Maybe We Should Listen

I graduated high school in 1994. Winnebago is sort of a rural school, with a lot of farms, but also included a series of outlying Rockford subdivisions. Our graduating class of 86 included people who had lived on the same farm their entire lives, and also included children of engineers who worked in Rockford. Many of my classmates spent their entire school lives in Winnebago. It was the kind of place where everyone knew each other.

Winnebago in the early ‘90s was sort of in extended cultural isolation even relative to its neighboring metropolis. For a city its size, Rockford seemed to have little going on, and this in turn meant that Winnebago had absolutely nothing going on. Winnebago was also almost completely white. The one Black student in my class in high school was expelled. What we had available culturally was whatever was on TV or the radio and whatever we acquired from our families. It wasn’t like it had been decades in the past, but it was still a time and place of high conformity.

I had a classmate I’ll call Denny. Denny was rail-thin and his dishwater blond hair went all the way down his back. When he could he wore a backwards hat. In my memory, almost every day he showed up for school wearing either a Metallica t-shirt or a Megadeth t-shirt, and they weren’t shirts for the most recent albums either. He was extremely reserved. I have no recollection of him ever saying a mean word to anyone, but he didn’t say a lot, period.

Every year the school would have an awards night. It was usually a senior-heavy affair and involved people getting inducted into National Honor Society and getting various non-athletic awards. One of the awards would be for perfect attendance for the year. And not only did Denny have perfect attendance our senior year, he had perfect attendance all four years of high school.

Denny did not show up to receive his award.

It’s pretty well known that grunge broke through in 1991 and 1992, most prominently with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Kurt Cobain was hailed as the voice of a generation, grunge became the hottest thing going, blah blah blah.

Well, two weeks before Pearl Jam released with Ten, Metallica’s self-titled - aka “The Black Album” - debuted at #1 on Billboard. Even …And Justice For All had climbed as high as #6. Before anyone in Winnebago knew anything about grunge, a much heavier sound was already established. When people talk about “Gen X coming of age” and whatever exactly it is that people might want to claim Nirvana represented, it can be easily overlooked that harder music had already broken through.

In early 1994, when Metallica came to Rockford, I think fully one-third of the senior class was there. I suspect that for a fair number of them it was the first rock concert they’d ever been to. It was Metallica, not Nirvana or Pearl Jam, who was the most popular band going.

Denny, through no intentional effort of his own, was actually way ahead of the curve. There were a handful of other guys in Winnebago who might wear heavy metal t-shirts, but truly just a handful, and Denny was the one who stood out as the guy who always wore a metal shirt. His goal, of course, wasn’t to be some kind of trendsetter. I never had a conversation with him about it, but it was clear even then that the kinds of frustration and isolation that heavy metal spoke to were things he could strongly identify with, and which set him apart from most of his peers.

It’s difficult to look back and understand exactly what we were supposed to be getting out of our high school educations. What I mean by this is how, for example, we all took a year of U.S. history without any kind of critical thinking being applied to anything we were nominally learning. History was just a series of multiple choice and fill in the blank questions. We never really considered anything controversial, and that’s how it was in pretty much every class.

We all took four years of English, which meant we all read the same books, and all of it was somehow part of some sort of important curriculum, but through broad chunks of it there didn’t seem to be any notion of what we were supposed to be getting out of it. I’m not saying it was worthless, but I am saying that it tended not to be especially well-directed. Sophomore year we all read The Red Badge of Courage. Okay? Over time we read a lot of Shakespeare. Sure! Now it so happens that English was about the only subject which ever approached critical thinking, but how were those skills being honed?

Junior year was British literature year. It’s telling that at this point I can’t remember what all else that meant except that we read more Shakespeare, and that was the year we had a poetry unit where we went over iambs and dactyls and verse. And, that was the year we read Lord of the Flies.

William Golding published Lord of the Flies in 1954, making it one of the more current novels we read in high school. Golding had been a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and commanded a landing craft in Normandy on D-Day. Let’s just say that it doesn’t take some sort of poststructuralist critique to understand that this was all probably important context to the book.

If you haven’t read Lord of the Flies, here is the plot in a nutshell: an airplane evacuating English citizens crashes on a remote island, and the only survivors are all pre-teen boys. The book chronicles their attempts to survive and maintain some semblance of order, but it degrades and there is a schism and without spoiling everything, I’ll just say that the whole thing is a morality tale and not a very positive one.

If we’re being honest, it was a hell of a thing to have high school students read. But it was especially a hell of a thing to have us read without appropriate context. Golding was a decade removed from fighting the Nazis, and in the aftermath of World War II, Britain was in bad shape, plus it was suddenly thrown into the Cold War. Of course this book was written by an English Royal Navy lieutenant!

Now I’m not saying we weren’t asked for opinions, didn’t talk about what Golding’s imagery might be… what I’m saying is that it was all a little perfunctory, all a little out of time and place. And, well, time and place matter.

Rock and roll wasn’t invented in England, but, arguably, heavy metal was. And the band who laid what we can now recognize as the clearest blueprint was Black Sabbath.

In early July, a tremendous one-day celebration was held in Birmingham for Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath. Seemingly anyone who was anyone in metal was there: Pantera, Anthrax, Guns ‘n’ Roses, even Metallica. Ozzy, the grand showman, the Prince of Darkness, would be playing his final ever show. A surge of feelings about the relevance and importance of Black Sabbath surrounded the event… and then two weeks later, when Ozzy died, an even greater surge.

A lot was written that month, and what I read more than once was how Black Sabbath had tapped into a deep vein of visceral frustration in a way that hadn’t been done before. And one of the things which occurred to me was: of course this sound had come out of working-class England. It’s not that young adults around the world haven’t experienced certain depths of frustration for millenia. Postwar England though was something very different: a victorious but diminished empire, where one was expected to simply “keep on”, one way or another. To borrow from David Gilmour, hanging on in quiet desperation was the English way. Except that Black Sabbath gave voice to that desperation. It didn’t have to be quiet. Maybe it should never have been like that.

Band after band who paid tribute to Black Sabbath in early July essentially said that if not for Black Sabbath, their band wouldn’t have existed. And the throughline from Sabbath to Metallica and beyond seems pretty clear to me. It’s not that it’s a clean, straight line, and I suppose I should stress here that those of you understand this best, you’re not the ones I’m trying to convince. Rather I’m trying to elaborate upon what I think is a continuous thread in heavy music over time - music that tends to attract the devotion of a more working-class audience, an audience which can’t be neatly classified in traditional political categories. There’s a reason why the progenitors of metal and punk tended to come from places like Birmingham and Manchester on that side of the pond, and places like Detroit on this side.

Every year at Winnebago High School, we would publish something called Kudos. This was nominally a literally magazine, and submissions would be solicited from the entire school. Included in the submissions every year were a lot of poems written by juniors who had just recently had the poetry unit in English. We’d turned them in, they’d been graded, handed back, and then I guess we were told to turn them again for Kudos. As it so happened, the poetry unit had come shortly after we finished reading Lord of the Flies.

I do not remember hardly anything from Kudos in 1993. I remember my own poem, “The Golden Horn”, which, well, it existed, and I suppose I had the rhyme and meter down, but… meh.

And then there was Denny’s poem. I don’t remember the title, I don’t remember the exact rest of it, but I remember these two lines, emblazoned in my memory forever:

I think William Golding had it right

Evil is locked inside us tight

It was the most chilling, most profound, most insightful work that anyone submitted that year. The book had clearly spoken to him, and I think it spoke to him in much the same way that metal did. Here was, displayed, a sincere and genuine outlook on the world, one which Denny was no doubt trying to make sense of.

On the top right of the looseleaf paper, in Bic red ink, was the grade: C.

You may be surprised at this point to find that I wrote this because an old classmate friend responded and said that he would be interested in my more of my thoughts on politics.

What I experienced in high school obviously stuck with me over these 30+ years, but I never really knew what to think about it. And I’m still not sure what to think about it. But last month, along with a number of other things, it was especially John Darnielle’s obituary for Ozzy Osbourne that got me thinking more, and it somehow brought me back to Denny’s poem.

How we understand politics is largely as an extension of how we navigate the politics of daily existence… and how we perceive ourselves to be treated when we attempt such navigations. The current political moment we’re in is one where “one side” has done everything possible to sow doubt and misinformation and to exploit the circumstances people are in, while the “other side”… well, I feel like they make you read the book but then don’t seem to care what you think about it… especially if you “don’t look right”. If that seems like an odd way to present “the two sides”, well, maybe you were like me, and it seemed like someone did care what you thought about that book.

The place we’re at is one where a lot of things were already broken, and what’s happening now is that those cracks are being thoroughly exploited. As we move through this and try to emerge from it, we can’t pretend that simply electing the other party is sufficient to address the cracks. They are neither sudden nor shallow. Darnielle refers to the “profound feelings of alienation and frustration” that Black Sabbath addressed, which years later Metallica addressed. Socially and politically, we have to address those feelings. For example, America has become a place where very few people physically make anything, and maybe - just maybe - that is one profound example of something deeply alienating and frustrating to people, and we need to have better answers than acting like people should move out of the backwater countryside and should be retrained in how to perform desk jobs. Maybe we need to throw all of the neoliberals out along with the fascists. Maybe we need to push back on the gigantic corporations in a way that neither party has been remotely willing to try. Maybe we need to lift up the genuine intelligence of human beings instead of the artificial intelligence of late stage capitalism.

Maybe when we ask people to show up every day, and the day comes when they have something important to say, even if their rhyme or meter might be off, even if their music might be too loud, gosh… Maybe we should listen to our fellow humans, the same way we’d want them to listen to us?