“Have you ever seen a human heart?! It looks like a fist,
wrapped in blood.”
-
Larry, Closer
When art had its first golden age, ugliness would have been
unthinkable. Classical artists sought to replicate the perfect nature that they
believed in; their goal was to inspire a sense of grace and glory in their
audience, to evoke God by perfectly portraying his Creation. To put flaws into
the pictures, or worse, to make outright ugly images, would be spitting in the
face of nature and, by extension, God.
I’m not enough of an art historian to say when, exactly,
that began to change, but that opinions shifted is inarguable. Postmodernism
takes error and ugliness as its main subject, with artists deliberately breaking
the rules of their craft in an effort to explore its limits and make them
obvious to the audience. This can be taken to unnecessary extremes, and even
verge on self-parody in some cases, but it can also offer pieces of genuine
interest. The key is that the artist can both prove that they’re breaking the
rules knowingly and that they’re competent enough to be able to shed those
rules.
Those rules of aesthetics are, often, where the beauty of an
art piece comes from. When I use the word ‘craft’ I’m doing so to refer to
artists attempting to give their audience a piece of perfection, a slice of
Heaven. Such rules are tied to the classical tradition of giving an audience
grace by offering them beauty, and by following such rules artists are
attempting to do the same, though not necessarily with classical subjects. Pop
music, for example, uses craft in an effort to inspire bliss in the listener,
but it’s rarely tied to any kind of natural imagery. Instead, most pop relies
solely upon the craft itself, using common, lovely chord progressions to
augment the content of their choice.
Even the ugliest, rawest of subjects can be rendered
graceful and lovely with the right degree of craft. A talented application of
aesthetic principles can make even a child starving and sobbing in the streets
appear beautiful, dulling the natural sympathy an audience has with a sense of
elevated beauty. Such images are easier to digest than the reality of someone
slowly dying in misery, and the ability to produce them is valued by charities
and political groups all over the world.
Human emotion is the basis for almost all music written in
the modern day, but most of it is treated in the same manner. The Beatles
famously transformed John Lennon’s desperate cry for help into the theme song
for a movie, and “Yesterday”, from the same album, pulls a similar trick using
a string quartet instead of poppy swing. Though the methods are different, the
results are the same, with the raw emotions behind both songs transformed into
palatable pop Digestives.
Less palatable, and far more powerful, is blues music. Blues
music is as direct a statement by the singer that you can get in the Western
tradition, and no matter how goosed up the music sometimes gets it remains, at
its core, tremendously affecting. The singers are untrained, the playing is
sloppy, and the lyrics are simple, but all those flaws do is remind you that
you’re listening to a human being. There is no God in the blues; those men were
too busy looking for Him.
While the blues is about a person speaking their mind, metal
is about them screaming it at the top of their lungs. Such music is essentially
big blues, similar to rock music but without the craftiness of pop. That shell
of tradition and aesthetics is stripped away, exposing the raw emotions at each
song’s core.
That kind of emotional rawness is ugly to behold, and the
Screaming Females have it in spades. While other metal bands tend to have two
guitarists and occasionally harmonies in order to give their songs extra heft
and complexity, the Females are far rawer: if we ignore overdubs, the band is
nothing more than a power trio of guitar, bass, and drums with a single
vocalist. While the band follows in the tradition of Black Sabbath by playing
songs that sound like a fistfight in the pitch dark, they substitute the
structural complexity of early Sabbath with sheer inertia. That raw band setup
means that the rhythm instruments are in control of most of the songs, with the
bassist occasionally operating as a second guitarist (ala The Who) with the help
of Muse-like pedal effects.
In terms of vocals, singer Marissa Paternoster is like the bizarro
version of virtuoso divas like Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston. Paternoster has
tremendous vocal range not in melody but in texture; she slips from sneer to
yell to baritone threat in nearly every song, often within the same few lines.
It’s a disorienting effect, one that trumps other legendary metal singers like
Dio in terms of sheer impact. While other metal singers have used powerful
voices and vast melodic ranges as tools (Rob Halford and Bruce Dickinson, for
example), I can’t think of any who bounce between entire styles as Paternoster
tends to do.
Paternoster’s guitar style is less unique, but no less
effective. Again, her style is close to the metal-music norm, but this time it
differs in its combination of sloppiness and ability. This isn’t the puffed-up
peacocking of hair metal bands like Van Halen, but it’s also not particularly similar
to the riff-based metal of Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin. Paternoster’s style
is looser and more sprawling, enabled, no doubt, by the strong grounding of the
Females’ rhythm section.
The combination of the band’s abilities and the rawness of
the songs is what makes Ugly so arresting. This is the sound of a band
that values emotion over craft, yes, but it’s also the sound of a band with the
ability to convey that core emotion. The ability to do so is a question of
execution; any artist can follow the laws of aesthetic to create a decent, if
not great, image, but it takes excellence of technique to break those laws in
an interesting way. It’s a question of compensation; do you have the ability to
make an image interesting, or even appealing, in a way that breaks the rules?
Even if an artist is dead-set on avoiding craft in favor of
human emotion, it doesn’t mean they can similarly dismiss technique and
execution. Doing that would render the result an hour-long, deafening scream,
something that only the most pretentious of the postmodern crowd would hail as
anything other than a din. To express oneself in any medium, one needs to
master the rules of the craft. It’s the same as communication: you need the
vocabulary and grammar to make yourself understood to someone else, and you
need to have excellent skills in both of those areas if you want someone to
listen to something uncomfortable. If you’re telling a story about a lovely
beach, a person will listen to you simply to hear about the beach. On the other
hand, if you’re telling a story about a murder, you’ll need to make the person
want to listen to you, specifically. Your words will require weight, grounding;
some arrangement that will make your story important to the listener.
It’s in the area of insistence and dire import that metal
thrives. Metal songs, even at their most pointless, operate as punches to the
gut of the listener. Their sheer noisiness ensures that people will listen,
even if it’s only to figure out what in the world the singers are yelling
about. The volume and violence of metal songs operates in the same way as hooks
do in traditional pop songs; they get people around the speaker to focus in and
pay attention. After that, it’s up to the band to make things interesting and
say something worth the fury.
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