Human Bastard- War of the Lords EP (2005)
There is an interesting scene in the Metallica “making-of” documentary Some Kind of Monster, where the label guy Cliff Burnstein drops by the studio to check up on Elektra Records’ investment and hear the progress the band has made on Saint Anger. He puts on his “rockin’ out” face as Metallica plays all of the tracks off the big Pro Tools monitor.
You realize immediately that no one in this room could possibly enjoy this abrasive, unpleasant, and bizarrely uncommercial music. Metallica are making it as therapy for themselves: not because they feel the world needs this music, but because they will “feel better” once they have gone through the process. The record itself is disposable to them. Certainly they are not making the album for their fans: to the members of Metallica, “fans” are needy bundles of expectations that just want to confine and pigeonhole the group. Cliff Burnstein, on the other hand, is an old weirdo whose job is not to encourage Metallica on their spiritual quest, but to make money. He is concerned about the “fans,” but in a special way.
It doesn’t matter if Cliff Burnstein enjoys the album himself: what matter is the experience of an imaginary third party, the person who might buy this album. However, far from being a “regulative concept” in a Kantian sense, deprived of all content and merely a mass of buying-power, this figment of Cliff Burnstein’s imagination is instead a fully fleshed-out psychological construct. The “listener” that Cliff Burnstein is conjuring up has all the depth of character of an Othello or a Humbert Humbert. How does he dress? What other similar albums did he buy? What lyrical content will he hearken to? What does he expect from the band? How much of a departure will he tolerate? How much will he pay for it? What does the art need to look like in order to draw him in?
And the entire experience is being curated for this non-extistent person. In the same way, I once heard that a women’s retailer (Anne Klein, I believe) had constructed an ideal personage, “Anne,” against whom every decision was evaluated. Would “Anne” wear this dress or was it too low-cut? “Anne” was a definitely classed woman of a certain age, a certain income, a certain middle-brow lifestyle, who was un-neurotic and yet pulled-together, etc. etc. “Anne” was not only the ideal consumer, but very likely the life-ideal OF the actual (slob) consumers who were trying to buy into this image and this life.
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I think that in listening to a new record—when we take something home from the store and spin it for the first time, or when browsing on YouTube or music blogs, or just downloading a passel of mp3s and then sorting them out—we often behave this way. We turn our own listening experience into that of an imaginary third-party.
Compare the following two situations: 1) throwing on a favorite record in order to have something on while doing the dishes or making coffee; and 2) listening to a new record which you have just downloaded for free off a blog. I don’t just want to say that these are “objectively” different activities: the media are obviously different… rather, they are subjectively different—our minds and ears are working differently in each case.
1) Let’s say I am playing one of my favorite hardcore 7”s from the 2000s, War of the Lords by Spanish d-beaters Human Bastard.
- I am not monitoring myself. My attention is on the dishes or grinding my coffee, not on studying my own response to the music. If I start tapping my foot, maybe I won’t even notice. My attention might even lapse in and out. It is certainly not a duty to myself to evaluate the music and be a critic. Maybe I will sing along—this is the height of un-self-consciousness. It’s hard to make out the lyrics to Human Bastard, but I know at least, “Day…. of the wolves’…. RE-VENGE.”
- I know what is coming up. If there is a boring song, I will skip it, and not hold it against the record. (On Joanna Newsom’s album Have One on Me, I never listen to the title track; it isn’t a “bad song” that detracts from the album, because it simply doesn’t exist for me.) If a good part is coming up, I will particularly pay attention. In short, I can prepare my experience for its own highs and lows. In the aforementioned “(Day of the) Wolves Revenge” [sic], there is a long guitar solo that drops out into really grandiose palm-muted chugging… only to slyly re-emerge and continue with true cock-rock aplomb. If I have to run upstairs or leave the room while this part is on, I will go back and play it again. The verses to any of these songs, on the other hand, are all interchangeable, not at all requiring rapt attention.
- I don’t care what style the record is in. Well, perhaps peripherally, in the sense of raw volume and mood, I won’t blast Human Bastard at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning. But it is no good telling myself, “It sounds just like Warcollapse!” because at this point, Warcollapse and Human Bastard are as different as can be: Warcollapse wrote those songs, whereas Human Bastard wrote these songs. In the same way, perhaps, the Rolling Stones’ “That’s How Strong My Love Is” might be interchangeable with any other number of Otis Redding covers… but when you want to listen to THAT SONG, no other will do. To tell me at this point that it is a “British Invasion R&B cover” is absolutely pointless. Test this out for yourself: put on your favorite album. Do you care that it is in-the-style-that-it-is-in? Is anyone that shallow? I happen to like this sort of Swedish barking crust, and that is of course a sorting mechanism: when confronted with S.D.S. and some polka music, I will of course give S.D.S. more of a chance. But, as it turns out that I don’t like S.D.S., and I love Human Bastard, this is indeed a “vanishing mediator.”
- I let the parts I like “take” me. That is to say, there is no skepticism. The necessary flipside to this is, I don’t expect some flight of melody to intervene where perhaps it jarringly *should* but nevertheless does not. Human Bastard are a fairly strict genre band, but when I was younger and listening to Iron Maiden or Sleater-Kinney records for the first time, I can remember being violently annoyed by their melodies, which I felt should very much have gone in some other direction. I learned to love those records and to enjoy those parts—the reason I’m not a musician is for this very reason that I can’t imagine melodies differently!! (This is the qualitative version of the second bullet-point above, which is quantitative.)
Things are completely otherwise, though, if I am either Cliff Burnstein, sitting in Metallica’s studio trying to size-up the sales potential of the Saint Anger album, or myself trying to figure out if 10 albums, downloaded one after another, are worth keeping on my computer. I monitor myself; I listen to the record impatiently, in ten second intervals; I skip around if I don’t immediately like what I hear; I leap at every “sounds like…”
In other words, “I” am not having this experience, I am watching someone else have it (someone else I have to produce imaginatively). It’s not even myself wearing my “critic’s hat,” for the very reason that this “critic’s” experience could only have an instrumental aim that would be *my own* listening. And obviously the only way to do this is just to do it, to jump in with MY ears. I have always argued that this latter evaluation is how we should be critics in the first place. The detached, “critic’s hat” only evaluates an unreal, artificial experience that takes place in a speculative nowhere.
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To tack on an ending to this: what sets Human Bastard apart from the legions of mediocre crust-core bands is their ability to write “hit songs,” such as the mega-catchy “After the Last Bombs” (from the EP of the same title), “Burning Time” (from their split with Article Nine), or “Living in Hell” here. I have written enough about my preference for hits over non-hits elsewhere, but like Totalitär before them, every Human Bastard record is worth tracking down for *particular songs*. In the end, this makes them a much more interesting band than, say, A.G.E. or Atrocious Madness.
To be perfectly explicit: the only way that bands WITHOUT hits can succeed is through everything I mentioned above. Bands without hits “sound like…” other good bands; their production is super-interesting; they front-load their records with the one or two best songs; they release concept albums that are pretentious gimmicks; etc. etc.
And all of this appeals to.. whom? No one, in the end. Because they are directed at a listener who fundamentally does not exist, or who exists only for the time necessary to verbalize to himself the critical cliches inscribed in the very object itself. Human Bastard, on the other hand, succeed because they wrote memorable songs.
[Recommended]
