Art, Perception and Malice

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A Special Message from Shaggy D:

It can't all be chaos, mayhem and fear. I mean, I wish it could, I wish it were, I devote my life to the selfless pursuit of these things, but ultimately I am only a man and can only sustain a certain level of Icarus-like, boundary exceeding lunacy for so long. Sooner or later I'm forced to take a breather. And it's during these troublesome moments of inactivity, when most people like to relax, unwind, think happy thoughts, that the real trouble begins.

One gets to thinking.

And that's what this is about. It's about what happens in that downtime. It's about the time I'm forced, through no fault of my own, to spend out here in this place where the wind never stops blowing, the sand always obscures the horizon and fellow travellers are few and far between. It's about the ghosts that come and dance in the sand and fill my head with disturbing thoughts - thoughts that I will share with you that I might rid my psyche of their troublesome weight.

Small Adventures isn't going away, of course. In fact, right now I'm brewing up some lunacy so ridiculous it gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it, and that's a recipe for a fresh column. But for those months where my efforts to kiss the sun, heedless of the certain disaster associated with that plan, are held in check, there's this.

So here's what's on my mind on this dusty day. Here's the ghost that dances on the sand out in front of my little tent and won't let me sleep.

Everything is relative.

You're only a star if you're a lot better than the rest of the pack, you're only a genius if you're a lot smarter than the general population, and you're only bad if you're worse than most. Anything else is boring mediocrity or, worse, posing - kinda like that Vanilla Ice guy who came and went a few years ago.

You're only a star if you're a lot better than the rest of the pack, you're only a genius if you're a lot smarter than the general population, and you're only bad if you're worse than most.

That's the double-edged sword here you see. In the same way that competition spurs great athletes to even more spectacular achievements, competition also spurs less savoury people to excel in their chosen areas. Sometimes, however, the competition comes from unexpected places.

Take, for instance, heavy metal. Somewhere back in the eighties heavy metal bands accidentally discovered the marketing magic of satanic imagery and life was good. The early pioneers had it easy. Black Sabbath stumbled across the gimmick and suddenly people were raging around giving them the devil hand-sign and wearing t-shirts with pentagrams before they even knew what they'd done. Hell, in his day Ozzy Osbourne was considered so scary that he didn't have to do anything - people were so spooked that they were making stuff up for him. He could sit back, relax with a cup of tea and the sports section, and people would be spreading stories about him biting the heads off of bats and defiling churches. Talk about a free ride.

Of course, whenever there's easy money to be made, competition will arrive, and arrive it did. The whole satanic band gimmick proved so successful that all sorts of new guys arrived to take advantage of it, many of whom didn't even bother to learn how to play their instruments first. The pioneering bands like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were soon joined by an endless list of upstarts selling ever more over the top versions of demonically inspired music. Bands like Venom, Merciful Fate, Helloween (yep, that's how they spelled it) and Slayer, got on the bandwagon and started selling albums like nobody's business.