Time to reflect...
January in Review
It’s the end
of January and the end of the first month of my trying to post something new to
my blog every day for a year. As if things weren’t narcissistic enough already,
I thought it would be useful to look back on my output for the first month and
see what can be learned for the coming months.
This project
was conceived to get me off my backside and become acclimatised to the process
of sitting down and writing every day. I tend to think of things I want to
write about and then they get stuck in my head for three months, before I sit
down at the computer and write the entire thing in twenty minutes. However,
setting myself a task like this means that there is no time to become insular.
The work just has to be done.
In general,
things have gone well. I have blogged every day, even if some blogs have gone
up at four the next morning (my body clock seems to be set to a twenty six hour
schedule). There has been some minor cheating, blogging pieces that were
written years ago, but as they hadn’t been posted previously, they still count.
That’s meant that I could get on with other bits and pieces. At the beginning
of the month I was barely keeping up. Here at the end, I’m a few days ahead.
A number of
articles that have been knocking around my head for a while got written in
January to varying degrees of success. There was the Best Things Article on
Star Trek Deep Space 9, which I’m quite happy with. There was also a trilogy of
pieces on Bob Dylan, one of which I wrote years ago, one which had tripped me
up for years, but which was pretty much sewn together from the copious notes I
had taken. Finally there was a short dialogue concerning the song, ‘Just Like A
Women’ written from scratch from an idea I had years ago. ‘Her Ribbons and Her
Bows’. was the most enjoyable thing I wrote all month.
On the down
side, I don’t think the article, ‘Blue Metal Jazz’ ended up quite how I
envisaged it, mainly because I focussed so much on the sections about jazz
music, that I forgot to include half of what I wanted to say about heavy metal.
The article was written at the beginning of the month, so it had to go up
pretty much as soon as I wrote it. The good thing about getting ahead of myself
is that I can write something, not touch it for a few days, then looked at it a
fresh and do some editing before publication.
To redress
the balance, I want to say here what I forgot to say about my love of heavy
metal:
I
think of all the styles of music, metal is the most literary and the most
respectful and reverential to other artistic mediums. Half of what I’ve read,
half of what I know comes from intellectual journeys that were begun in the
heavy metal world. I first came to appreciate Coleridge and The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner because of the Iron Maiden song by the same name (and length).
It was the Coleridge poem that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick and
Moby Dick that inspired one of the best post-millennial metal albums,
Mastodon’s Leviathan. Leviathan is like the soundtrack to Ahab’s inner monologue.
If you want an album that reflects the man’s anger and his rage, Leviathan is
that album.
Metal
bands have always written songs based on novels. One only has to think of
Metallica’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ based on the Hemingway novel or ‘One’ based
on Dalton Trumbo’s terrifying anti-war book, ‘Johnny Got His Gun’. I read both
books because of Metallica and went on to read more or less everything
Hemingway wrote.
Anthrax
wrote a couple of songs based on Stephen King novels, ‘Among the Living’ based
on ‘The Stand’ and ‘Misery Loves Company’ based on ‘Misery’. I’ve yet to get
into Stephen King, I must admit, but I read 2000ad religiously as a kid, so ‘I
Am the Law’ about Judge Dredd was always a favourite Anthrax song. “DROKK IT!”
I
have a lot to thank metal bands for. I became aware of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic
of Cancer’ when I saw it on the inner sleeve of Rage Against the Machine’s
‘Evil Empire’. Bruce Dickinson’s ‘The Chemical Wedding’ caused me to read
everything by William Blake. Indeed, Wolfsbane frontman, Blaze Bailey, is
probably most directly responsible for my becoming a writer. I was a member of
the Wolfsbane fan club at 18 and I can
remember reading a piece he wrote shortly after David Icke made his now
legendary appearance on ‘Wogan’. It was Bailey’s rant against the sneering
media reaction that inspired me to want
to do the same. And now I do.
Metal
led backwards towards the blues. To John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters and Robert
Johnson and Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. From blues I
eventually came to jazz. I was a late convert to the genius of Bob Dylan, but
between Guns n’ Roses version of ‘Knockin On Heaven’s’ Door’, Hendrix’s
blistering ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and Rage Against the Machine’s grinding
interpretation of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, I was well versed in his oeuvre by the time
I got there. And metal led through a dozen different crossovers to rap and hip
hop, via Cypress Hill, Faith No More, The Beastie Boys, Anthrax and Public
Enemy.
I
use music as a mood elevator, a metronome for writing, a soundtrack to reading
and as a relaxant. I need a wide range of musical genres because I have a wide
range of moods and need a palette broad enough to match. Hard rock/heavy metal
has the broadest spectrum of any style of music other than jazz. Alice in
Chains soothe, Clutch cheer, Slayer get me energised and fired up for writing
and Tool and A Perfect Circle drop me into a state halfway between relaxation
and nervous tension. I don’t listen to a lot of new metal these days, but then
I don’t listen to that much music at all. I have enough to work through as it
is.
So there you
go, that’s that imbalance restored and the karmic, thermodynamic forces are
retuned to parity. To finish up, a selection of my favourite articles
you may have missed from the month. I’m spectacularly bad at promoting myself,
but I would ask that if you read something I’ve written that you like, please
do share it. I only want to be read (and to be rich from being read, but you
know, one step at a time).
Click on the
links below to be whooshed away to genius.
So that’s January done with. To February and beyond!
Get it done.
