John Semley
In 2013, hilariously, West Texas A&M University introduced a course called "Introduction to Literature: Heavy Metal as a Literary Genre." This is around the same time the Wall Street Journal reported on the International Conference on Heavy Metal in Popular Culture, which was right around the same time the word "metallectual" entered the pop-cultural vocabulary. Metal's long creep toward pseudo-respectability is just as evident in literature as it is in the academy. Poet Michael Robbins, who sports a Slayer T-shirt in author photos, recently purveyed an essay for Harper's, billed as "a poet's guide to metal." Last year, John Darnielle, singer-songwriter of feted California indie folk act the Mountain Goats, released his debut novel Wolf in White Van, about a disfigured young man who finds solace in epic role-playing games, Conan novels and death metal. Now, here's Boring Girls, another debut from a singer-musician (Sara Taylor, of London, Ont., spook-wave act the Birthday Massacre) who's preoccupied with the aesthetics of heavy metal.
Taylor's protagonist is Rachel, an unpopular teen in a small Anytown whose life gains a sense of purpose when she first hears heavy metal pouring out of a car parked at an intersection. "It was music that I had never heard before," she recalls. "It sounded pissed. The drums were fast, the guitars were manic, and the voice that rumbled along with it sounded evil. Absolutely furious and evil." In Wolf in White Van, Darnielle's Sean has a similar virginal encounter. "[B]y normal standards it sounded terrible," he says of the first metal tape he hears. "There were no bass frequencies, the singer just screamed, the drums were a constant artillery barrage the whole time. But it transported me." In both cases, the awfulness – the sense that this music is somehow deviating from some "normal standard" – becomes an entry-level marker of metal's aesthetic, and social, distinction. This is something else. Something other.
Metal has long thrived on this emotion of otherness. The overwhelmingly heavy riffs of Black Sabbath and Pallbearer, the intense loops of recursive noise roused by Sunn O))) and Burning Witch feel as if they're accessing some alternate world that exists astride our own, a world of overwhelming blackness and bleakness. It's all that Lovecraftian stuff: Stygian maws, immeasurable abysses, the undreamable and unnamable. "Something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it," H.P. Lovecraft writes in his 1928 story The Call of Cthulhu. "Something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part."
Boring Girls, and the grinding death-metal music it deals with (if never really by name), brings this inky, otherworldly blackness into our world in a way that's recognizably adolescent. There's a capital-R Romantic ideal in this strain of metal that naturally plays to the feelings of frustrated youth. It's a revolt against classicism (of both pop music and more operatic, high-flying forms of metal) and a rejection of the world as it is. The growling death-metal frontman embodies those characteristics of the Byronic hero described by 19th-century British critic Lord Macaulay: "proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection."
These feelings – scorn, pride, cynicism, defiance and vengeance – send Taylor's Rachel headlong into metal's elseworld: collecting CDs, pinning up posters of glowering, long-haired singers, mulling over what it means to be "metal," littering her high-school notebooks with lyrics about revenge and liberation-through-violence and other will-to-power type stuff. She even starts a band with her friends, called Colostomy Hag. Things go pretty well. Until Rachel and bandmate/BFF Fern are raped by the members of DED, a band they idolize. "We get very tried of boring girls," barks singer Balthazar Seizure, as he tosses a stunned Rachel against a wall, her friend shrieking in the background. It's a ghastly scene, described by Taylor with the gritty fealty of a lo-fi exploitation movie or a bad dream that's tough to shake.
Their thirst for revenge implacable, Rachel and Fern toil to make Colostomy Hag good enough that they can come across DED on tour – and murder them. Rachel has long fantasized about re-enacting the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, the tale of a beautiful widow who exploited the drunken amorousness of an invading Assyrian general, decapitated him and saved her city. And in Boring Girls's climax, she gets her chance.
As a fan of heavy metal since my own semi-anguished, mostly bored, adolescence, I can't help but feel as if Boring Girls's tapering toward cathartic, cartoonish violence might reinforce more negative assumptions about the music, and its devotees. What's more, Taylor (whose own music skews closer to the Cure than Cannibal Corpse) feels, not unlike John Darnielle, as a scene tourist: speculating on the appeal of a sound they seem only passably interested in. (If they like death metal so much, why aren't they in death-metal bands?) But as a fanciful, hyper-violent myth of the angst and agony of what it means to be a teenage girl – something that I am, obviously, way less qualified to speculate on – Taylor's novel feels basically satisfying.
Rachel's adolescent maladjustment finds expression in the same sort of stereotyped silliness her character initially rejects; all those warrior-princess, "girl in a metal band" clichés. Maybe this is Taylor's point: that women in heavy metal are so tokenized that they can only actualize themselves by fulfilling the expectations foisted upon them. In Boring Girls, Rachel ends up embracing this role with a violent literalness – not warrior princesses, but murderesses, a full-on Judith beheading her captor.
And if that's not "metal," then I don't know what is.