Metal show.

The bar/cultural venue I am writing from is KUD France Prešeren. Tonight they are hosting a heavy metal festival. The music of my childhood. And as memory serves me, the ultimate mid-80's dog & pony show of rebellion. To wit, if it's too loud, you're too old. I just watched a Slovenian metal band do hair rolls, guitar arpeggiations and complicated drum rolls in the name of that frenzy that comes with a disagreeable temper toward convention. There, I found myself toe-tapping along with the music. A half-hearted journalist in the vast sea of black leather and denim. The crowd struck me as uniquely heavy metal. I may as well have been in Texas. The girls were dumpling in out-sized t-shirts. The boys androgyne in aspect and spangled in silver rings and sewn-on patches. The men too old, as if their presence fought the age their aspect betrayed. The women that rarified breed of truck-stop mama who seems to exude sexuality, even if a faulty, shattered one due to overuse. The music is the norm: a pastiche of Slayer, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Judas Priest (pre-gay pride). It reminds me of being holed up in my room as an 11-year-old with my Victorola pumping out Van Halen and my portable cassette player blasting some reedy version of Motley Crue. These were the role models I looked toward before I really knew what role models were. I would stencil VH graffitoes on my Trapper Keeper, draw pentagrams on my off-pages of notebook paper. The whole parade seems adolescent to me. And then I caught a moment of retrospection that detailled what this show means for its viewers here. The goal of being noisy, of being worthless, of being satanic (to cut to the chase) is that dissatifaction is close at hand. Youth is always dissatisfied. They feel infringed upon, helpless, unneccessary and unwanted. They mow lawns for a pittance. They talk on the phone until the wee hours, because talk is the only currency they have. And when they get together, they unite their frustration into a cataclysmic expression. Young countries are no different. To think that Slovenija is only 15-years-old boggles the mind. It almost betrays the architecture, the cobbled streets, the statuary and Roman walls of the south. But it remains a fact. They, the nation, are in a state of coming to terms with themselves, and as they get closer to joining the EU, they will find hair in places that were hairless, their voices will crack and still they will shout out anti-everything lyrics. It's a parent's dream and nightmare to see this sort of expression. (I consider myself a foster parent of sorts. I was here 10 years ago when the gurgling infant just broke loose from the umbilical Yugoslav cord. Though I was much more an infant then too.) As I watched the show, I noticed when the red footlights shown onto the drummer, the backdrop became a sort of skull with each eye going goggled whenever the cymbals were crashed. The image of death can be a heavy one, and especially obvious amid a sea of devil iron-ons, Gothic letters and cross bone decals. But mustn't one thing die for another to live? Isn't the food we eat a living thing until we internalize it and from there our lives continue forth at the expense of another? The death wish is never a totality; it's a sacrifice. It screams I have presence through actions that lack vagueness. It's difficult to like heavy metal as a musical form for me anymore. This music has no irony. It is, uh, heavy. (And as a footnote, I should instantly point out that once I discovered punk and indie rock, I consumed it with a voraciousness metal never inspired in me.) But how much irony do nascent societies need? In the States, we saw the ridiculous assumption that after 9/11, irony was dead. A radar blip of an oversight, since a mere 2 years later saw the Onion, the Daily Show and Bill Maher become the "news sources" of choice for the educated. As I figure, the metal empire in the States crested from 1978 to 1987. Nine years. In a country of (then) 200 million, that's a lifetime. In a country of 2 million, hungry for any sort of tradition, it could be much longer. But the ultimate paradox of music is that it is a fad. (The paradox being that music, unlike art or sculpture which captures a moment in time and holds it, needs time in order to express itself.) And like all fads, anyone who liked it once eventually becomes too old. And the future has no room for the elderly...no matter what their population.