CAUGHT IN (Y)A MOSH

HEAVY METAL AND ME

It started at recess in 7th grade, when my closest friend would split ear buds with me and play Metallica tapes as we avoided social interaction with our peers. I stared at the skulls he painted on the Walkman and the image of Iron Maiden's Eddie taped into the player window, and thought, THIS IS REBELLION. At first it seemed like a wall of noise, because he usually got the bud channel with the guitar solos. After a few tries, metal started to make sense to me. I requested mix tapes, started pooling my pocket change to buy used tapes at the record store down the street from my house. By high school, I was a metal head at heart, and could talk for hours on end about the nuances of Steve Harris's bass tone or the stylistic shift in Metallica's music after Cliff Burton died, or plead with the more extreme dudes to accept Anthrax into the pantheon of greatness, because they deserve it, dammit. I'm just happy I didn't dress that way, because nothing says "please beat the crap out of me as I walk home through bad neighborhoods" like a Megadeth shirt, black jeans, spike bracelets, and stringy hair adorning your 120-pound gangling frame. I'd rush home every day to blast my favorites on the big stereo in the living room before my sister and her boyfriend came home and kicked me out so they could (shudder) "be together". Gross. 

Metal helped get me through the high school doldrums and long, hot summers. It helped me make friends at my age level and in the adult world when I worked in a restaurant kitchen, blasting Sepultura with the sous chef as we prepped the dinner specials. Hell, it even put me to sleep, as I'd throw in Pantera as I went to sleep, but at a low volume; somehow through his legendary, house-shaking snoring, my dad could hear music through walls that I could barely discern from five feet away. 

I still dig metal, and probably always will. It's been helpful in getting to know students who think they're unreachable because of their interests, and makes for debate material with these boys and girls, which I always win, until they get into the Scandinavian black metal stuff, which I just can't get behind. Sorry, my northern brethren. But hey, let's have some tea and discuss the finer points of Black Sabbath any time. 

These guys warped me, and I gave them lots of my money.

HEAVY METAL AND YOU

A guide to ruining your life

ANYHOO, I read the Heavy Metal & You by Christopher Krovatin, for which I had high hopes. In one sense, Krovatin delivers thoughtful analysis of metal music and translates the scary rage into something outsiders can understand. I have had to slowly introduce many a lady to metal, with mixed results, but I can identify with protagonist Sammy's passion for the genre. HOWEVER, I just can't get with Slayer and Deicide, his two favorite bands. I tried with Slayer, but after about four songs of yelling about blood and Satan and visceral accounts of how you are to be dismembered, I'm ready to move onto something more stimulating, like putting my head in C-clamp. So, the music part is good. My problem with this book? THE ACTUAL STORY.

Argh. It moves so slowly and seems empty. There is some revelation near the end that is deeper than I expected given the setup, and Sammy and Melissa learn a lot about themselves, and relationships. For that, this is a worthy read, but it takes a while to get there. Krovatin cleverly uses the play, pause, rewind, and fast forward button symbols to indicate time at page breaks, which assists in navigation and makes this feel like an audio book or movie, and the chapter titles are all recognizable songs. Sammy has some rage issues, which are explored between bouts of heavy petting, and while he is a stereotypical metalhead on the outside, at least he's well-read and somewhat intelligent, of which we in the metal world are not usually accused. 

Without giving away too much, this book is a mixed bag, but it's a promising first effort, and because he knows his metal so well, he has an authentic voice when rendering ideas about into a fictional context. He has subsequent books out there, which I'll eventually try. If the Goodreads page for this book is any indication, he's gotten through to many people, and that's what it's all about. 

HEAVY COMPLAINTS AND ME

In all, this book is fine, I guess. It just doesn't have the right oomph to make it to the upper echelon. And now for my list of SEVEN DEADLY COMPLAINTS:

1. I don't smoke, but I know enough that quitting smoking is extremely difficult. Yet, this guy Sammy seems to go cold turkey for his love interest without a problem. An angst-riddled metalhead who doesn't have a nicotine craving worth mentioning? As my boy Downtown Clay Davis would say: 

2. Sammy angrily stalks the streets of NYC with Slayer blasting in his ear holes, but somehow gets Anthrax lyrics stuck in his head and equates it to his situation. Me, being an authority on metal, can tell you that it's impossible to have a coherent thought while listening to Slayer. 

3. I know there exist young metal-loving men who go to expensive prep schools in Manhattan, but when you're trying to create a story for the extreme music set, most of whom probably don't have that upbringing, that's a classic case of misplaced setting. 

4. Rookie mistake: the standard classic book plant is executed poorly. The back of the book says Krovatin was an undergrad when he wrote Heavy Metal & You, so it stands to reason that he'd stumble when inserting references to The Catcher in the Rye. Instead of finding some kind of deep connection to Holden Caulfield, Sammy breaks some windows and realizes that he's acting JUST LIKE CAULFIELD. Does this mean I could put this book down and READ A BETTER VERSION OF THIS STORY? I guarantee no one will be clamoring to read Krovatin's sealed stories, decades after his death. 

5. Technology moves fast, and by spending so much time describing the finer points of creating a mix compilation (High Fidelity did it, and did it better*) on CD, Krovatin is already alienating his younger readers, who probably use them for coasters. If he'd checked his email using AOL I'd have chucked this book in the neighbor's burn pile. 

*I could go into the differing theories on creating a killer compilation here, but I'd have to start a new blog titled JB Yells About Your Crappy Mix. 

6. The protagonist's favorite band is Deicide. Deicide sucks. 

7. Krovatin gives such short shrift to Sammy alienating his friends that their eventual conflict and resolution feels forced, shoehorned in to give complete resolution to the boy + new girl = boy's friends are sad trope. This is the second most important part of the story and it receives about four rushed pages of treatment near the very end. 

8. I'm not fond of Sammy being a stereotypical high school metal dude who smokes, drinks, does drugs, and pukes all over his friends. I was a high school metal dude, and didn't do any of those things until college. Just as there are eight items on this promised list of seven, I'm the exception to the rule!

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

A book advertised as a bike trip murder mystery, but turns out to be a coming of age novel about acknowledging change. Let's just say this book has a great title of double meaning, and HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT!

BORING STUFF

Heavy Metal And You

Christopher Krovatin

2005 PUSH

Running on Empty

HELLO AGAIN

I can't remember the last time I read a book and thought, "You know, I understand why people think burning books is a good idea." Oh, wait, yes I can. What a shame that the first YA book I get the time to read after two months of doctoral coursework (read: voluntary suicide) is such a dud.

Fitting, then, that this book was available for a dime at a library book sale. No, really, a dime, and I just happened to have one. You can't get anything for a dime anymore. A dime can't even buy you two nickels. I tried it at the bank and they said go away. I said I have a right to be here. They said we don't know how long you've been living in our break room, but it stops now. I said fine.

Don't click. Please, don't. I've never been so serious.

This book, by English author Julia Donaldson, is set in Scotland. Right away, there are two problems:
1. I may have Scottish ancestry, but the way their spoken language is written is maddening, and there are enough apostrophes in it to I don't know a good punchline for such a lousy setup.
2. The text on Donaldson's website is all Comic Sans. Therefore, I must attempt to destroy her.

The story itself is about a girl, Leo, who runs away from her aunt and uncle, her primary caretakers after the death of her parents. For some reason, when a kid in Scotland runs away from home, it makes the front page of the paper. Either it was a slow news day or the fine people of Scotland get their world news from around the cracker barrel. Anyway, running factors heavily into this story, for about, oh, two pages. Leo, in typical fashion, hasn't thought far beyond simply running away and is starving; she steals some donuts and is chased by the vendor, a nice young man named Finlay who becomes her best friend and ally. They befriend some invalid woman who somehow is released from an asylum. She yells and screams madcap things, which is supposed to be funny, I think? Yeah, nothing like making fun of the deranged, and then making some political commentary about how her shady drinking buddies only come around when her welfare check arrives. Kids love that stuff. They eat it up and talk about the pitfalls of the socialist model on snapchat and instagram.

As if that weren't enough, Leo is pursued by her uncle, who may just be a pedophile who talks to birds. What?  Oh, and Leo RUNS away from him, so there's your titular significance.

Within this mishmash mix-up of weirdos and pederasts, Leo attempts to find her identity as she attempts to track down her father's side of the family. HOWEVER, the entire story is compromised by several plot holes, flat characters, and the fact that it's her first and only book for people over the age of 7. Somehow, Donaldson won an award for positively portraying people with mental health issues. Did they even read this book? Mary the nut job is played for laughs, and if she isn't, she's just played to be a nut, with no redeeming qualities, over than breezily giving shelter to Leo. The rest of the time she's howling Johnny Cash lyrics and twirling in circles. There isn't anything to Mary, but of course, Leo and Finlay care for her, and her plot point is beleaguered the way it's shoehorned in...and then resolved through exposition. EXPOSITION. Come on. That's like killing Hamlet off-stage, and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern lumber onstage to describe his demise. "Bet you thought we were dead! Nope, we were too stupid die. Now, about the guy who's been whining throughout this entire play..." Not that this is even close to Shakespeare.

So, this was a tough 220 pages to navigate. The format is sort of neat; points to Donaldson for splitting up the sections with headings for the parts that center on Leo and Finlay and the person talking to the birds (I already spoiled that one, boo hoo). It works for a while but becomes tedious, as Leo's sections are in the first person, and the rest in the third.

And what's the deal with Finlay being ridiculed for experimenting with goth style? Why are we doing this to a subgroup of people? As if it's a phase that needs to be overcome. For a novel that's supposed to be about finding like-minded people and acceptance from others, this is a gross misplay.

Skip this one. Not even worth reading it to heckle.

NEXT TIME, I YELL ABOUT

A book for which I have high expectations: the heavy metal romance novel. In high school, I had down the heavy metal part, but the romance was absent and/or catastrophically present. I'm putting all my leftover angst and encyclopedic knowledge of the genre into this one. Let's just say, no matter how disappointing this one is, it can't be worse than the tripe I just reviewed.

  \m/  \m/

BORING STUFF

Running On The Cracks
Julia Donaldson
2009 Henry Holt & Co