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Lowbrow
Aristocrats Feature Departments
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Contact Shaggy - shaggyd@lowcrats.com |
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Those were the golden days, before the real trouble started. Before the church got involved. Oh sure, right from the get go we had various organized religions wading in to warn of the sinister dangers these bands represented. They assailed the blatantly evil imagery. They spread X-Files calibre conspiracy theories about back-masking on records and other vile, satanic plots for world domination via heavy metal music. All of that stuff was a boon for the music industry, of course - if your goal is to sell records by virtue of being scary, nothing helps more than the official seal of disapproval from the Vatican. It was like a stamp of quality. If the church didn't hate something it was probably just Christian rock in disguise.
Oddly enough though, the way the church finally defeated heavy metal was by outdoing it. Scandals surrounding the Roman Catholic church started to fire up in the late eighties and sounded the death knell for the whole black metal industry. It started out with a lengthy series of revelations about young boys being sexually abused by priests, which was pretty upsetting. Then there were the lurid tales of sex between priests and nuns, then more abuse of little boys. Then there was the whole scandal surrounding abuse of native children at church-run boarding schools. Nowadays Eastern European nuns are being convicted of murder. That was the end of scary metal bands. It was all fine and well to try and outdo the next guy when he had just drank blood onstage, but how do you top priests having sex with little boys? You don't. And you know what? If you aren't scarier than the Catholic Church, teenage boys will not idolise you and teenage girls will not want to sleep with you on your tour bus. It only took a few years of secular scandal to largely depopulate that whole musical genre. The Catholic Church transformed the once scary landscape of death metal into a ghost town where few dared to tread because, dammit, there were monsters there. In fact, just about the only guy left even trying to play in this space today is Marilyn Manson, and he has a job that few would envy. You can bet that every morning, the first thing Marilyn does is cross his fingers and grab his morning paper to scan it for fresh signs of trouble. I'll bet every time he reads about the church screwing with someone, or being implicated in the death of someone else, Marilyn winces, shoulders sagging like a bouncy castle when they tear down the midway on a Sunday night, and then calls his PR guy. I'll bet the call goes something like this. Marilyn: "Oh dear God, did you see the paper today." PR Man: "I know, I know. You're going to have to top this, quick, or you'll look like a sissy." M: "How am I supposed to top this?! My God man, did you read the details? I can't do that sort of thing. I'd go to jail." PR: "Right, right… jail. Ok, how about you just perform some sort of ritualistic, sex sacrifice thing onstage. It wouldn't have to be real, just as long as we made it graphic enough to be disturbing. The church don't get any video coverage so we've got to take advantage of visual media." M: "Oh man. My girlfriend is going to hate this." I can't help but feel bad for the poor guy. I don't particularly like his music, but at least he's trying. All the other would-be bad guys take one look at the competition, flinch, and then go form a boy band. So does this mean that the Catholic Church is responsible for the plague of boy bands that is currently sweeping North America and beyond? Yes. Yes it does. |
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