer from Faulkner to Maddox to Warren has assured us is a key in the grand Dixie scheme of things. I am sure Lynrd Skynrd considered their mothers feelings at some point during their partyin’ and that why they play with such soul (as if I need to illustrate the connection, here is Weedeater covering “Gimme Back My Bullets”). Only recently have I come to understand the cultural significance of “Free Bird” and, even though I can not listen to it because of Guitar Hero and Ryan Allen Droney I understand how much pure soul power is in there. The best Weed Metal still typically comes from the South (Weedeater, Rwake, the entire NOLA scene) and it still generally embraces the unique combination of working class weariness, moral confrontation and the desire to just get fucked up and party.
And thanks to the rock star status and pure listenability of Sabbath and the new, true blue crop of American rock bands we had the incubation of modern Weed Metal. Imagine all the kids who grew up listening to Sabbaths grooves and Black Oak Arkansas' bluesy ass riff fests and now imagine those kids moving those elements through the intense filtration of the underground metal and punk scenes as they developed. While the sounds got bigger the approach got smaller. The rockstar element dropped out of the bottom (though it was somewhat rekindled in Pantera) and the music became even more working class because of it approachability.
Weed Metal is for the people by the people so the people can get dirty and rock. This extends even to gender relations. In the hippie culture of the 60's I would wager that very few ladies signed up for the free love action. The drugs maybe, but getting laid was certainly not reason number 1. Women tend to be purer in their ideological intentions. But, as Robert Crumb asserted in “Crumb” and the old hippie square in my grad class asserted in grad class, the boys wanted to get some play. And from this a bizarre gender dynamic developed in that scene where the larger concepts behind free love acted as bait to draw in the girlies to the dudes who probably just acted deep to get some. I am willing to argue this intensely.
In Weed Metal, a culture that exists outside of the schematics of a culture no such sexual dynamic exists. Why is this? That’s a great question which has a great answer: While Weed Metal dudes want to get laid, they have consciously created a space which is, for the majority of ladies, about as unsexy as it gets. Scratch that, the majority of people are not going to regard Weed Metal as baby makin' music unless they are some weirdo that gets off on nihlism. So the genre is a boys club but only ostensibly. By consciously eliminating the sexual element from rock and roll they have created an even playing field where the ladies can and do play a pretty damn vital role. Tons of doom outfits employ the fairer sex: Liz Buckingham in Electric Wizard, B. from Rwake, Wata from Boris, Lori S. from Acid King and Amber from Jucifer are just a few off the top of my head. There may be more females involved in jam bands or whatever now but the girlies in Weed Metal are not regarded as a sideshow built from a place of self-aware meaning. Nobodies bats a fucking eye because it is entirely understood that they just want to rock.
And that is truly the crux of the matter. The desire to rock for the sake of rocking (even as shadow of death crowds our fuckin' space) is what makes Dragonaut, a song ostensibly about dragons flying to Mars, a trillion times more meaningful than anything the Mamas and the Papas ever produced. I mean, yeah, there was a schism in rock music. It’s happened more and more as rocks history has progressed like punk from rock and hardcore from punk. This is one of the only cases where the new entity was about a devolution. Weed Metal is about the old soul of the blues, rocks true father combined with the dirt of rock and roll and the intensity of heavy metal. And, unlike the place from whence it came, it offers no solutions, only consolation and that in itself is comforting.
I mean, seriously man...Weed Metal knows you got them problems. Its got problems of its own. Can’t nothing be done but, still, its there for you. Welcome the Death Hippie. Get high and rock.
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